Index your Square Online site with search engines
About website SEO
To help your Square Online website rank better on search engines like Google, you can add search engine optimisation (SEO) details to your site. Adding SEO details helps make your site more discoverable online, which can also help lead to more visits and online sales.
Before you start
You can index your website from your Square Dashboard.
Since search engines aren’t updated in real time, their search results won’t immediately display any recent changes you’ve made to your SEO details. It can take anywhere between a few days to several weeks for a change to be reflected in search engine results. For more information, review our Ultimate SEO Guide.
Hiding your website or webpages from Google and other search engines does not unpublish your site. Not including the page in your navigation menu doesn’t hide it from search results either – it simply removes the link to that page from your site’s navigation. Anyone with the direct link to your site or page can see it. If you need your website online but need to hide the information on it, learn how to password-protect your Square Online site.
If you see outdated search results on Google and need them removed, learn how to remove outdated content from Google search results in the Google Support Centre.
Set up site SEO
SEO settings for your entire website correspond to your website’s homepage.
- Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Sales channels > Online > Website > SEO.
- Under ‘Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)’, select Update SEO.
- Add your SEO details and select Save when finished.
- Publish your site from the editor to see the changes live.
SEO settings for each webpage are located in your site editor within the settings panel for each page.
- Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Sales channels > Online > Website > Edit site.
- Open the page you want to index.
- Select the cog icon in the editing panel and select View page settings.
- Select SEO in the pop-up window to add your SEO details. Select Save.
- Publish your site to see the changes live.
Image descriptions, commonly known as alt text, help search engines explain what images are about. This is especially useful when the image doesn’t load or a site visitor can’t see it.
- Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Sales channels > Online > Website > Edit site.
- Open a page containing non-background images, or add a new section with images if you haven’t already got one.
- Select the section that contains images, and select an image to open up the image menu in the editing panel.
- Add your alt text into the text box to describe the image.
- Publish your site to see the changes live.
Hide your site from search engines
- Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Sales channels > Online > Website > SEO.
- Under ‘Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)’, click Hidden from search engine results.
- Publish your site from the editor to see the changes live.
- Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Sales channels > Online > Website > Edit site.
- Open the page you want to hide.
- Select the cog icon in the editing panel and select View page settings.
- Select SEO in the pop-up window.
- Under ‘Search visibility’, choose Hidden from search engine results. Select Save.
- Publish your site to see the changes live.
Enable site search
Your website has also got a search feature that indexes your site’s content. The site search feature allows your customers to search content and items found on your Square Online site.
Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Sales channels > Online > Website > Edit site.
Select your website’s navigation menu.
In the editing panel, go to Content > Icons and tick Search icon.
Publish your site to see the changes live.