Grow Your Squarespace Site | 6 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website

You’ve built a beautiful Squarespace website and everything looks perfect. That’s amazing! But excitement fades as you realize nobody is actually visiting your site. Worse yet, nobody seems to care at all.

It’s a freaking ghost town!

Unfortunately, this is the reality many website owners face after launching their site. The decorations look great but nobody’s coming to the party.

Luckily, it’s actually pretty simple to start fixing this zero-traffic situation. This should be the next step in launching your Squarespace website.

Because what’s the point of having an epic website if no one ever sees it?

I’m on a mission to help as many site owners and creators as I can. And this post shares my top moves for getting sustainable, organic traffic to all of my Squarespace websites.

I’ve been working in content marketing for the past 4+ years and I’ve successfully grown three of my own personal brand websites. I’ve learned what actually works and what doesn’t. So rest assured, you’re in the right place!

But let’s wrap up this chit chat and get to it already!

1. Optimize Your Site for SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is optimizing your website and content for ranking in search engines. Here are some of the most important factors to optimizing your website for SEO:

• Have a clear niche. Niching down is helpful for building brand and actual topical authority in your niche.

• Define your brand keywords. Research your niche and choose the most relevant brand keywords you want to be known for.

• Use your keywords. Use your brand keywords in the right places, like in your title headers, URLs, meta descriptions and body text.

• Verify your site with Google. Connecting to Google Search Console (GSC) lets you track keywords and request immediate indexing for new pages and posts. Luckily, Squarespace makes this super easy.

• Have great UX. UX (user experience) is designing your site so it’s super simple and enjoyable to use. Having clear site navigation and making things scannable are two examples.

• Create pillar pages / posts. It’s smart to create core pages or ultimate guides for your most important keywords. These are often more competitive terms, but will establish your niche and brand authority.

Explore more:
➤ Key Features of a Great Website
➤ Squarespace SEO Checklist

2. Definitely Have a Blog

“Want to know the best way to bring sustainable organic traffic to your Squarespace website? Start a blog.”

Content is by far the best way to get sustainable traffic to your website.

A blog not only brings you organic visitors, but it establishes you and your brand as an authority in your niche. This is how you start building more awareness and unshakable SEO authority.

Starting a blog in Squarespace is super easy:

1. Go to Pages under Website

2. Click + next to Main Navigation

3. Choose Blog under Collections

And once you have your blog page set up, you can start writing and publishing content.

I won’t go into all the nuts and bolts or growing a blog (obviously — that would be too much for one post). But here’s the basic formula:

• Do good keyword research

• Write good content

• Have good blog SEO

• Be consistent

• Update and optimize posts using data

Explore more:
➤ Personal Blogging 101 (where to start)
➤ Squarespace for Blogging (full guide)

3. Diversify Your Traffic

Relying on a single source of traffic is a bottleneck. I learned this the hard way during Google’s March 2024 core update — I lost half my traffic overnight and I had no backup.

Woe was me 😣!

So now, I’m focusing more on diversifying my traffic to hedge against these types of algorithm updates. The truth is, platforms change and users evolve.

Staying relevant in the future of blogging means being adaptable.

So here are some of my favorite options for diversifying traffic to a (Squarespace) site:

• Start an email list early

• Use a Pinterest strategy

• Use a social blogging strategy

• Start a YouTube channel

You can learn more about blog traffic diversification in this post by Backlinko.

4. Get Backlinks

“Backlinks are like votes of credibility from other sites...”

— Brian Dean, Backlinko

Backlinks are when other websites link to your website. They’re highly sought after and one of the stronger ways to establish SEO authority.

When you get backlinks from trusted sites, it’s a strong signal to Google that your site is also high quality.

(it’s also a great way to expand your reach)

For example, I recently was referenced by ApartmentGuide (see here) for my travel site, which boosts my domain authority (DA) and trust and drives more traffic to my content.

Good stuff!

Learning how to get *quality backlinks is beyond the scope of this article, but here are a few quick tips for getting backlinks:

• Do guest posting in your niche

• Use HARO and get named as an expert source

• Form strategic partnerships

• Create really good, share-worthy posts with custom data

5. Do Local SEO (if it makes sense)

Local SEO is optimizing your website for “near me” searches in your local area. This is perfect if you’re a local business or offering local services (obviously).

Local SEO requires a different strategy for keyword research, content creation and site optimization.

You can learn more in this guide from HubSpot. But here are some of the key takeaways:

• Optimize your Google My Business profile

• Have consistent name, address and phone number (NAP)

• Add location-based pages to your site

• Create local content

• Target local keywords

6. Establish Niche Authority

An important part of SEO, organic traffic and trust is establishing authority in your niche. This can take a while, but it’s something to start thinking about from day one.

One of the best ways to establish authority in your niche is through content creation — yet another reason to start that blog 😏.

By covering a topic in full (through guides and posts), you build solid trust and credibility in your domain.

Here’s a good litmus test for starting your niche authority journey:

When you visit your Squarespace website or blog, is it immediately obvious who you are, what you do and what you want visitors to do?

If not, try to improve things for brand clarity. Have a single CTA (call to action), a clear mission and a clear target audience.

---