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Have you ever received an email from a specialist SEO person who sends a long list of everything they can do to optimise your website? We get those too — usually a generic reply to one of our posts about SEO for Squarespace websites, with broad promises rather than tailored advice.

So, from what we can tell, the majority of the information you hear is crafted to extract your money — and much of it is simply not accurate. So, what is actually true?

It’s true that every Squarespace website or for that matter any website on any other platform needs to be optimised so Google can rank it and understand what the website is about.

It’s also true most website owners don’t optimise their websites.

It’s true that all of your SEO fields need to be filled in, your page descriptions need to describe what’s on the page and all of the images need to be labelled and the Meta information changed. Google can’t read images so you need to make it easy for them.

It’s true that blogs and regular content are very good for SEO. Google rewards fresh, useful content, so try to write and publish a blog at least once a month if you can, and share each post across your social channels to increase visibility and traffic. It’s also true that duplicate content, or pages stuffed with lists of keywords and locations, can seriously damage your SEO — Google flags this as “keyword stuffing.” Taking content from other websites and passing it off as your own is also a definite no‑no; Google is very good at detecting copied content. And yes, inbound and outbound links are beneficial for SEO too, helping search engines understand your site’s relevance and connections.

What’s not true? You don’t need to be locked into an ongoing contract with some company that insists you must buy their services. Kindly ignore those alarmist emails.

SEO is a gradual process — Google moves slowly and steadily. Plenty of people will promise rapid fixes to your SEO, but that’s simply not true. Be patient and focus on publishing consistently good content.

I won’t call out names, but that one website that ends in ‘rush’ will try to convince you your site is rubbish when it probably isn’t. User-focused content that keeps people reading and reduces bounce rate is far more valuable than shaving a millisecond off load time. Don’t let that site push you toward unscrupulous SEO specialists.

Trust your website designer — we understand these issues and know what really matters. Watch your analytics to see which pages are engaging. Google can detect whether users read your content or quickly leave a page, so keep an eye on engagement metrics and act on what they tell you.