How to Optimize a Portfolio Website for SEO

3. Create high-quality content

Designers and photographers often want to keep their portfolios super "clean," avoiding too much text to maintain the page's flow and aesthetics. However, this approach can be counterproductive. While a portfolio is meant to showcase your skills and expertise, content remains a crucial ranking factor.

Right from your landing page, you should add helpful content to provide value to customers-and also ensure search engines understand your brand voice.

This copy might include describing your business's main services, its history, answering common questions your customers ask, or even mentioning successful projects you've worked on in the past.

Think about it: How can search engines rank you for keywords if you have very little text on your site to communicate to Google, Bing, etc. what you should display for? To boost your chances of ranking, you need to make it clear what you want to display on search engines for.

Here are three tips explaining how you can craft content that resonates with both search engines and potential customers.

Craft engaging portfolio descriptions

Don't just rely on visuals to tell your story.

Each project in your portfolio should have a detailed description that includes:

• The client's objectives and challenges

• Your creative process and solutions

• The outcomes and results achieved

Weave your target keywords naturally into these descriptions, ensuring they read smoothly and provide value to visitors.

Leverage client testimonials and FAQs

Incorporate customer testimonials and a comprehensive FAQ section into your site. Using an FAQ accordion can boost your word count without making the page look cluttered.

FAQs not only build trust but also provide opportunities to naturally include long-tail keywords, which are keywords with four or more words. These long-tail keywords improve your chances of appearing in featured snippets, which are short answers to questions asked by potential leads and featured prominently in search results.

Implement a blog strategy

Blogging is a powerful way to boost your SEO efforts. At any point in time, only 5% of potential leads are ready to buy from you. To get the remaining 95% interested in your services, you need to provide value that captures their attention before they're ready to enquire or buy-blogs are a great way to do this. Squarespace offers free built-in blogging capability, making it easy to create and manage a dedicated blog section on your portfolio website.

For example, if you're a photographer, consider creating topics on the following:

• How much it costs to hire a photographer

• Behind-the-scenes looks at your photography projects

• Photography industry insights and trends

• Things to know before hiring a photographer

These guides and insights help identify you as an industry thought leader. Remember, most potential leads are not ready to buy right now, but seeing your business name more often means they're likely to remember you when they are ready.

Once your website starts gaining traction, your next goal will be to get references from relevant websites in your industry via backlinks.

4. Build backlinks and promote your portfolio website

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. Search engines view them as digital endorsements. The more reputable the referring website, the more credibility it adds to your portfolio site.

Generally, when you produce helpful content that provides information that others need, they're likely to link to your content. However, such links can be disadvantageous if they're coming from a spammy website. You can always get rid of these unhealthy links by using the Google Disavow Tool.

But in addition to organic backlinks, you can also make conscious efforts to get links from reputable sites.

Here are some helpful strategies for building a robust backlink profile.

Send link requests

Reach out to industry peers, bloggers, or complementary businesses with personalized messages. Highlight how featuring your work on their website can benefit both parties.

For example, a Squarespace website designer might reach out with the below template:

Hi [First Name],

It's [Your Name]. I'm a Squarespace website designer who found you [how you found them].

I really liked [add some information to show you've done your research, such as a blog they wrote that you like or a video they shared]. It got me thinking: I'm writing a blog on [a topic you'll both benefit from], and I'd love to feature you there to share your expertise.

I'm sure the article could benefit your audience, too. Would you be open to collaborating on it?

Please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Speak soon,

[Your Name]

[Your Title]

[Your Website]

Outside of outreach and link requests, below are other ways you can build backlinks to your website.

• Creating linkable thought leadership content on your website: Common examples include industry reports, infographics, and unique data, which others might link to when writing content on their own site.

• Asking partner businesses to collaborate on content or link to you as a partner from their site: For example, let's say you're a wedding planner, you could ask trusted suppliers and partners to link to your website from their partner page or portfolio where they cover projects/events you worked on together.

Engage in local SEO strategies

For location-based services, consider listing your business on directories like Google My Business, Better Business Bureau, and Yelp. Encourage customers to leave a review to boost your business image. These directories have a verification process that search engines find credible. This means that search engines can trust that websites featured on the directory are legit, boosting your chances of ranking.

As mentioned early on, monitoring your goal progress is important to ensuring an effective SEO strategy, which leads us to step five.

5. Track your goal progress

You've set a goal in the first step, and now that you've learned the key strategies and tips for SEO on portfolio websites, it's time to ensure you're on track to achieve those goals. We recommend breaking these goals into smaller, manageable milestones to make them easier to accomplish.

Consider these 4 tips to assess if you're making progress in achieving your set goals.

Use Squarespace's built-in tools

Take advantage of Squarespace's Search Keywords dashboard to monitor your progress.

This powerful tool provides insights into the following:

• Keywords you're ranking for

• Your current position for each keyword

• How your rankings are improving over time

• Your traffic sources and geography

• Button clicks on any of your page

You can locate this tool by navigating to Analytics > Traffic from your Squarespace dashboard. Compare these data to your set goal and adjust your approach if you do not reach your expectations.

Connect external analytics

For a more comprehensive view of your SEO performance, connect your Squarespace site to Google Search Console.

This integration allows you to do the following:

• Submit your sitemap directly to Google

• Gain deeper insights into your website's search performance

• Identify technical issues that may be affecting your rankings

You can connect to Google search console by navigating to Settings > Third Party Tools > Connected Accounts. Select Connect Account and choose Search Console.

Track lead generation

SEO isn't just about traffic-it's about attracting the right leads who may become customers. Keep a close eye on how many leads your portfolio is generating.

Key metrics to track include:

• Contact form submissions

• Direct email inquiries

• Phone calls from your website

Connecting to an analytic tool like Google Analytics can give you more insight into these data. Using Google Tag Manager, you can also set specific parameters to track these elements.

Review and adjust regularly

SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. Set aside time each month to review your progress, analyze the data, and make necessary adjustments to your strategy.

This might involve the following:

• Updating your target keywords

• Refreshing your portfolio content

• Improving site speed or mobile responsiveness

Remember, SEO wins take time. Be patient and persistent in your efforts, and you'll see gradual improvements in your portfolio website's visibility and performance.

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