Recommendations For Your Squarespace Website During COVID19

Fortunately, during these strange times of lockdown, many online businesses are seeing an uptick in traffic to their websites, because more people are home working online with more time to browse the Internet. But for some websites—primarily those that sell and fulfill orders or host events—you might need to put things on hold for a bit.

If there are facets of your website that need to be put on hold, Google has released some announcements on how to go about doing that while also making sure you don’t damage your SEO in any way.

Along with those announcements, I want to offer a few more nuggets of advice during this time, focused on what you can do right now to improve website rankings, grow traffic, and get your brand setup for even more success in the future.

Let’s jump in.

Making the most of your Squarespace website during the coronavirus pandemic

Concerning events

Do you use your website to book events, host events, or speak at events?

You don’t have to miss out on hosting events, just consider hosting live online events instead. Maybe you usually speak or hold workshops in public in-person scenarios, now is the time to bundle all of that into an online presentation.

With so many of us sitting at home, why not host events for your audience, including live streams? You can charge or ask for donations, and your audience benefits by getting some social time, although distantly.

“In the current environment and status of COVID-19 around the world, many events are being canceled, postponed, or moved to an online-only format.” [Google announcement]

Online courses

If public workshops and classes are something you usually count on for outreach, education, and income, consider using this time to create an online course!

Online courses are a fantastic way to offer value to your audience while also creating a stream of income for you.

Even if you’ve never played the educator role before, if you have something you specialize in that you can teach, I think this is a great way to both use this time at home productively and create extra income for yourself.

If you have a Squarespace website, you’ll be happy to know you can host your course here on Squarespace, no need to use any external software like Teachable. I just finished building an online course, using Kerstin Martin’s wonderful instruction in her wonderful course: Squarespace Classroom.

**Pause the selling of products without damaging seo**

Right now, you could find yourself in a situation where you usually sell and ship products from your website, but now that isn’t so feasible.

If you plan to reopen your online shop in the future, Google recommends keeping the site online, but removing certain functionality.

The recommended approach in this scenario is to:

Mark items as out of stock
Restrict the cart & checkout functions
Disable cart functionality
Inform your customers of the changes with a pop-up or announcement banner
Once you’ve made the updates, be sure to request indexing so web crawlers can update

For more recommendations from Google, refer to this article.

Use this time to improve your squarespace site seo!

If you find yourself with downtime, make good use of it by enhancing your Squarespace site SEO. How? Well, there are a myriad of ways to really optimize Squarespace SEO—I cover the fine details of this in my course Squarespace SEO Expert—but if nothing else: BLOG!

That’s right- commit to publishing as many blog posts as you can during this downtime. SEO-driven blogging can only be done after you have done the required keyword research for your site. Keyword research is the foundation of great SEO, so don’t blog blindly— if you don’t really get keyword research, take my course or hire an expert. Good SEO really is the best investment you can make for the growth of your brand. (And you can write these things off on your taxes!).

I cannot emphasize enough how important blogging is for organic SEO. I discussed a great example of how imperative blogging is in this article: Is Blogging Still Relevant? I Experimented & Here Are The Results so be sure to check it out.

I get to watch these two from my desk window; Photo by Tiffany Davidson

Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or further recommendations to offer. I hope you’re all faring well. Take care of yourselves.

Talk soon,

Tiffany