221. What are the key SEO strategies for Squarespace success? (f. Henry Purchase)
Wondering why your Squarespace site isn't ranking on Google? 📈 Today we dive into the SEO maze with founder Henry Purchase, creator of SEO Space, a tailored Squarespace SEO tool. Henry shares invaluable insights to elevate your website's visibility and ensure it's not lost in the digital haystack. Let's unravel the complexities of business building and SEO together!
Episode transcription
Phil
Wondering why your Squarespace site doesn't show up on Google? Uh oh.
Trying to decide for the maze of SEO, I feel you. Today we've snagged my friend, founder Henry Purchase. The mind behind SEO Space. An SEO tool that I use, tailored specifically for Squarespace. Henry gives some really valuable, inspiring bits today to amplify your Squarespace website ensuring it's not just a needle in the digital haystack, okay? Let's get right to it.
It's late where you are. Why on earth are you talking to me of all the things you could be doing right now, no? It's okay.
Henry
What else would one be doing on a Thursday evening?
phil
Yeah, exactly. Well, you get to hang out with me. We get to talk about business building. We get to talk about SEO. There's so many things we could talk about. Where do we even begin? I see a like we should begin by me commending you on building a really great platform specific to an audience. Don't you think the key to your success of the launch of this platform, that is SEO for Squarespace.
Don't you think a large part of this has been the fact that you've focused on one particular platform?
henry
Yeah, I actually get asked quite a lot, like, when are you going to open up to other platforms and are you going to do WordPress, Wix? Maybe one day, I don't know, but like you just got to focus on one persona, like a beachhead, get it right for them and the opportunities come.
So I definitely say so when I've had businesses in the past that haven't worked, it's because I haven't found a big enough starting audience like I have with Squarespace. I see it.
phil
How did you get this idea about Squarespace?
henry
Sort of two ways, my girlfriend and I, we had a travel blog on Squarespace, and I was watching her do SEO, and I was like, you are dreadful.
She was working for the UK government at the time, and I was like, there's got to be something that can help her. And I'd used like WordPress before, and Yoast, sort of stuff, so I did a bit of a search and there was nothing. And I could see him forums asking about it. And then my friend, Sam Crawford, he was like, he said, I think he'd built like an AK website.
And he said, after I'd handed it over, they were like, can you install Yoast on that site in order to help us get going? And I was like, wait, there's AK websites. And they're asking for an SEO tool. And my girlfriend can't get started. There's got to be something here. That's just a span of a waiting list, but on Facebook groups.
phil
How interesting. I didn't know Sam until last summer when you and I met in real life. Yeah. I like to think I know a lot of people, but I actually knew about you before I knew about him. And you know, I've got lots of friends in the Squarespace world because I'm old and I have lots of gray hair. So what are you working on right this second?
And before I let you answer that, let me tell people, I recently actually, it took me a while, you were very patient, but I was like, yes, Henry, I'll try your platform and I'll wrap my head around it. But I have 75,000 other things I need to do first. So I worked through my list of 75,000 things. And then I finally, finally, after months was like, I love this platform and I can't wait to promote this and I can't wait to use it with clients.
And again, like you've echoed for the Squarespace community, we always feel like we're using a platform that was designed first for WordPress and secondary for WordPress for Squarespace, and it's so nice to have that specificity, but the tool is super cool because it works in two, there's two elements to it where you can go to SEO space, the dashboard, and it gives you a prioritized list of things that you should be focused on for your SEO for your Squarespace website, which is so awesome.
Hop into like other SEO tools. I almost started naming a few, but they're brands that I'm actually starting to work with. So that was Danger Zone right there. But they're overwhelming. Your tools, not overwhelming the two parts. So you've got the dashboard and then you have the nice little what do you call it while you're actually on your website? The, like, sidebar? Uh, just the plugin.
Henry
The plugin. Plugin. Yeah, like a Google Chrome extension also, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's a Chrome extension. And we do that because it pops up on any Squarespace website, whether it's live or on the Edster. So, like, you may prefer to have two windows open and scan it in one and edit in the other.
Or just do it on the Edster. I'm going to mention Phil as well, we can talk about this later, but also I've made like an exclusive discount code for your audience as well. So if anyone uses phil50, they'll get 50 percent off their first two months.
phil
Oh my God. Amazing. That's a legit discount. That's awesome.
Listen, I try all kinds of tools, but I get really, really excited. Hopefully people can hear the enthusiasm of my voice when something that I maybe start and try for a video, and then I ended up using. SEOSpace is one of those. I just, I really like it. I like that you make it easy. Can't SEO be so overwhelming at the best of times?
