No matter how attractive or functional your website is, it is usually pretty redundant if it doesn’t appear highly in search results. 

So how do Squarespace and Wix stack up in the search engine optimization (SEO) department?

Well, both tools allow you to do the basics perfectly well, i.e.,

Additionally, both platforms allow you to display your blog posts in AMP format, which can speed up delivery in mobile search results (something that Google, with its ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing content, approves of).

Both products have a couple of weaknesses in the SEO department however.

Squarespace makes it rather difficult to change alt text (the text used to describe images to search engines and screen readers) — it’s doable, but a really convoluted process is involved.

Wix’s weakness involves how mobile versions of its site display — as discussed earlier in this comparison, Wix creates a separate version of your site for desktop and mobile, rather than using responsive design. 

And responsive design — where you are dealing with one template that adapts its size automatically to the device it’s being viewed on — is preferred by Google to Wix’s ‘absolute positioning’ approach. 

Wix and Squarespace could both perform better when it comes to URL creation — Google likes URLs to be as ‘clean’ and as relevant as possible, but both platforms insert prefixes into your URLs in certain contexts (for example, with blog posts, Wix sticks ‘/posts/’ into your URL and Squarespace inserts ‘/blog/’ into it). It would be good to see more flexibility on this front.

It’s important to remember that SEO is not entirely about the technical aspects of a website — the quality of content and the number of links to it are also hugely important. But judged solely from a technical perspective, I think that Squarespace ultimately wins the SEO shootout, simply because it makes use of responsive design, and Wix doesn’t. 

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