What is the Squarespace equivalent of Yoast’s SEO plugin?
Lemme guess…
You hopped ship on WordPress or are considering it right now, but you’re unsure if Squarespace will be as strong SEO-wise?
Or you’re looking to figure out how to get your site to rank well in Google, and have always known that Yoast, the top SEO plugin for WordPress, is needed in order to achieve that.
Or you’re already on Squarespace & on the SEO struggle train and want to see if there’s more help available to you!
If that’s you, then you’re in the right place friend!
FYI - If you’re about to make the jump you can sign up for a free trial of Squarespace here and I also got ya a little off the price, use code PAIGE10 for 10% off your first year. (Yes, that's an affiliate link!)
So when I originally wrote this blog post back in 2019, I started it with this…
So I have good news and bad news for you. Let’s start with the bad.
Bad news: Squarespace doesn’t have a Yoast SEO plugin.
Good news: You don’t need it with Squarespace.
Here’s the deal, Squarespace was built with SEO best practices in mind, meaning you don’t need to add plugins on to your site to ensure some basic site functionality is working correctly.
This is what Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s CEO said on the topic:
Take special note of the second paragraph there “Squarespace is engineered to work properly without a sea of plugins, and you should not take the lack of a plugin for this to mean that we didn’t actually just build it right from the start.”
So this was a post all about how Squarespace is so fantastically set up that you don’t need an SEO Plugin like Yoast to help you optimize your site for search…
But now we’re in 2023 and times have changed… and hot off the press news - there is now a “Yoast for Squarespace!” or in fact, an even better than Yoast for Squarespace… SEOSpace that launched earlier this year.
Yep these are affiliate links - my Margarita fund thanks you kindly in advance!
Now it remains true that Squarespace is set up to make it easy for you to set your site up to have great SEO, without needing an extra plugin to be added on to your site.
And I’d argue that Squarespace makes it easier than WordPress to keep up to date with SEO best practices, such as having a secure website and mobile-friendliness.
Sweet!
But hang on, you just said there’s a new plugin for Squarespace SEO - so what’s SEOSpace all about & why do I need it?
Well friends, SEOSpace is suppper exciting! It’s a plugin mastered by Squarespace SEO expert Henry Purchase & his team, who have been running a Squarespace SEO agency for the last few years and killin’ it in the rankings for their clients.
They realized that their services were out of reach for many small businesses - SEO can be pricey, and so set about creating an “Squarespace SEO Expert in your Pocket”.
And that’s what SEOSpace essentially is!
SEOSpace is a chrome extension (with a free version #ballinonabudget) that you download to your Chrome browser & then can use to scan any website page on any Squarespace website (including from the edit area).
This SEO Expert in your pocket essentially looks at all the key SEO best practices you ought to have set up on a page, and gives you a rundown of what you’ve done & what you still need to do to maximize your chances of a thumbs-up from the google gods.
Things like
Wordcount
Broken links
If your images are compressed & have alt descriptions
Whether you’re using headers correctly etc
All the things you know you should do, but it’s so easy to forget!
And check out how pretty it is all laid out with an easy to access set of recommendations!
I particularly love the function that highlights the issues you need to change on the page - no more hunting down that sneaky broken link you just can’t find!
And the paid version of SEOSpace goes even further
In this version you can add the target keywords and get advice on how to make changes to increase your chances of ranking for them, it tells you about keyword cannibalization & a tonne more, equipping and empowering you even more to charge your way up the rankings.
Now before I go any further, I’ll let you in on what I learned at a blogging conference once.
The speaker, a die-hard WordPress user, and SEO expert basically said that adding a plugin to your site doesn’t suddenly up your Google juice or mean you’re going to rank in spot #1 in every search result.
If that was the case, every website owner ever would add the plugin to their site, and suddenly be in spot #1 for their chosen keywords, which obviously mathematically doesn’t work seeing how many websites there are and how many #1 spots in Google there are for different keywords.
So SEOSpace is like any other plugin or extension… if you add the plugin to your site and do nothing with it, it really won’t help at all.
But what SEOSpace does do, is gives you an interactive digital checklist that you can use to go through the key things you need to do to improve your site, and over time learn, refine & become better at SEO.
It’s there as a guide on the side (a bit like Yoast on Wordpress, but IMHO more user-friendly & helpful) helping you check that you’re setting yourself up for success with things like…
Text content of at least 1,500 words (2,000+ is even better!)
Have at least 1 outbound link on your page/post
Have a few internal links in your page/post
Keywords in title, towards the beginning of the title
Keywords in introduction paragraph
Keywords in metadata description
Keywords in text headings
Keywords in image name (alt description)
Keywords in the URL slug
You can also use the analytics dashboard to see how your site’s performing more holistically…
Then highlighting them on the page so you can easily see where to make improvements.
And that’s not all - SEOSpace is new in the game & has a seriously exciting list of continued improvements that are coming out (they update the extension every 2 weeks right now) and a super useful community where you can get advice, and even access their SEO Basics course if you’re a paid member - pretty sweet hey!
So how much does SEOSpace cost?
The good news is you can use SEOSpace for free and benefit from their pretty comprehensive free version, or you can opt into the paid plan to have more functionality if you need it (you could also do this for a couple of months whilst you get your site set up & then revert back to the free version too if you’re wanting to save pennies!) Running more than one site, or needing more premium scans - there’s also an “Agency” version which has even more of the good stuff. And TBH the pricing is pretty reasonable for what you get…
At the time of writing, here’s how it pans out…
So at this point, I’ll hand on over to Henry, founder of SEOSpace to give you a whizz through the platform (coz clearly he’ll do a better job than I will given he built the thing!)
Oh and highly recommend you hop on over, grab yourself a free subscription & have a play around - it rocks!
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