Henry
Yeah. And you actually asked what we're working on right now. Now. So in January, we released a big new update. And Phil's got, Phil has a capacity for overwhelming that is above, I would say, average people because even with where we are right now, the feedback is still a little bit overwhelming.
And the reason why is we present, as Phil said, like prioritise this to SEO tasks. I think there's 12 of them right now, but even then people are saying more, or 12's a lot. So we're like, what are we working on right now? I had an hour long workshop. There was Christie Price, Justin Maybe, uh, Christine Neil, they're all on that.
And just giving me feedback on some new designs we're working on. So we're essentially going through the process of mapping our user journeys. So like how are people using that product right now? What's the ideal way to do SEO, the steps, creating designs to then create the next version of SEO space. So we've just got like super basic designs.
Get loads of feedback, change it all up, shift it all up, and then make it pre and develop it.
phil
How do you stay motivated when it's a constant iteration? How do you stay motivated and excited and not stressed out by people that are like, can you do this? No, not yet. It's on the roadmap. Like, isn't that stressful?
henry
That is tough. And it's tough. You have a whole spectrum of people that communicate that in different ways and have different expectations. Some are very direct and borderline rude. Some just completely get it. Uh, how do I personally stay motivated? I'd say three things.
One, I do genuinely love our customers. For example, those three people I mentioned, all amazing people and the fact that they're taking time out of their day. An hour to just sit and listen to me talk about my business, that's incredible. Now, of course, And how business works in general, they will benefit from it because I'm listening and I want to make the best possible product for them.It works both ways, but like still, they're still taking the time out, which is incredible.
The second thing is, I do love software. I think the ability to, we've got customers in 45 different countries. And like from someone who's always at mind, business owners and, and people that help a lot of people through business. I think that's quite inspiring that I can help someone in the other side of the world grow their business for a tool that costs a fraction of their paying someone to do it. But then also like life beyond SEO space. I want to run a multi billion dollar tech company to, so I see this as like leveling up me as a person and an entrepreneur, and this is part of my journey for where I want to go.
So it fits into like short, medium and long term, I guess.
phil
That makes sense. Can we circle back on this thing that you mentioned about the cost of your subscription being a fraction of what it costs to hire people to do SEO? I have not referred a lot of business to SEO specialists over the years because it's a tough one. Some people keep trade secrets and they don't reveal how they do it. And then they charge a bunch of money and it's hard to track performance and all of these things. I've just always been skeptical about two groups of people, SEO experts and publicists. You know, it's been over 10 years. So I've seen lots of things and I'm just.
Once I hear you do those things, I'm like immediately skeptical and I go, okay, prove yourself to me. And I do feel like SEOSpace, again, I always come back to this, it makes it tangible, right? And you break it down into like bite sized pieces. I almost feel, Henry, like, let's say you have 10 15 minutes between a call, you could hop into SEOSpace and optimize a blog post or a page, depending on what you want to rank for it. Like, and you can chip away at it every day. And isn't that super cool?
henry
The feedback we get is, um, that that's like probably the fastest value that a lot of people don't expect. It's just seeing what pages aren't indexed.
So like the amount of people that have, they've created blog posts by being on the site for a year, and then they realize it was never even on Google. And you can just click on it, click on the page, 10, 15 minutes, change things, request indexing the day after it's on Google. And that's like, I think that's probably most common feedback we get about that, like quick time to value.
phil
Yeah. And now for beginners, how can someone check if their website pages are indexed or not? Let's go back to the beginning for people that are like, wait, I don't even know how you do that.
henry
So. Platform called Google Search Console, which is Google's native platform that essentially shows all the data around how you're ranking on Google, the keywords you get clicks from, how many clicks each page gets.
It's also the platform that you tell Google that you're ready to be showed on search engines. And if you go to pages, scroll down, it'll say pages not indexed. And that's how you can see a list of all the pages not indexed. So, um, yeah, if you haven't set it up, it's super easy to do, type in how to set up Google Search Console and you'll be covered, but you also then should check how to submit your sitemap and whether your pages are or aren't indexed.
phil
That makes sense. What are some other quick wins that someone can do in Google? SEOSpace or for their SEO.
henry
Yeah. So first of all, it's always writing content. So whether it's blogs or making sure there's helpful content on your web pages. Without helpful content, you're not going to be able to rank or attract our customers.
And SEOSpace is a suggested blog post feature. So you just press generate blog posts and it will generate 10 blog post suggestions for you. So that's probably the first one.
The second one is deciding what keywords you want to rank for. So SEO always starts with keywords, knowing what you want to actually rank for, and then placing those keywords in your main title of the page so you can communicate to Google that you wanna route for that.
