SEO for Photographers on Squarespace

Squarespace is one of the more SEO-friendly site builders available to photographers out of the box — clean code, fast hosting, and a genuinely useful set of built-in SEO tools. The catch is that most of them are opt-in, tucked into settings panels photographers never open. Here's what's actually worth your time, roughly in order of impact.

Set your SEO title and description on every page

Every page, product, and post in Squarespace has an SEO title and description field, usually found in that item's settings under an “SEO” tab. Left blank, Squarespace auto-generates one from your page content — usually generic and rarely as compelling as one you'd write yourself. Go through your main pages (homepage, About, each specialty or gallery page, contact) and write a real title (“Wedding Photographer in Savannah | [Studio Name]”) and a one-sentence description for each.

Check the site-wide SEO settings once

Under Settings → SEO (naming varies slightly by Squarespace version), you'll find a site title and description used as the default when a page-level one isn't set, plus a toggle for whether Squarespace should suggest content in search results. Fill in a strong default here so any page you haven't customized yet still has something reasonable, rather than nothing.

Use the alt text field on every image you upload

Squarespace gives every image an alt text field when you click into it in the editor. It's optional, so it's almost always skipped. Write a real, specific description — “Bride and groom dancing under string lights at a Savannah garden wedding” — for your key portfolio and homepage images at minimum. See Image SEO for Photographers for more on this, including filenames.

Clean up your URL slugs

Squarespace auto-generates a URL for every page based on its title, which can end up long and awkward (/about-us-1). You can edit the URL slug directly in each page's settings — keep it short, lowercase, and descriptive: /newborn-photography-denver rather than /gallery-final-version-2.

Watch page speed on image-heavy and video pages

Squarespace compresses images automatically on upload, which helps, but full-bleed video backgrounds and very large galleries can still slow a page down noticeably. If a page feels sluggish, that's usually the cause — trim gallery length, or swap an autoplaying background video for a static image if it's not earning its keep.

Use the blog for questions your clients actually ask

Squarespace's blog supports categories and tags, which help organize content by specialty or location if you shoot in more than one area. You don't need to post weekly — a handful of posts answering real client questions (what to wear, how to book, a real wedding feature with the venue named) tend to outperform generic “10 tips for your engagement session” posts, because they're specific enough to actually rank.

Connect Google Search Console

Squarespace supports domain verification for Google Search Console directly in Settings → Marketing → SEO (or via a meta tag/HTML verification method under the same area). This is free, takes a few minutes, and is the only way to see your actual search performance — what you rank for, what gets clicked, and what Google has indexed. It's worth doing on day one, not after something goes wrong.

What Squarespace won't do for you

Squarespace's built-in structured data (schema markup) is limited and largely automatic — you don't get deep manual control over it the way you would with a WordPress SEO plugin. For most photographers this is a fine trade-off: you're getting solid defaults in exchange for not having to manage a plugin, at the cost of some fine-tuning ability. If your competitors are running heavily customized schema and you want to match it, that's one of the few genuine reasons to consider WordPress instead — but it's rarely the deciding factor for a portfolio site.