Search engine optimization is one of the most important activities that you should be undertaking on your Squarespace website. Part of this, and one of the most important aspects for Squarespace SEO, is to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. This helps Google to crawl your website more efficiently, helping you to rank quickly and highly on the search engine.
By adding your sitemap to Google, you’re able to monitor your website for error messages. Messages about broken links and other important SEO issues that need attention can be included on your Google Search Console.
What is Your Website’s Sitemap?
The Squarespace sitemap for your website is an XML file that is located at a specific URL on your website. This provides search engines with all the information they need about the important pages on a website. It helps your website to crawl your site to index it, associate keywords with each page and help determine your site’s position on the search console.
A sitemap is not the only tool that Google and other search engines use to crawl and index a website. However, it is one of the best and it allows the search engines to follow all the internal links between website pages. This will help Google to determine the relationship between pages.
How to Add a Squarespace Sitemap to your Websites
One of the best things about your Squarespace website is that you don’t need to have an XML sitemap generator for your website. Regardless of whether you're using an eCommerce template or another one. This is automatically created for you on your website. This saves you a lot of time. And every time that you make a change to your website, add a page, remove a page, make a change to a website, the sitemap is automatically updated for you.
To view the Squarespace sitemap on your website, you just need to add the /sitemap.xml to the end of the website address. For example, if you’re using example.com, use the address example.com /sitemap.xml
Submitting the Squarespace Sitemap to Google Search Console
Once you’ve discovered your Squarespace Sitemap, you can then submit a copy of it to Google. This is a very quick and easy process and something that is not done automatically for you. This is because you will need a Google Search Console account to make it work.
If you’ve not yet got this account, be sure to do this before following these instructions.
Step 1 – Log In
Log into your Google Search Console account and then click on the website property from the dropdown menu that is located within the top-left corner.
Step 2 – Index
Within the Index section of the left dashboard menu, you need to select the option ‘Sitemaps’.
Step 3 – Add
Now you need to click on the option ‘Add a new sitemap’ and then add the sitemap.xml in the field that follows the URL for your website. When this is entered, you can click on ‘Submit’.
Google will not crawl the website immediately. It will check the sitemap at a regular period of time to ensure it has linked to new content or check whether all the content is the same.
Final Word: How to add a Sitemap to Squarespace
Adding a sitemap is really easy when it comes to Squarespace because it’s already done for you. However, you will need to submit it to Squarespace for it to become active and to have maximum benefit for your search engine optimization.