And then the third thing is backlinks. Now, this can be a little bit trickier to get sometimes, but backlinks are links from of a websites to yours. They increase something called your domain authority. So score given to by Google that deems how much of North you are, how your score more likely you are to rank.
Yeah, backlink through loads of different ways. Probably a whole nother video, but in general, collapse. Business directories, any guest posts, if you can write on other people's websites, um, it's probably the three main ways that are easy to do.
phil
How can someone decide, I've actually asked you this question on WhatsApp, which is hilarious. How can someone decide the keywords that they want to rank for?
henry
The first way, if you don't know, literally the best way is speaking to your customers. Let's say Phil is one of my target customers and. Well, he uses Squarespace and he You know, if he's having problems, I'd just say, and I'd ask a question like, Phil, what problems do you face when it comes to ranking your site on Google?
Tell me more about that. So I just ask questions for Phil about the problems he faces when it comes to Google, when it comes to SEO. He's going to say all these different things. And those are basic search terms. Those are things that Phil might search into Google. And I can even ask Phil, ‘Hey Phil, if you were looking to rank on Google, what question would you ask on Google to find the answer’?
So I'm just asking about how would you solve this solution by typing into Google? And those are potential keywords. You then just take what your target customer says, put it into really cheap keyword research tools like Keywords Everywhere at 10 a month. And you're going to get, it's going to give you the data.
So always start with asking customers questions to begin with.
phil
Keywords everywhere I've used for years. And so the public has been a reliable one to at least visualize it. Everywhere is great though, because it gives you, uh, an idea of competition for that keyword, right?
henry
Answer Socrates is a really good one. I don't know if, I don't hear too many people in the States talk about it, but. You just add a topic in and it will list like a hundred questions that people ask about that topic. Write a blog post for each question, and you're going to get some traffic.
phil
Are there any tools that you think, this might be one of them, Socrates might be one of them, but are there any other tools that you think are complementary to SEOSpace?
And let me give an example, one that I've been trying this week. From a video that I created, it's called Neuron Writer. And there's a few in this family of like, uh, blog content optimizing tools. But what I love is that I can import the text from my blog post with the header styles and the body, no images, and it analyzes my blog post. And then it'll ask me to choose five to seven competitors from the Google search ranking. And then it, it will then tell me specific keywords that I should be including in my blog posts and I can just look and then I'd make some adjustments. It could be adding things like just words here and there, things I would never, ever think about doing.
I know it's not an exact science, but I love that it has a, like a scoring system. So I was able to improve my score by 10 points. And I've already tested it. I had a, I was on a call earlier and I asked someone type in this keyword, Adobe Express versus Canva and tell me what comes up. I know that's going to be different for everyone, but my blog posts went from.
Spot seven is what it told me to spot two by spending 25 minutes adding in keywords.
henry
I've done something very similar. I use surf SEO, which I wouldn't say it's not an entry level SEO tool, but I will literally do that. I will. See what keyword it like or analyze competition, see what keywords need to be added.
I'll add the blog into chat GBT and say, ‘Hey, provide me a four bullet summary of this article and include these keywords.’ I'll stick that at the top. And I'm really seeing Google rewarding at the moment, updating old content, which is probably why yours boosted up because it was, you said it was already there and Google was really liking refreshing new content and it had the keywords in.
phil
Can we talk about that for a second? I actually, it was a blog post from October and I made updates to it. And then I thought, wait, shouldn't I update the date of this? Cause now it's updated with information. And you're saying that actually might've helped me.
henry
It does help. Yeah. Cause Google sees that like looks for something called eat, which stands for expertise or authority. Think authorities are in that and trustworthiness and like. It trusts you and sees your authority if you're updating your content, making it relevant and recent.
phil
So cool. It's so cool.
henry
I was just going to add, like, on that article, the Canva versus Adobe, since you wrote that with how fast things are moving, probably both of them have got new features.
So like, Google makes money people staying on its search engines seeing ads. So Google's going to reward Phil because It naturally knows he's updated the content. It's got new information on which people are going to respond better to than an out of date article that's been there for two years. So like any business, Google wants to make money.
So it's going to rank Phil higher.
phil
The way that you frame that makes perfect sense. You've had two instances now where you've. Brought us back to thinking, some say back to basics. Google's going to perform in a way that motivates them ads. Yeah. Right. Your keywords are going to be motivated by your user, your customer, what they're searching for. Don't make this more complicated, you know?And I love that kind of philosophy.
henry
I call it like first principles. So, and this is like super important in software. Is like, you've just got to really boil down to when people get software wrong, it's they create things that solve problems that don't exist or don't actually help people get to where they want to get to.
