The Squarespace SEO Ceiling (And How to Raise It)
There's a conversation that happens in every Squarespace design community, usually about once a month. Someone asks whether Squarespace is “good for SEO." Half the replies say yes, it handles everything automatically. The other half say it's terrible compared to WordPress. Both answers are wrong, and the truth is more useful than either.
Squarespace handles SEO basics competently. It generates clean HTML, creates XML sitemaps automatically, applies SSL by default, produces mobile-responsive pages, and gives you fields for meta titles, descriptions, and image alt text. For a local business trying to rank for “[service] in [town]," Squarespace is perfectly capable. The platform does not limit your ability to rank for low-to-medium competition terms.
But Squarespace does have a ceiling, and if you're building sites for clients who need to compete seriously in organic search, you need to know where that ceiling is, what causes it, and which workarounds actually work.
What Squarespace Handles Well
Before discussing limitations, it's worth acknowledging what Squarespace does right, because dismissing the platform's SEO capabilities entirely is as unhelpful as overstating them.
Squarespace generates clean, semantic HTML. Page titles use proper heading hierarchy. The platform creates and submits XML sitemaps to search engines automatically. SSL is provided free on every site. Canonical URLs are set correctly by default, preventing duplicate content issues. The platform supports 301 redirects through the URL Mappings panel. Blog posts include proper date markup. Pages load via a CDN. And the mobile responsiveness is handled at the platform level, satisfying Google's mobile-first indexing requirements.
For a small business with a five-to-fifteen page site targeting local or niche keywords, this is sufficient. The gap between Squarespace and a well-optimised WordPress site in this context is negligible, and any ranking differences are far more likely to be caused by content quality and backlink profiles than platform choice.
The Real Limitations
The ceiling appears when you need to do things that go beyond basic on-page SEO. Here's where Squarespace genuinely constrains you.
No custom schema markup. Schema (structured data) is the JSON-LD code that tells search engines exactly what your content represents: a product with a price, a business with an address, an article with an author, an FAQ with specific questions and answers. Google uses schema to generate rich results (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, product cards, event listings) that occupy more visual space in search results and typically receive higher click-through rates.
Squarespace applies basic schema automatically for certain content types (products, events, blog posts). But you cannot add custom schema for content types that Squarespace doesn't natively support, and you cannot modify the schema it does generate. You can't add FAQ schema to a regular page. You can't add LocalBusiness schema with detailed opening hours, payment methods, and service areas. You can't add HowTo schema to a tutorial post.
The workaround is to inject schema via the page-level Code Injection field (available on Core plans and above). You write the JSON-LD manually and paste it into the page header. This works, but it requires you to write and maintain schema code by hand, with no visual editor and no validation within Squarespace itself. You'll want to validate your schema using Google's Rich Results Test tool every time you add or update it.
Limited URL structure control. Squarespace enforces a specific URL structure for collection items. Blog posts are always at /blog/post-slug (or whatever you name the blog page). Products are always at /shop/product-slug. You cannot create flat URL structures like /post-slug without the collection prefix, and you cannot customise the collection prefix beyond changing the parent page name.
For most sites, this doesn't matter. But for sites competing in verticals where URL structure is a factor (thin margins in competitive SERPs), the inability to create custom URL hierarchies is a genuine limitation. A WordPress site can have /kitchens/shaker-style/ as a URL. A Squarespace site cannot replicate that hierarchical structure.
No native canonical URL editing. Squarespace sets canonical URLs automatically, and in most cases it does so correctly. But you cannot override the canonical URL on a page. If you have content that exists on multiple URLs (perhaps a product that appears in two categories), you can't manually specify which URL should be treated as canonical. The platform decides for you.
Limited robots.txt and sitemap control. You cannot edit the robots.txt file on a Squarespace site. You cannot exclude specific pages from the sitemap (though you can disable a page's search engine indexing via the page settings toggle). You cannot create multiple sitemaps or submit additional sitemaps for images, videos, or news content.
No server-side redirects beyond 301. Squarespace's URL Mappings support 301 (permanent) redirects only. You cannot create 302 (temporary) redirects, which have different implications for how search engines treat the original URL. In practice, this rarely matters, but it's a limitation worth knowing about.
No access to server configuration. You cannot modify HTTP headers, set custom cache policies, implement hreflang tags server-side for multilingual sites, or configure any server-level behaviour. Everything is managed by Squarespace's infrastructure, and you work within the parameters they've set.
The Heading Hierarchy Problem
This one deserves its own section because it's the most common Squarespace SEO problem that designers inadvertently create.
Squarespace lets you choose heading levels (H1 through H4) for any text block. This is a visual formatting tool in the editor, but to search engines, heading levels have semantic meaning. H1 is the primary topic of the page. H2s are major subtopics. H3s are subtopics within H2 sections. The hierarchy communicates the structure and relative importance of content.
