Ultimate Squarespace SEO Checklist - My Interview with Squarespace SEO Expert Henry Purchase

October 23, 2023 Paige Brunton

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Kind of frustrated by the fact that Google seems to have put you in their bad books and isn't showing your website in the search results?

Or for some strange reason, you keep seeing your competitors' site links above your own?

Then it's time for you to meet my friend, SEO expert Henry. In our chat, he’ll walk you through exactly how to get that Squarespace site of yours ranking with his ultimate Squarespace SEO Checklist.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became an expert at Squarespace SEO?

Thanks Paige. First of all, thanks a lot for having me on. I'm really excited to go through this, but a brief introduction to who I am. I'm Henry Purchas. I'm from the UK and I'm the founder of SEO Space. We made the SEO plugin for Squarespace, which is a jargon-free plugin that tells you how to rank on Google, which I'm sure we'll get in later in the video. And I'm here to talk all about Squarespace SEO. What my people need. They need to know how to rank.

So you have seen through your plugin and just through your experience, a lot of websites, some that rank well and some that rank not so well. What do you think is the difference that makes a website rank well in those that are really struggling?

Yeah, the timing of this is actually pretty fitting. So we've had over 2000 sites analyzed for our plugin, and I'm just finishing off a study looking at 22,500 Squarespace websites to look at what the difference is between the top 10% and the bottom 90% and it's three things.

It's more high-quality backlinks. So backlinks are links from other websites to yours. And this is often something that I see people fall in short. If they're like, why aren't I ranking? Often it's because of backlinks. So the top 10% have more high-quality backlinks.
Then it's content, more high-quality content. So if you've got more high-quality content that provides readers users, you're going to rank for more keywords.
And then the third thing is better on-page SEO. So you're following SEO best practices. You haven't got any broken links and you're following some of the things that we're probably again going to be covering later.

So top 10% more backlinks, high quality, more high quality content and good on-page SEO.

Let me share with you my top pet peeve of what happens on the internet is we get probably five to 10 emails a day being like, Hello, sir. Can you left your blog post on x? And I'm like, why do people do this? This cannot possibly work - we ignore every single one of those emails. But I'm wondering, how do people get back links? Is there a good strategy you can share?

Yeah, this is something I get asked a lot. And it's a shame - part of the reason why SEO is , a lot of people, let's be honest, don't like SEO, because it's full of jargon. And those emails contribute massively because you say SEO and we think the spam we get in the inbox every day.

In terms of backlinks, in general, I think this principle applies to like a lot of things in business, provide upfront value without asking anything in return.

So one of the big problems with those emails is they're saying, Oh, Paige, of you know, can I add this in your blog?

How I do it, I'll pre-write the article, and I'll send it to Paige and say, Hey, I've already wrote this article personalized for your audience, likely to rank for this keyword, just have it. By the way, it's got links to our site, feel free to remove them if needed.

So that's one way.

However, one of the best ways that I have found to get backlinks is be “the source”.

So be the person that people want to link to, because you're providing incredibly valuable information, because it's much more organic.

So for example, the study that I've built together looking into 22,500 square space sites, I've done that because I want to be the source. I want people to link to me and say, SEOSpace*’s Henry has done the research to find out what ranks on Google.

So it's providing a ridiculous amount of value upfront, and then in return people will link to you.

(Paige:) I think the beauty of that is also is that when we write useful content we become known on the topic. And then people just are like, Oh, I love Paiges this or Paige’s that and they'll link back to that, without you even needing to ask! And one of the things we did also without really intentionally doing it, we haven't really thought about the backlinks aspect of it, was a survey of over 770 website designers, and asked a bunch of questions and put it together into a really, what I thought just interesting blog posts and the same thing happened - that got a ton of backlinks. So it wasn't like intended for that. But when you just produce interesting content, it ends up happening.

Interested in that web designer survey? You can check it out here!

(Henry again!) And I think you've in life, you've always got to think what's in it for the other person. So like, you can even do so we're doing an article featuring the 25 best Squarespace website designers in our on our website.

Squarespace website designers are going to love getting featured on that!

And I want to provide them a ton of value by hopefully driving leads to their site. Of course, I've also know in the back of my mind that they're likely to also link to it back. So it works both ways. But again, I'm providing the value first, I'm featuring them and making them look amazing. And in return, hopefully, yeah, they'll link back to us as well!

Okay, so coming back to rankings, if someone wants to improve their ranking, what is like the first thing that you would recommend someone start with?

