Meredith's husband: 0:24

Something has been upsetting me a little bit recently. Just one thing. Well, aside from the news Okay, the news is pretty bothersome, but something else, entirely separate from the news, has been bothering me. I'm with you. Remember, we've been doing some episodes on Squarespace. Yes, last week I said I did an episode, we did an episode, and then you have to redo it. And then I checked out Squarespace and they had redone it and yes, so I was going back looking at that episode. It came out to be much longer than our typical episodes and I just feel it wasn't that helpful. It was reviewing what I thought was a turd on the part of Squarespace and presenting their customers with some SEO advice, their SEO checklist, they had all these things and I was reviewing it. And then, yeah, I went onto Squarespace after we recorded that episode before I publish it, and then I had redone it. But what they did, as far as I can tell, is they basically painted a turd. Oh, I thought you said it was a good thing. No, that was something else. I'll get to that in a second. Okay, we're not repeating what we've already said. No, this is going to be in place of that episode, because I want this episode to be helpful. I feel like that episode just wasn't that helpful. Oh, okay, yeah, trash it, yeah. So I'm going to do this one instead. Okay Now.

Meredith's husband: 1:45

So Squarespace updated their SEO section. Yes, looks a lot better but, like I said, it seems like it's paint on a turd. It's still a turd. I started to dig in a little bit. It was the same stuff that I had said a week earlier was kind of worthless. Right, still worthless. It just looks much nicer and knowing like kind of working with companies for many years now, my feeling is that somebody in the chain of command at Squarespace was like we need to do, we need to make this SEO stuff better, and they assigned it to someone to make it look better, but didn't actually they didn't make it any better, which I find is really fun.

Meredith's husband: 2:22

I just I don't like the way Squarespace approaches business. To be honest, I put them in the same category with like Yelp, ooh, like, not. Well, yelp is probably worse. Ooh, yeah, but absolutely, after working with or trying to work with Squarespace support for a year plus with your site, I feel very strongly that they don't have your best interest at heart. Do they have their best interest? Yes, they just want to keep subscribers, okay, and, like I've said before, there is a place for Squarespace websites, like your site is on Squarespace, because you wanted to design it, yeah, which we actually we just relaunched last week. Yes, with your design, but my Help Editing, massaging of content, yeah, you're making it for everyone Less frustrating, let's say, for people visiting.

Meredith's husband: 3:18

Anyway, so where was I? You were painting a turd and saying that Squarespace really works for them. So what I imagine is somebody at Squarespace told somebody else, a team of people, to make it better, and they made it look pretty nice. To be honest, it looks a lot better, but it's just the same old stuff, right? Then, just a couple days ago, I have access to a few different Squarespace accounts. Yes, and I logged into another one and it hadn't been updated. It still looks exactly the way it used to. So they haven't even rolled out these changes to every account. So your Squarespace account, meredith, looks confused. So I'm going to describe this your account has been updated, has the new look, the new look and feel, but the same old content. I just checked another account and it does not have the new look and feel, it just has all the old stuff. So, especially. I don't want to roll out that previous episode we did, when you may or may not even see the new stuff. So this is why I've been kind of frustrated Again frustrated with Squarespace.

Meredith's husband: 4:20

Oh my gosh, what a surprise. So, rather, like I said, rather than releasing that episode, which I kind of feel now is like would be almost like painting my own turd I decided my SEO advice. If you're on Squarespace, my SEO advice is don't bother with all the stuff that their SEO checklist and all their guides. It's just not worth it. Really, there's too much stuff. There's like the SEO checklist, for example, is one of the pieces. Like the SEO checklist, for example, is one of the pieces. If you go through that list, which we did in a previous episode, half of it doesn't even have anything to do with SEO, and the other half is just like kind of very generic good SEO advice. Okay, so it's not worth it. There's nothing new.

Meredith's husband: 5:00

Yeah, but, like I said, I want to be helpful. I don't want to just have an episode where like, oh, squarespace is garbage, good luck with it. What I think would be helpful is the Squarespace fundamentals which I put together on my website. That is in the paid section, though, so I created a special link below, so the first 10 people to use that link will get access for a week for free. It's a monthly subscription, so if you want to keep it, you can do that, but the first seven days will be free. So if you want to check it out and go through, I think that's a very helpful.

Meredith's husband: 5:32

Well, I created it to be a helpful step for Squarespace, a good beginning, I will say also, there's another helpful piece of advice, I think, for Squarespace. So remember we mentioned the new Squarespace AI tool. So remember we mentioned the new Squarespace AI tool. Yeah, very briefly, they launched this and what it did is it helped to update your image alt text. Yeah, yeah, yes, okay.

Meredith's husband: 5:54

So, in using that, what I have found to be very helpful and most efficient, time-wise and probably get the best results, is, when you're creating a Squarespace site or when you are uploading images to it, do not give it alt text. Don't put alt text in there. Leave it blank, and for you, what I actually ultimately did is I went in and deleted all the alt text from all the existing images, and then I'm going to go back and use the tool, because the tool is so much easier to use in bulk. Great. Now I will probably do the same thing with the meta descriptions. This tool also does the meta description tags. Also, if you are not on Squarespace, you will probably start to see tools like this elsewhere, because it didn't occur to me at the time, but that tool collecting all your images that are missing alt tags and suggesting alt text is a very simple tool to create. I didn't realize how easy that was. Like I could literally do that within 10 minutes. I'd go to ChatGPT and write a prompt that would do that. However, the thing about Squarespace is that it will update the images for you Okay, but if you're not on Squarespace, you will start to see ads for these types of tools.

Meredith's husband: 7:06

Okay, what do they call? I don't know, but there's probably going to be a bunch of them. Many platforms, like Wix, includes them already. It's just a tiny little tool that Wix includes. It doesn't bring much attention to it. It's just a tiny little piece of their SEO suite, let's say, and, like I said, they didn't make mention of it. Squarespace, on the other hand, made it seem like it was changing the world. Anyway, okay, I digress. I don't know what these tools are going to be called, but they're very easy to create. So if you see something that does something like that, yeah, I would use that. If you're on WordPress or ShowIt or you're on Wix, use the Wix tool. So if you want to check out the Squarespace Fundamentals, the first 10 people using the link below get a free week. Sweet, I hope that's helpful.