And I think what goes wrong with SEO a lot of the time is you get these people that are in SEO, they know the jargon and they explain it in a way that people don't understand. I just want to get my customers more clicks and ultimately leads in sales. So like just taking a step back and being like, well, what actually does Squarespace people care about?
Which ultimately is like, yeah, how do I just move the needle from a business?
phil
Yeah. I really like these tools that give you a score. Yours gives a score on overall, I think in a few areas, but I know the one I always look at is the overall SEO score. Mine's moving up slowly. Slowly, but I gotta put in the work to do it.
I, and it's, it does, it keeps me motivated to keep chipping away at it. Even if the score is kind of arbitrary, it's human nature. You know what I mean? It's like, that's the humans want to improve. And so I like that.
henry
That's quite funny actually, because we deal with quite, and I never realized this until we launched the big update in January, people get so tied to being able to achieve a hundred.
And they were like, pesterous via support, like, I can't, my score's on 90. And I initially thought that, like, people would be a lot more relaxed about it, and realized, well, I've got it to 90, there's this thing I can't change on Squarespace that's stopping me from getting to 100. But no, people, like, people hammered the door on us being like, I can't change this, tell me how to change it.
Which is a good thing, right? Like, it motivates people to improve and SEO is in like, the sexiest of areas, so it's good that we're able to like, motivate people to, I guess, do it and improve the site.
phil
Absolutely. What about just building a business? What do you think nowadays, like, it's so hard when you get pulled in so many directions or like shiny object syndrome I've heard described, you know, how do you decide what to focus on and what's a distraction, you know, maybe from what the main goal is?
henry
I'm a massive believer that focus is probably the most important thing, whether that's focus on the customer, focus on whatever it is. I see a lot of friends who, I'm 26, so I've got a lot of friends who they've left university and they have been trying different things. They never just stick at something and they never just spend long enough working hard on a problem.
So like in general, I think it's finding that thing that you want to focusing on, focus on, give it enough time and energy rather than just like pogo sticking from thing to thing. So I'd say that's probably for me, the biggest thing that I've found. And then once you've cracked that, you can then decide whether it's the right thing to be working on or not.
I don't think you should like, try and decide it's the right thing to work on or not without actually focusing on it and seeing if you can, if there's value to be gained there. I don't know if I explained that too well, but it's like.
henry
You did. I had a great chat with Christy Price, you mentioned, on this podcast a few episodes ago. We talked about website trends. In 2024, in this position that you're in, you look at a lot of websites. So I'm curious to get your perspective on what you think are good trends or good let's call them best practices for people, for their websites, even if they're not on Squarespace.
henry
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm talking to, so there's AI than me, but one of the biggest things that I'm seeing in websites is something called XGE. And this is in particular how they interact with search engines. So XGE stands for search generative experience. It's an AI summary that Google is starting to put at the top of search engines. Because if you think about it, more and more people are using ChatGPT instead of Google to find answers and solve things.
So AI summary that rather than having to click through the 10 different search results, people are just seeing a summary at the top with a few references that answers their problem. So, and one of the things I'm also seeing is sometimes you'll see a site that's featured in that that isn't even on page one of Google, which like begs the question where there's questions, the sites that are being featured in this AI summary that aren't even on page one for that search chat.
So what I'm seeing a trend of is Google looking back, looking more into, I said eat earlier, eat signals. They’re looking at the websites that are on page one and figuring out additional ways to determine, are they an expert? Do they have authority? Do they have trust? So, so yeah, that's what I'm seeing because there's so many sites that can have a thousand AI written articles on their site and route for a load of things, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're an expert.
So I'm seeing sort of those things changing a little bit and therefore websites moving back more to storytelling and back more to showing and telling that they're the expert, which is obviously like the best surrounding stuff. Uh, YouTube, I think is huge. Back to the storytelling, because I think we've moved a bit more to like robots and it's flipping back a bit, I think.
phil
A hundred percent. That's so insightful. I've even heard chatter around how do you have some influence on what chat GPT is serving up and answers when I go into an AI tool and say, give me the five best content optimizer. Give me the best, you know, the five best SEO tools for Squarespace, you know, how do you then have influence on what it serves up?
That's not quite as exact of a sign. No, I don't know. I don't know. And even when you're describing with SGE, I know what you're talking about and I've seen it based on my own interaction, but it's not even something I've actually stopped to analyze. This is really new territory. And I think to your point, It's less about a hack to figure out how to rank and more about making sure that what you put out into the universe is high quality and not high quantity because quantity is no longer an issue.
