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You could have captivating images, compelling content, and a beautifully constructed website, but without SEO, nobody will see it. While many people may know about search engine optimization, they might not be entirely clear as to what it entails. This article should help alleviate any confusion surrounding what makes a site optimized.
Julia Lehman is a Philadelphia-based underwater, home & garden, corporate, and lifestyle photographer, and the subject of our case study. She built her site using Squarespace, one of the easiest-to-use and most popular website platforms for those with no coding experience. Our mission was to assess the SEO of her website, find and address any issues, improve search rankings, and increase traffic to her site.
The time that a site takes to load in a browser window is a crucial concern for SEO. The faster a website loads, the quicker a search engine reads through its information. This allows the website to show up on a Google search sooner and be ranked higher. Moreover, a slow-loading site can incline a user to go to the next link on the Google search results.
We ran Julia’s website through a speed test, which tells us how quickly her site loads. Her website loads fast, at 4.1 seconds; anything under three seconds is ideal, but under five is still solid. She got a poor PageSpeed score, a number determined by Google algorithms. This score is an assessment of the site’s functional set-up, not of actual speed; it is more important to have a quickly-loading site than a great Pagespeed score.
Her YSlow score, which is a Yahoo rating of the effective organization of a website and how it affects the speed, indicated there was still room for improvement to increase her page speed.
One surefire way to increase site speed, particularly on photography websites, is to shrink images to the smallest possible size without sacrificing quality and to strip them of any excess metadata. For example, a 3.4 MB image file is almost twice as large as any website landing page should be. Excessively large photos increase load times, ultimately affecting the page speed. The best practice for optimizing images on Squarespace is to size them correctly before uploading them.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for improving SEO. Once GA connects to your site, it generates a variety of statistics to demonstrate the impact and popularity of each element on the site. This information, in turn, affects search rankings.
Julia’s website did not have Google Analytics enabled, so we registered the site and added a tracking code to Squarespace’s “Advanced” settings page. You can learn about this process in our Google Analytics Setup article.
Another issue was that Julia’s site was linked in Google Analytics to the HTTP protocol, whereas her site uses HTTPS. We had to fix the entry in GA in order for Google to correctly collect data from the site.
Look into Google Search Console to ensure your URL matches the administrative settings for GA.
Descriptive phrases and text on the front- or back end of a website are considered keywords. The front end of a website is what you are probably used to seeing, whereas the back end is full of HTML and links to images, videos, etc. on a site. Consider any titles, descriptions, URLs, texts, or alt-texts to be potential keywords. They affect SEO because Google recognizes the text as a resource when using the search criteria to find a relevant site. The more diverse the keywords, the more relevant they will be for Google queries.
In addition to the general meta keywords that Squarespace allows one to edit, there are also keywords in the meta description, show up where a description should be. We wanted to replace them with an actual description of the page. To learn more about Squarespace meta description, go to their article on Adding SEO Descriptions.
Every image on a website has a unique URL (unless it runs on Javascript). These URLs are a good place to put descriptive keywords. By contrast, the URLs provided by Squarespace contain unrelated and therefore ineffective text.
One problem we did not anticipate was that when we tried to adjust each image’s settings to add pertinent keywords, the photo would then disappear completely! However, it was an easy fix: we just had to re-upload the image. To edit the URL and title tags of an image, remember to upload the photo with keywords already included in the file name.
Google seeks out the robots.txt before anything else on a site. The robots.txt function is to provide Google with a sitemap, a list of all the pages on a website. The sitemap is responsible for directing Google through the individual URLs throughout your website. It is a hidden page, but significant to the performance of the site.
One of the first challenges we encountered with Julia’s site is that Squarespace uses a standard robot.txt, making it difficult for the developer to make the needed adjustments to improve SEO. The issue I found with Squarespace is that it does not include the homepage in the sitemap but lists Julia’s “interiors” page as the first link.
We also found that many of the URLs listed on Julia’s site were irrelevant to search engines because their titles do not have keywords. For example, a link like “https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e04aadb453e2850616195/5c3e06eba0be754251435111” contains no description, keywords, or relevant search terms.
While a Squarespace user can’t directly edit her sitemap, how she designs her site affects the sitemap. Making sure that the homepage is set correctly in her design will fix the issue. As we worked on Julia’s site, we set the homepage and corrected the sitemap. The first page is now listed as JuliahLehmanPhoto.com/philadelphia-home-photography.
After we made all of the preceding changes, we ran the same test from Gmetrix as we did at the beginning and got a better PageSpeed and YSlow scores. The load time was nearly a second faster. Once all of Julia’s images are optimized, there will likely be a significant further decrease in loading time.
On the whole, Julia’s analytics presented some of the results of this process (from late July to early September).
The average Session Duration increased and the Bounce Rate decreased, which meant her visitors were staying longer and seeing more pages.
Looking into the location of users, we found that 15% fewer came from Pennsylvania, while 35% more came from New Jersey. This might be because of her portfolio of New Jersey homes, which are now descriptively titled.
Although we saw fewer visits to the website, this should not be taken at face value. We saw a 60% increase in the impressions for Google searches of ‘Corporate photography Philadelphia’ and a 48% increase in the impressions for Google searches of ‘Drone photography Philadelphia.’
Other site pages saw double-digit growth:
To learn more about SEO and using Google Analytics, check out our article on setting up Google Analytics. You can also check out these articles:
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