How to Optimize a Portfolio Website for SEO

When you build and launch a stunning website that displays your portfolio, getting it found by your target customers is usually your next step. If you’re unsure how to attract visitors to your website, or display professionally on search engines, then you need an SEO strategy.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website to follow best practices so it appears higher up on search engines when your target customers are looking directly for your business, products, or services.

In this guide, you’ll discover 5 actionable steps to improve your Squarespace portfolio website visibility through SEO. Whether you’re a photographer, graphic designer, or marketing professional, these SEO tips will help you attract more customers and build your brand.

These tips are based on my experience helping over 6,000 Squarespace DIYers, agencies, and designers rank higher in search through SEOSpace, the SEO extension for Squarespace, and helping businesses of all sizes attract customers over my SEO career. 

1. Set a realistic goal

Before you begin the search engine optimization process, it’s crucial to be practical about what you aim to achieve. Setting a realistic goal is essential because SEO doesn’t deliver results immediately. Depending on the nature of your service and your competitive edge, seeing results from your SEO efforts can take months or years.

However, search engine optimization has always been essential for online success. Stay motivated, be consistent, and keep following SEO best practices until you start seeing results.

Getting your goal right is crucial—here are two tips for creating realistic milestones.

Define your SEO objectives

Start by clearly outlining your SEO goals. Most professionals aim to increase website traffic, generate more leads, or improve their online visibility.

For your portfolio website, the goals might be:

• Rank higher for people looking for your product/services locally

• Increase organic traffic from your target audience

• Improve engagement metrics like time on site or pages per session

• Attract more potential clients to get contact form submissions and enquiries

Be specific with your goals. Instead of an unclear goal like “boost traffic,” set something more detailed, like “boost organic traffic by 20% in the next six months.”

Set realistic timeframes

SEO results can take time, so it’s essential to set practical expectations. From experience, significant improvements typically take about 4 to 6 months to become noticeable. Don’t expect overnight improvement—instead, plan for progress over months or even a year.

Remember, timelines can vary based on factors like your industry, competition, and the effort you put into your SEO strategy. Stay committed, monitor your progress, and adjust your goals as needed to ensure long-term success for your portfolio website.

We’ll provide details on how to monitor your progress later in this guide. Before then, however, you need to understand the essential SEO strategies, starting with keyword research.

2. Conduct thorough keyword research for your niche

Keywords are those terms or phrases a potential customer will type into search engines like Google and Bing when looking to solve their problems or fulfill a need. Search engines go through billions of web pages to determine the most relevant content to those problems and needs and rank it higher. Including related keywords or phrases on your portfolio page helps signal to search engines that your content is relevant and useful.

While keywords aren’t the only factor search engines consider, they’re one of the primary indicators. Here’s how to find relevant keywords and best practices for adding these keywords to your portfolio pages.

Identify your target keywords

Start by surveying your target customers to gain insights directly from them.

Ask questions like:

• What problem or issue were you looking to solve when looking for a business/product/service like ours?

• What search terms would you enter to solve these problems?

• What search terms would you enter to find what we offer?

• What information do you wish was easier to find during your research?

These questions will help you understand the language your potential customers use and provide a solid starting point for keyword research. Tailor your primary keywords to reflect the unique services or skills that make you stand out in the creative space.

For instance, if you’re a photographer, you might target keywords like “[your city] + [your service] e.g., “London wedding photographer.” Other possible keywords to target may include “commercial product photography” or “affordable wedding photography.”

You can also use Squarespace-focused tools like SEOSpace to gauge the popularity and difficulty of ranking for different keyword variations. Choose keywords that the data shows are being searched by your target customers, with low competition, as they’re easier to rank for and can start your SEO journey on the right track.

Consider client expectations specific to your industry

How you select keywords will depend on your specific industry.

Here are some examples from different industries:

• Photography: Photographers typically work with customers local to them, so focus on location-based keywords and specific photography styles. For example, “landscape photography London”.

• Graphic design: Customers are usually more interested in your design skills than your location. Target industry-specific terms and your expertise. For example, “graphic designer for tech company”.

• Copywriting: Your work experience and field of knowledge are more important to customers. Emphasize niche expertise and content types. For example, “B2B SaaS whitepaper writer.”

Always consider the needs of your potential customers and your strengths to determine the right keywords to choose.

Add keywords to your portfolio pages

Once you’ve identified your target keywords, the next step is to strategically incorporate them into your portfolio pages. 

One of the best ways your portfolio work can attract potential customers is by ranking on search engines for the business name of your client. If you do a great job on a client project and rank high for their business name, people searching for that business might find you, too. This increases your exposure and links your portfolio to successful projects.

For example, let’s say you build a stunning new website for a local business. By adding a dedicated page to your portfolio showcasing this website, describing the work you did for that business and how it’s helped the business get found and grow, when people search for that business, they might find your portfolio and potentially hire you to achieve similar results.

This works in a similar way to how web designers get work by adding their credit/signature at the bottom of a client’s site—by associating yourself with and getting found through previous work, you can build channels for lead generation across the web.

To boost your chances of ranking high in search results, follow the below best practices on your site.

• SEO title: Craft a compelling title of 50 to 60 characters that includes your target keyword.

• SEO description: Write a concise 150- to 160-character SEO description that incorporates your keyword and entices clicks.

• Page content: Naturally weave your keywords into your portfolio descriptions and project summaries.

Remember, the goal is to optimize for both search engines and visitors. Avoid unnatural keyword introductions and prioritize creating valuable, informative content that showcases your expertise.

Once you’ve identified and optimized your portfolio page with relevant keywords, your next step should be creating helpful content.

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.