Quantity is easy. Quantity is easy. It's easy. We don't even need to write our own shit. Quality is harder, and it takes more time. And we're like, ooh, let's use AI to save time. A lot of instances, I'm not actually saving time with AI. I'm putting out a better product because I'm able to research things and iterate things and workshop things faster with a brainstorm partner, a research partner.
It's interesting, isn't it? I think a lot about this.
henry
Oh, every month now. And my whole team's together and we have an AI workshop where we present to the rest of the team how we've been using AI that month and then create an action plan for the following month. It's been, it's been, I get a little bit too into it at times, but.
phil
That's so cool that you guys take the time because in essence, that is why I create content. I mean, I love, I love trying new tools, but the truth is I don't have time. I don't have time. I have a lot of client work, and I have a lot of video projects, and I got a lot of things I need to do, but by creating content out of something, it makes me accountable to getting it done by a deadline. And as a result of that, I've gotten to try so many cool things, and be able to make recommendations on things I've actually tried.
So for you, you're basically saying to the team, keep experimenting and trying to be able to bring some back to the meeting. That's a good story. That's a good case study that will inspire everyone else. That's a great example of, we always feel like we're behind, especially with AI. I mean, I have total imposter syndrome.
You're like, well, Phil, I don't know as much about you. You probably know more than me about it, but I've only been doing this for a year. Like everyone else, other than Sam Altman and others. Engineers and stuff, but like, we're all just trying to figure it out and with our own unique brand and to your point, I feel like AI is job security for me because they will, you know, nothing is more important now than being confident in the positioning of your brand person or company to be able to mine for those stories that compliment what you're sharing and what you're selling. That's been underscored in terms of importance because the robots can't really do that very well.
henry
That reminded me what I was going to say. You said earlier that. With AI, you're not actually saving time. You're still like spending the same amount of time doing the work. But how I see it is, that's 100 percent the case because it removes 80 percent of the work, the mundane stuff, the shit no one likes doing, and then frees up that 80 percent to focus, focus more time on the 20%, which in reality is where the real value comes from.
That creativity, the flair, the unique understanding that you have of the client, the project. That's where I'm seeing it, and that's what I was explaining the team earlier today. One guy was like, oh, but Henry, like, I've still got a, like, it can't help me there. And I was like, well, it can, because it's replacing the 80 percent and like, you know, every single one of you is smart because you're part of the team and you're extremely talented.
Focus that talent on the final 20 percent rather than the full 100%, which can just, a big part can be done by AI now.
phil
Yeah. It's just finding this balance. People also always say, I feel so behind or I know I'm so behind on this. And I don't think that that's the truth or the case. I'm excited by it because it does kind of feel like the wild, wild west and people are using and trying all different tools.
And that doesn't mean one is better than the other. It doesn't mean you're really missing out. If anything, I don't think anyone is behind on AI. The way that you fall behind is if you get distracted by these things and lose track of what's actually important, which is growing your own business. That's the only instance where like you can be thrown off the horse and you can be so invested in an AI tool, but like it's easy. Like it's so easy to get to go down a rabbit hole and then lose your entire day and you spent. Little to no minutes on your business where you make high impact. That's the most dangerous thing that can happen.
henry
Yeah. The thing, the tip that I have done and I've told you this before, uh, chat, dbt is my default new tab in crow.
So it doesn't like, um, it doesn't interrupt my whole day, which makes it hard to go down rabbit holes. It's just a step in the process. So if I do want to. I'm immediately thinking, can I do this or do I just go to Google? If it does, I go down that path. If not, I'd go down the route that I was going to go anyway and still get the same stuff done.
phil
So many insights. We talked about AI. We talked about SEO. We talked about mindset for building a business and finding your niche. We've covered a lot of ground. How can people get more from you. I would say we've got to send them to try SEOSpace.
If they have a Squarespace website. So they've got a Squarespace site, people that have listened to this, um, and Phil's audience go to SEOSpace.co.uk
You can start with a seven day free trial. And if you like it and you find it valuable, use code Phil50, the number 50. Five zero, and you'll get 50 percent off your first two months. So that's SEOSpace.co.uk. You can then also head over to my YouTube channel, which is Just Henry Purchase. There's tons of free Squarespace SEO videos, and those are probably the two best places.
There's also the SEOSpace blog as well. There's like 50 blogs on there, all about Squarespace SEO, backlinks that we discussed earlier, a little bit about how you can use AI as well.
phil
Genius. Well, thank you for giving so much value to our listener. I know they appreciate it. It's been fun to hang out with you on Brand Therapy.
henry
Thanks a lot. Good time, Phil. Cheers.