So the first thing absolute first speak to who you want to attract, like get on the phone, go for a coffee, email your target customers. Because you always want to start with a buyer persona and a buyer persona is just like a profile of your target customers. And as soon as you can figure out what their pain points are, where they spend their time online, a little bit more about, how they research things, you're going to start to identify patterns and trends that you can then use for keyword research.

So speak to your target customers, find what they're searching, and then ultimately create valuable content that answers their questions and pain points.

(Paige:) So true. It's literally simple. People often think like, I need to go to this like super complicated research with the like all these things. And I'm like, Oh, actually just like thinking like, who's my client? And what would they put in Google is a good place to start.

(Henry:) Why do you think that like people avoid that? Because it's it's so simple. But like, people are not, there's got to be a tool or like a shortcut.

(Paige:) I don't know! Maybe it just seems too simple that it just doesn't even cross their mind. But that is literally, I'd say the easiest first place to start!

(Henry:) I've done about like, probably close to 250 interviews now just with Squarespace website designers, people that have got Squarespace. That's primarily about the plugin. But all of that info feeds into our content strategy. Because you hear patterns of what people say. And then you can use that in different content pillars on your content, whether it's social media, or SEO, it's, it's listening to who you want to attract.

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So coming back to content creation, if you had to say, like, could someone be successful with SEO without creating content? Or is it kind of vital? And when I say like, content creation, I mean, like, on their website, not on social media.

Yeah, I definitely think it's vital in this day and age, like you and I were just speaking about how Squarespace is changed as a whole, and how your rankings have changed over time. Because there's always people that are looking to catch up. There's always people that are looking to, get up search engines, and they're writing content. So if you want to rank for those keywords that ultimately can generate cash for your business, you're gonna have to write content, unfortunately.

But there are more and more tools out there that make it easier. So it's a bit more competitive, but the tools available, like, especially Chat GPT do make things easier.

Actually let's talk about that. Google has said that they will not rank content produced by chat GBT. Do you think that's true? Do you think they know how to figure out the content produced by chat GBT? I've heard some things. I'm curious to know what your thoughts are.

I do not publish unedited Chat GPT content on any website. On my own site, we are trialing human-edited Chat GPT content. With our clients, we use AI andChat GPT for the briefs, the structure, then we have human writers that fill it out. So that's sort of how I view it.

I'm not a full expert in AI and Chat GPT. Everything's done from experiments and seeing what works. But here's what I think.

Google makes money by people coming to search engines, finding it helpful, seeing ads, and coming back over and over again. Google just wants to rank what's going to provide users the most amount of value so they keep coming back to search in the future and find what they need. So in my opinion, Google doesn't really care whether something's produced by AI, humans, whatever, as long as it provides an amazing amount of value.

As long as you're checking that box and really providing value to what people are searching, I think you're going to be fine.

(Paige:) But the thing is every time something new comes out, like the thing way back in the day - link farms or whatever. And then Google did find a way to catch up with that and cut that. And then all those people who had just been sort of artificially ranking were demoted.

So kind of one of those challenging things to figure out, I've heard that Google can't tell what's produced by a robot or human or whatever. So while they say they might not rank it, it's potentially not the case. But granted, what could happen in the future? We do not know!

(Henry:) Yeah, I think just double-clicking on that for anyone that is reading and is worried about AI and, maybe they've seen a competitor publishing a load of content.

What do I do?

That is where something called EAT comes in.

Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

If you want to use AI content and rank, you need to show that you're an expert, you're an authority and people can trust you. So that's why SEO isn't going to be the thing that massively exponentially grows your business. You also need to do a bit of social media, YouTube videos show that you're an expert in the niche that you want to rank in, because that's ultimately something that AI can't be. It can't be yourself and who you are as a business and your expertise. So like, go all in on that across like a holistic marketing strategy, and you will get better results from SEO. So that's my advice.

(Paige) Yeah, I agree with that.

So coming to the checklist of things that you need to do, can you walk us through and explain to people what they need to do?

Yeah, so three simple steps.

We've already spoken about

Step one, speak to your target customers, learn what their pain points are, look at what they're searching.

What you then want to do is do keyword research. So you want to take the pain points and questions and problems they have and put data behind the keyword. So you essentially need to make sure that the keywords are what people search into Google actually are being searched. And there's some fantastic tools out there such as keywords everywhere. It's really cheap, Ahrefs for people that have got a little bit more budget, and also SEOSpace* that will actually tell you whether people are searching what you want to write about.

So for example, we've got an article on a “Squarespace website not showing up on Google”. A pain point of my target customers is that they're not ranking for what customers search for. We interviewed them, we did keyword research and saw about 200 people a month for searching “Squarespace website, not showing on Google”.

