How do you improve SEO on a Squarespace site?

Squarespace has a reputation among SEOs that it no longer deserves. The platform handles hosting, SSL, a sitemap and basic structured data on its own, and its sites are faster than most. What holds a Squarespace site back is usually something else: settings nobody opened, blog archives nobody asked for, product pages duplicated by accident, and service pages that were never written.

We look after SEO for businesses that run on Squarespace, from studios to small retailers, and the work almost never starts with a rebuild. It starts with knowing which of Squarespace's defaults are fine and which quietly cost you rankings. Here's that list.

Is Squarespace good for SEO?

For most small businesses, yes. W3Techs finds Squarespace on 2.4% of all websites, a 3.6% share of sites that use a content management system, and the HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac shows its reach growing from 1.3% of mobile sites in 2022 to 1.5% in 2024.

The more interesting number is speed. The Almanac tracked how many sites on each platform passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, and Squarespace made the biggest improvement of any content management system it measured, from 33% of sites in 2023 to 60% in 2024. WordPress sites managed 40%. On a platform where you can't touch the server, that matters: most Squarespace sites start from a faster base than the average self-hosted site.

The Squarespace settings to check first

Five settings decide whether Google reads your Squarespace site the way you intend. Squarespace's own SEO checklist covers where each one lives.

1. Business Information. Squarespace builds its structured data from this panel, so your business name, address and phone must be right. A name field holding an address or a placeholder is what search engines and AI assistants then read as your business name.
2. Site title and SEO description for your homepage, and a title and description on every page that matters.
3. URL slugs that describe the page, set before the page gets links, because changing them later needs a redirect.
4. Page visibility. Squarespace lets you hide a page or the whole site from search results, which adds a noindex tag. Check nothing important is hidden by mistake.
5. Search Console connected, so you can see what Google indexes and which searches bring visitors.

What to know about Squarespace robots.txt and AI crawlers

Squarespace manages robots.txt for every site and doesn't let you edit it. Open the file on any Squarespace site and it can look alarming: a long list of AI crawlers, including GPTBot and ClaudeBot, at the very top.

Why that list is not a block

In robots.txt, consecutive user-agent lines form one group that shares the rules beneath it, as Google's introduction to robots.txt sets out. Every bot on that list ends up with the same rules as User-agent: *, which only keeps crawlers out of system paths such as /config and /search. On the live site we checked, 29 named bots sat in that one group, and none of them was blocked from the content.

When it is a block

Squarespace also has a setting that blocks known AI crawlers. When it's switched on, those bots get their own rule that disallows the whole site. That's a legitimate choice for some businesses, but it keeps your site out of the sources AI assistants draw on, so make it deliberately. How AI answers choose what to cite is covered in making a business easy for AI answers to cite.

How Squarespace blog archives create thin pages

Every category and tag on a Squarespace blog gets its own archive page, with a plus sign in the URL for every space: /blog/tag/wedding+dresses. On one Squarespace site we audited, 27 archive pages sat on top of just 7 real blog posts, and every one of them was in the sitemap.

• Use fewer tags. A handful of categories that genuinely organise your posts is enough.
• Keep the archives out of the index with a noindex tag added through code injection, since there's no switch for it.
• Check Search Console for archive URLs earning impressions but no clicks, which is the usual sign they're competing with the posts themselves.

Squarespace store SEO: duplicate slugs and deleted products

Squarespace stores use their own URL shape, with products under /store/p/, and two problems turn up again and again.

Duplicated products leave duplicate URLs

Duplicating a product appends a random suffix to the URL, and duplicating the copy adds another, so a store builds up families like /store/p/linen-blazer-xk2hs. The copies compete with each other and with the original. Clean up your slugs, merge genuine duplicates, and redirect the old addresses.

Deleted products stay in Google

A removed product drops out of the sitemap but can stay in Google's index as a 404, taking its impressions and links with it. Squarespace's URL mappings panel is where you add 301 redirects, one line per old and new address. Redirect anything with traffic or links to the closest live product or category.

How to add better structured data to Squarespace

Squarespace adds some structured data automatically, which its help centre explains in how it prepares sites for search. What it prints is basic: separate blocks for the website, the organisation and the local business, with no links between them and the address as a single line of text.

If you want your business to be understood properly by Google and by AI assistants, a hand-written block added through code injection does better. It can connect your organisation to its location, name the founder or practitioner, list your services and point to your business's profiles elsewhere. Code injection is available on Squarespace's Core plan and above, so check the plan before promising it. This is the kind of detail how AI search picks its sources depends on.

Speed and page weight on Squarespace

Squarespace's template code is fixed, but what you put into it isn't, and that's where speed is won or lost.

• Galleries and slideshows with dozens of full-size images on one page.
• Background video in the first section of your homepage.
• Embedded blocks from booking, review and social tools, each loading its own scripts.
• Custom fonts added on top of the template's own.

Measure the pages that matter on a phone, trim the heaviest sections first, and resize your images before you upload them rather than relying on the platform to do it.

Content is where most Squarespace sites fall short

Squarespace templates are designed to look good with very little text, and many sites keep it that way: a homepage, an about page, a gallery and a contact form. Google can't rank a page for a search your site never answers.

• One page per main service, written for the way your customers search for it.
• Location pages only where your business genuinely serves the area, each with something real to say.
• Blog posts that answer questions your customers ask, each linking to the service it supports.
• Headings that describe the section, chosen for meaning rather than size.

If you run a studio, salon or shop, your Google Business Profile, reviews and citations matter as much as the site itself. That side is covered by local search visibility for a studio or shop.

Should you move from Squarespace for SEO?

Usually not. A Squarespace site with the settings, structure and content right can rank well for a small business. A move makes sense when your business needs something Squarespace can't provide: many locations with deep pages, complex store features, or full technical control. If that's where you're heading, what WordPress asks of a site owner instead sets out the trade, and any move needs its redirects mapped first.

A Squarespace SEO checklist

1. Correct the Business Information fields and check the structured data they produce.
2. Connect Search Console and check nothing important is hidden from search.
3. Write titles, descriptions and slugs for every page that matters.
4. Read robots.txt properly and decide on AI crawlers deliberately.
5. Trim blog tags and noindex the archives through code injection.
6. Clean up duplicated product slugs and redirect deleted products with URL mappings.
7. Add a complete structured data block through code injection where your plan allows.
8. Lighten your heaviest pages: galleries, video and embeds.
9. Build out service and location pages with real content.
10. Work on your Google Business Profile and reviews alongside the site.

Most of the list can be done by a careful owner. Where it needs code injection, a proper audit or ongoing content, that's what our Squarespace SEO for small businesses covers, and we work inside your Squarespace account rather than asking you to rebuild. For the wider picture of how we help as a digital marketing agency for studios and small retailers, the same order applies: settings, structure, then content. If you'd rather start with a second opinion on what your site is publishing, that's where SEO help inside Squarespace usually begins.