SEO Expert AMA: Matt Callahan

Hey everyone! This month, we are excited to have Matt Callahan, founder and CEO of Delphi and Squarespace Expert in the Marketplace, answer your biggest questions about SEO. Delphi is a strategic marketing and design agency headquartered in NYC. They offer a full suite of design and marketing services, while specializing in Squarespace website development and SEO.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of making your site better for search engines, so that when people search for products or information that you offer, your website is more likely to appear in their search results. Optimizing your site for SEO could mean more site traffic, and potentially increased revenue. 

There are a lot of SEO tactics and tools, and the best practices are constantly changing, which is why Matt is here to answer any questions people in the Squarespace community have about optimizing their site’s SEO. 

Please reply to this topic with any questions you have by Monday April 6th, 8pm EDT! If you see any questions you want to see answered, simply like the question. Matt will answer the top 10 most liked questions.

I followed an email link here minutes before it began, and logged in, but I could find no way to join the discussion. I wandered all over the forum and Matt's pages. No dice. Couldn't figure it out.

@giordano We are currently accepting question submissions for Matt until April 6th. Simply comment on this post with your question or 'like' another user's submission. Matt will be answering the top 10 questions.

Hi Matt

I use SEMRUSH (https://www.semrush.com/) to co-ordinate SEO activity for a number of Squarespace sites I maintain.

When I run the SEMRUSH site audit tool, I notice the same warning coming up regarding Squarespace using uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files.

Do you think this is a "real" issue and if so.....is it something I can fix?

Thanks 

Damian

Hi JGutierrez, Matt,

I want to know how to add Schema Markups in SquareSpace to get featured on the SERP sections?

What is the number one thing that all squarespace site creators should do regarding SEO? Understand that there will be multiple actions to get better rankings, but if you had to name just one, what would it be?

Thanks

What's your best advice for keyword research without investing in one of the expensive tools?

Can we have the expert's opinion on Squarespace not being SEO friendly and finally put this issue to bed?

Is it best to have Squarespace host domains to reduce DNS lookups in order to avoid a slow site load speed? Or would you suggest using CloudFlare? This is assuming other site speed factors are already optimized (images, minified css, js, html, ssl, etc). 

What's the best way to optimize images? Keeping file sizes down and adding descriptive text with keywords to the captions? I've read that we should use caption text as image alt text but what about for templates that display image captions but you don't want it displayed so leave it blank? 

How should we deal with adding Expires headers in order to avoid unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views?

What prompted you to build your new site on Webflow versus Squarespace? And what differences in search performance have you seen as compared to your older site?

Is SEO dead with the continued move to mobile and establishment of Amazon as a primary  search engine and Facebook etc. as primary platforms on the web ? What types of searches; informational, comparison, transactional, and so on, should we be optimizing our site for - what part of the searchers journey should we target to optimize our investment in SEO ? Can you share your definition of SEO and your model for its Return on Investment and compare this to an investment in paid search? Perhaps, you can touch on site design for SEO and Paid Search - how should we consider landing pages? Do you conduct a Site SEO Audit for clients, how do you approach new clients, what information do you look at in Squarespace and what tools do you recommend?

- Sorry, several questions there. Thank you! - John

Hey Matt. Do you have any Squarespace-specific suggestions for optimizing local SEO for a business with multiple physical locations? Cheers.