The problem is twofold. First, some Squarespace templates automatically generate an H1 from the page title, which means if you also style a text block as H1, the page has two H1 tags. Multiple H1s aren't technically invalid HTML, but Google's documentation recommends a single H1 per page, and SEO best practice is to treat it as the page's primary heading.
Second, designers frequently use heading levels for visual sizing rather than semantic structure. They'll use H3 because it's the right visual size for a particular section, even though the content hierarchy calls for an H2. This creates a heading structure that, to search engines, looks disorganised: H1 followed by H3 followed by H2 followed by H4, with no logical nesting.
The fix is to think of heading levels as an outline first and a visual choice second. Set the semantic structure correctly (H1 for the page topic, H2 for major sections, H3 for subsections), and then use custom CSS to adjust the visual appearance of each level to match your design. The heading level and the font size are independent variables, and treating them as such is a mark of a designer who understands SEO.
Content Architecture for SEO
Beyond individual page optimisation, the way content is structured across the site has a significant impact on search performance. This is where many Squarespace designers leave ranking potential on the table.
Internal linking is the most underused SEO lever in Squarespace. Every page on your site should link to other relevant pages. Blog posts should link to related service pages. Service pages should link to relevant case studies. The about page should link to specific services. These internal links distribute page authority across the site, help search engines understand the relationships between pages, and give visitors pathways to deeper content.
In Squarespace, internal links are added manually through the text editor's link tool. There's no automated internal linking system and no way to display "related posts" without custom code or a third-party solution. This means internal linking is a manual, ongoing discipline, and most designers don't do it.
Blog category structure functions as a taxonomy for your content. Well-chosen blog categories that match search terms create category pages (e.g., /blog/category/kitchen-renovation) that can rank in their own right. Each category page displays all posts tagged with that category, creating a themed content hub that signals topical authority to search engines.
Pillar content and topic clusters is the strategy of creating one comprehensive "pillar" page on a broad topic, supported by multiple "cluster" blog posts that cover specific subtopics in depth, with all cluster posts linking back to the pillar page and the pillar page linking out to each cluster post. This structure signals to search engines that your site has deep expertise on a topic, and it's one of the most effective ways to compete for competitive terms.
Squarespace supports this structure technically, but building it requires deliberate planning. The pillar page is typically a custom page with extensive content and internal links. The cluster posts are blog posts, each targeting a specific long-tail keyword related to the pillar topic. The linking between them is manual. None of this is automated, which means it won't happen unless someone plans and builds it intentionally.
Local SEO on Squarespace
For businesses serving a geographic area, local SEO is where the real traffic lives. "Plumber in Cheltenham" or “wedding photographer Edinburgh" are high-intent searches that convert at rates far above generic terms.
Squarespace handles local SEO adequately but not proactively. The platform generates a business information section that feeds into search engine listings, and you can set the site's business name, address, and phone number (NAP) in the settings. But local SEO success depends heavily on factors outside the website: Google Business Profile optimisation, review quantity and quality, citation consistency (your NAP appearing identically across directories), and local backlinks.
Within the Squarespace site itself, the local SEO essentials are: consistent NAP in the site footer on every page, location-specific content on service pages (not just "we serve Cheltenham" but genuinely useful content about the area), embedded Google Maps on the contact page, and LocalBusiness schema injected via Code Injection.
The AIO Factor
Alongside traditional SEO, a new discipline is emerging: AI Optimisation (AIO). This is the practice of making your content visible in AI-generated answers from Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search tools. Squarespace's new AIO Scanner (introduced in the September 2025 Refresh) monitors your brand's visibility across these platforms and provides optimisation suggestions.
AIO favours content that is clearly structured, factually specific, and formatted in a way that AI can easily extract and attribute. FAQ sections, clearly defined processes, specific data points, and well-structured headings all increase the likelihood of your content being surfaced in AI-generated responses. The overlap with good SEO practice is significant, but AIO puts particular emphasis on direct, concise answers to specific questions.
For Squarespace designers, this means building content that answers questions explicitly. Not just “we offer kitchen renovation services" but “a typical kitchen renovation in Cheltenham takes six to eight weeks and costs between £15,000 and £35,000 depending on..." This kind of specific, structured content is what AI models are most likely to extract and present to users.
Raising the Ceiling
Squarespace's SEO ceiling is real, but it's higher than most designers think. The platform's limitations matter most for large, content-heavy sites competing in highly competitive verticals. For the majority of small business sites, the ceiling is nowhere near being reached, and the gap between current performance and maximum Squarespace SEO performance is large enough to keep any designer busy for months.
The highest-impact actions, in order, are: proper heading hierarchy on every page, comprehensive and accurate meta titles and descriptions, alt text on every image (using descriptive, keyword-aware language rather than “image1.jpg"), consistent internal linking across the site, a blog strategy built around search intent rather than whatever the client felt like writing about, and manual schema injection for content types that benefit from rich results.
Do all of that before you start worrying about URL structure or robots.txt. The fundamentals, executed thoroughly, will take a Squarespace site further than most designers imagine.
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