That's step two, make sure that we know what keywords people are searching.

And then step three is look at what's already ranking, take your pain points and information about your target customers and write content that is better than what is already ranking on page one.

Provide more value early and basically beat what is already on page one. And that like, there's technicals, but that's sort of a summary of how it works.

I love how you brought that down as well because it's not really that technical of a situation. And so many people get so nervous about the like tech side of things that they're like, nevermind!

There’s something that my students always ask me, so I'll ask it to you and see what your thoughts are. “How many searches is like a good amount of searches in order for me to write a piece of content on this topic?”

Yeah. So how many searches, I would say that's where the intent comes in.

So ultimately the whole reason that we want to do SEO is attract target customers and get them to, maybe buy something on our site, fill in a contact form, et cetera.

Let’s look at 10 searches a month. If we can get 10 searches in all from our target customer, I would much rather that than a thousand searches from a term that's going to generate me no money.

So it's worth thinking about the intent and the person that is searching for something. I can't give an exact answer, it's very situational, depending upon what they're searching, what the intent is, and is that going to move the needle for your business.

That's another thing, especially people in the Squarespace world, they often think like, oh, well, there's already so much content out there. Like, can I compete in everything?

There is such a thing as difficulty of ranking for certain keywords. And maybe we're going for less difficult to rank for keywords at the beginning. But over time, when we can compete on those larger topics. So I would advise looking to go for long tail keywords, which are keywords that are four or more words to begin with. If you're just getting started, keywords everywhere like I mentioned earlier can help you find those to build up your foundation and then you’ll get to the point where, in the future you can, as, as Paige mentioned, rank for those more competitive keywords.

(Paige:) It also depends on the industry. So funny story! We had to get some wood delivered. So we're like googling “wood for a fireplace”. And so my husband was chatting with the guy who delivered the word and the guy was like, Oh, how did you find me?

And my husband said, Oh, I found you on Google.

And he's like, Oh yeah, it's amazing. I just did this thing. I like put keywords into my website. And now it just appears! And I’m just thinking that this guy, he has such an easy life - literally just creating maybe one blog post would have been enough for him to rank at the top of Google!

So it really is also industry-dependent as to how challenging or potentially not challenging it is to rank!

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(Henry:) And I think that's why for people listening, definitely don't write SEO off. Cause I've seen that many times before that you can literally be like a day's work and input from the right person from transforming your business.

And you'll know more than any one page when you're getting those inbound leads, it just makes life so much easier. And that's the power of SEO!

And then finally, please do tell us all about your plugin. What does it do? Who is it for? How does it help people?

So SEOSpace is the SEO plugin for Squarespace (Pst, Paige here! - I recently reviewed SEOSpace so check out the full blog post with that SEOSpace review here!).

(Back to Henry!) It's a jargon-free plugin. Essentially a traffic light checklist, which will take you step by step, though how to rank higher on Google for a search term that you're going after.

So I mentioned earlier about how you've got to do your keyword research, you've got to write content, but then afterwards, you know, are you following best practices?

Are you doing, maybe doing things that you don't even know are going to hold you back?

So you put your keyword in, SEOSpace* scans your webpage, and it tells you how to rank higher for a search term.

So when you open up SEO space on your website, it's going to give you a dynamic traffic light checklist to tell you what you need to do to rank higher on Google. So for example, there's a section about images. It shows me images that I need to compress and not only will it show you the images, but you can also click on it and it highlights them in red so you know exactly what to do.

And for anyone listening that's like,

I don't know what an SEO title is.

I don't know how to edit my URL on the Squarespace website.

Don't worry because we've got video tutorials every step of the way.

So for example, if you don't know how to compress images on Squarespace, we've got a short two-minute video tutorial of me taking you step by step on how to follow that SEO best practice.

So Squarespace SEO really has never been easier!

And on top of that, we also have a Squarespace SEO community and they also show obviously Squarespace SEO tips on my YouTube channel.

And the data shows right now that people new to SEO can increase their clicks on the website by 68% within two months by using SEOSpace*. So with our lowest plan, there's a seven-day free trial, but our lowest plan is $9.99 per month.

So for $20 over two months, you can increase your clicks by 68%, which I know I'm biased, but like I think it's pretty good.

If you have any questions - feel free to reach out to me I do all of the customer support and answer all the emails. So you'll be speaking directly to me!

Now, you might be thinking, Henry's tips are fabulous and all page, but I have a lot of things to do. And this website is taking me ages. That's the case. Then watch this video next. And I'll walk you through 12 Squarespace hacks to build that side of yours super fast. Over 4,000 people have already watched it and loved it. So go watch it next.