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Hey hunni, welcome back to another banger of a blog post about our favorite topic under the sun - Squarespace SEO!

We’ve covered quite a few of Squarespace’s built-in SEO features up until now (see THIS post and THIS post for examples) and I’m super excited to continue that trend today.

This time, however, we’re moving past the most obvious settings and taking a look at one of the often overlooked Squarespace SEO settings: page title formats.

Because I’m going to guess you didn’t even know that page title formats were something you could play around with, let alone that they have SEO value, non?

Don’t say I never taught you anything LOL! ;)

As a Squarespace SEO expert and leader in this super random little niche, it’s my job/pleasure to introduce you to things like this and present it in a way that makes you think, yes Charlotte I can handle this!

This is the kind of insider info that I share with my Squarespace SEO consulting clients and students in my online course, Top Squarespace SEO. But since I’m not one for secrets and truly want the best for anyone with a website, I’m giving you the summarized goods here - totally for free!

Read the blog post or watch the video tutorial below - either way, make sure that you’ve set up your Squarespace page titles the right way, for best display and SEO impact.

Some of you reading this might be totally new to Squarespace SEO and are looking for an introduction to this topic, someone to hold your hand and show you it’s not actually that scary. On the flip side, you might already be familiar with a few points on this list already but maybe you are looking for confirmation that you’re on the right track and haven’t missed anything important. No matter where you are in your Squarespace SEO journey, I know you’ll benefit from this info!

Alright, let’s get straight to it - read the post and watch the video tutorial below to learn about Squarespace title formats: how they display and why they’re important for SEO!

I have so many tips to share on the subject that it would have been crazy to put it all in one article! There are many misconceptions about Squarespace SEO which is why I've dedicate so many posts to this topic. Enjoy!

Click to view all posts in the Squarespace SEO Series

Visit my Squarespace SEO page for lots more resources.

Squarespace Title Formats: How they display and why they’re important for SEO

To review or change your website’s title formats:

Log into the back end of your Squarespace website
Click on the Marketing tab
Click SEO
You’ll see 3 tabs under Search Appearance: Home, Pages and Items
Review or change the SEO Title Format as needed

Why are Squarespace Title Formats important to SEO?

The reason why we care about Squarespace title formats is that they hold intrinsic SEO value, since they present a consistent structure for how your website’s content will display in three key formats:

Search engine results (e.g., how your website or particular web pages show up in Google)
Browser tabs
Social posts (e.g., if you share a blog post to Facebook or Pinterest)

You can totally just leave the default title format settings in place but it’s also a chance to add in additional keyword that will be crawled and indexed by search engines (like Google), so they have a better understanding of what your website or particular content of your website is about.

Squarespace’s Default title formats:

Squarespace has default title formats set up:

Home: default is ‘%s’ (site title)
Page: default is %p (page title) - %s (site title)
Item: default is %i (item title) - %s (site title)

Note: Item refers to any collection item, such as blog posts, galleries, events, etc.

In many cases, the default title formats will suit your needs and there’s no need to do anything else or change things around.

However, you might want to override these formats to suit your needs, especially since this presents an opportunity to add in additional keyword-rich content for search engines to crawl & index.

For example, the Home Default is %s (site title) - but you can override this by adding additional custom keyword-rich text (e.g., if ‘%s’ is just ‘John Smith’, you could change it to something like '%s | Seattle Wedding Photographer’ so that it would show up as ‘John Smith | Seattle Wedding Photographer’)

For the page title formats, the default is %p - %s, but you might decide to reorganize the display so that it’s %s - %p *this is often done if you have a lot of brand recognition and you want to prioritize that over the actual page title.

For the collection item the default format is %i - %s. Again, in most cases you’ll keep the default as is (or maybe add in that additional custom keyword rich text after %s) but you can totally switch things around.

Display of Title formats in browser tabs or search results

When setting up your title formats, don’t forget that it’s best to keep the %p or %i BEFORE the %s, for ease of reading & navigation when someone has multiple browser tabs open. If they can scan through the browser tabs and easily see which page/post/product/even/gallery/whatever they want, that will be better than if you have %s first because then it would all look the same - which might not be great from a user experience point of view.

Same thing goes for how your content will display in search results. Like, if your website or a page of your website shows up in a Google search results, you probably want to lead with the page/post/product/event/gallery/whatever title instead of the site title, just for ease and readability.

Ultimately, it’s your choice and depending on what part of your brand or website content you want to emphasize first in the browser tab or search results.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it, a deep dive into Squarespace page titles! Now you know what they are, how they display and why they’re important for Squarespace SEO :)

It’s an often overlooked setting when it comes to Squarespace SEO but don’t skip over it since there’s value here!

There’s a lot to consider with Squarespace SEO and I totally understand that it’s a daunting subject when you’re first starting out, which is why I’m thrilled to help you out with this blog post/video tutorial all about Squarespace’s page formats that you might not know about you!

Whether you’re just starting out with a brand new website and want to make sure that you’re setting it up correctly, or if you’ve had a site live for a while and now want to grow it to make more of an impact, SEO will get you where you want to go! From web pages to blog posts to product descriptions, these factors should be considered across your Squarespace website if you want best results.

Now it's your turn to tell me, have you changed your Squarespace website’s page title formats? Are you using the defaults? Did you know you can add in additional keyword rich text? Are you going to make any changes to your current display?

Leave me your questions down in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them. As people are spending more time online than ever before, it’s SO important that your website shows up properly in search results so that you can reach your ideal audience online - but you can’t do this without SEO!

If you want more SEO goodness, be sure to check out my Squarespace SEO page for all resources on the topic.

My signature online course, Top Squarespace SEO, will be opening for enrollment again soon - sign up for the TSS waiting list here!

You can also sign up for my newsletter (right here or below), where I often share Squarespace SEO tips, tricks and high-quality exclusive content. I send out emails to my list every Wednesday, mostly focused on Squarespace websites and SEO, and I can guarantee that you’ll find the newsletter topics interesting, entertaining and worth your time. #humblebrag

Finally, shameless plug: hit me up with any specific questions you have about Squarespace SEO and your website because I’m your girl. You can reach out to me directly if you’re interested in working together on your website and we can talk about whether or not you would be a good fit for my consulting and ongoing services. I can’t take on every request to do Squarespace SEO consulting but I do pick a few websites and businesses to work with every month and I’d love for you to be one of them.