Squarespace is a brilliant platform for new and experienced bloggers alike! Here we’ll run through some blogging tips for all of you new bloggers. Blogging has quite honestly been an amazing way of increasing traffic to our own website, as well as us being able to produce evergreen content for our audience.

First we’ll run through why blogging is a really good thing for your business, then we’ll move on to 7 tips for when it comes to writing and posting your blogs in Squarespace (psstt, but can also be used in other website platforms)!

3 Reasons why blogging is great for SEO

One of the greatest benefits of blogging is how great it is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In other words, the ranking your website has on search engines like Google, for specific search terms. Every post on your website can greatly improve your SEO, but make sure to do some keyword research beforehand, to know what keywords and terms your audience are typing into search engines.

We use sites like Semrush, which is a fantastic tool to get an overview of keyword searches, such as the volume of searches per month (given as a quantity), keyword difficulty (given as a percentage), and the intent of users (e.g. are they looking for information? Are they looking for a specific service?, etc) when they search using that keyword. 

So here are the 3 top SEO benefits:

• Increasing visibility via organic search

• Improves credibility of your website & business

• Improves your website’s authority

Note: SEO is a long term game, and often it can take a few months to see an improvement in results. So don’t lose faith!

7 Squarespace blogging tips for new bloggers

1. Know which keywords you want to use and target, and place them towards the beginning of each blog post. You can do this in the first paragraph, and by using subheadings.  

But, you want to do this strategically and remember that you’re writing for other human beings and not solely for the Google algorithm!

We’ve provided an easy Checklist for you to use, at the bottom of this blog post (make sure to scroll down and grab it)! What you might want to do is copy and paste this Checklist into a Word document, and use it before you upload every post!

2. Write between 500 - 1000 words in each blog post you upload (but, the more the merrier).

3. Use relevant images in every post. It breaks up the text, and is a great visual for your audience and to keep them way more engaged.

4. Use a captivating thumbnail! Ideally one which contains the title of the blog post, because this will mean you don’t necessarily have to display the title of the blog as text, on your website (obviously this is up to you!), and this is just to keep your Blog page looking minimal and clean (like the image below from our own Blog page).

5. Use videos in your blog posts, this doesn’t have to be the case every time, but every so often. Videos are great for SEO! They are a great way of keeping your audience on your page a little longer, which can greatly improve your website’s bounce rate (keeping it low) and therefore have a positive impact on the SEO.

Check out our other blog post, where we dive into the fun world of bounce rates a little more!

6. Use the ‘SEO’ section in your blog post to customize your post’s search engine descriptions (like the image below). This is otherwise called the meta description, and the SEO title (which is optional but great to do!). When filling in your meta description, strategically implement those targeted keyword(s) that you want to rank for, but Squarespace will also guide you a little here, by reminding you to keep to a certain number of characters.

7. Use tags and categories to categorize your blog post (see the image below), so that when it comes to doing things like summary blocks, you can easily display only those blogs that you want displayed. Check out this blog post for more info on this!

If there is anything else that we haven’t covered, or if you’d like to know more, then just leave us a comment below!

Don’t forget to grab this checklist for your future reference!

CHECKLIST

1. Use the keyword in the page title

2. Add the keyword to the first paragraph of the copy after the title

3. Place the keyword in a heading tag (h2, h3, etc.) at some point in the page or post copy

4. Use the keyword(s) in the meta description

5. Use the keyword in the slug (otherwise known as the URL)

6. Enter the keyword in the alt tag for the image(s) used on the page or post

7. 1000 words in the blog post 

8. Have at least one outbound link