SEO guide for outdoor businesses on Squarespace
Squarespace is the second most common website platform among outdoor recreation businesses, right behind WordPress. The templates look sharp, the drag-and-drop editor is fast, and you can have a site live in a weekend. The problem is that most outfitters and guide services running Squarespace never open the SEO settings. Bookings come in from referrals and repeat customers, and the assumption is that the platform handles the rest.
It doesn’t. Squarespace handles the basics: generating a sitemap, serving pages over HTTPS, compressing some assets. It does not write your title tags, optimize your images, or structure your trip pages so that Google understands what you offer and where you offer it. That work is on you.
Set your seo titles and descriptions on every page
Squarespace gives you a title tag and meta description field for every page and every blog post. Most outdoor business owners leave these blank or let them auto-populate from the page heading and the first few lines of body text. That’s a problem because the auto-generated versions are almost never what you’d want showing up in search results.
Go to any page in the Squarespace editor, open the page settings, and find the SEO tab. You’ll see fields for SEO Title and SEO Description. Fill in both for every page on your site, starting with your trip pages.
Your trip page SEO title should include the activity, the location, and your business name. “Half-Day Whitewater Rafting, Browns Canyon | River Co.” is a title that tells both Google and a potential customer exactly what the page is about. Keep it under 70 characters. The description field should summarize what a customer gets: the experience, the duration, what’s included. Stay under 160 characters. That’s the text that shows beneath the blue link in Google results. Write it like you’re trying to get someone to click.
Do this for your homepage too. “Adventure awaits” as a homepage title tells Google nothing. “Guided Rafting and Kayaking, Arkansas River | Your Company Name” tells Google everything.
Get your urls and page structure right
Squarespace generates URL slugs automatically from your page titles, which is better than WordPress’s old default of random numbers. But the auto-generated slugs can still get long and clunky. A page titled “Our Amazing Half-Day Family Whitewater Rafting Adventure” will produce a slug like /our-amazing-half-day-family-whitewater-rafting-adventure. That’s too long. Google weighs the first few words in a URL most heavily.
Edit the slug in page settings to something short and specific. /half-day-rafting-browns-canyon works. Shorter URLs are easier for Google to parse and easier for customers to remember or share.
Your site structure matters too. If all your trips sit under a single page called “Trips” with brief descriptions and no individual URLs, Google has one page to index instead of ten. Each trip or activity should have its own page with its own URL, its own title tag, and enough content to rank on its own. At least 300 to 400 words describing the experience, what’s included, what skill level is needed, where to meet, and what to bring. These are the questions your customers ask on the phone, and answering them on the page lets you rank for the things people search before they book.
If you operate in multiple locations or offer distinct activities, each combination needs its own page. “Kayak rentals in Moab” and “kayak rentals in Green River” are different searches. Build them separately.
Handle images the squarespace way
Outdoor businesses have better photos than almost any other industry. Customers on rivers, on trails, on cliffsides. The way you upload those photos to Squarespace affects whether they help or hurt your search rankings.
Squarespace automatically converts images to WebP and resizes them for different screen sizes, which is a real advantage over platforms where you have to manage that yourself. But it only helps if you do your part.
Before uploading, rename your image files. IMG_4823.jpg tells Google nothing. brown-canyon-rafting-group-june.jpg tells it a lot. After uploading, fill in the alt text field for every image on every page. “Group of paddlers entering rapids at Browns Canyon” is useful alt text. “Photo” is not.
Even with automatic resizing, uploading a 12 MB photo from your camera means Squarespace has to process a huge file. Resize your images to around 2000 pixels wide before uploading and keep file sizes under 500 KB. Slow pages lose bookings, and oversized images are usually the biggest reason outdoor business websites load slowly.
Watch out for image-heavy gallery pages. A page with 40 full-resolution photos will load slowly no matter what Squarespace does on the backend. Break galleries into smaller groups or link to a dedicated gallery from your trip page instead of embedding every photo.
Add schema markup manually
Squarespace requires more effort here than WordPress. There is no Yoast or Rank Math plugin to generate structured data for you. Squarespace adds some basic schema on its own, covering your business name, logo, and contact info. It does not add trip-specific or tourism-specific markup, which is the kind that gets your pages richer search listings with star ratings, pricing, and FAQ dropdowns.
You’ll need to add custom JSON-LD code through Squarespace’s code injection feature. Go to the page you want to mark up, open Settings, then Advanced, and paste your JSON-LD code into the Page Header Code Injection field.
If you’re not comfortable writing code, use a free JSON-LD generator like Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator or Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Fill in the fields for your business or trip (name, description, price, location, rating) and copy the output. Paste it into the code injection box and save. A developer could do your whole site in under an hour.
The schema types that matter most for outdoor businesses are LocalBusiness, TouristTrip or Product (for your trip pages), AggregateRating (for reviews), and FAQPage. If you want a full walkthrough on what each type does and how to implement them, this guide covers the details.
Use your blog to rank for searches your trip pages can’t
Your trip pages can rank for “guided rafting trips Browns Canyon.” They probably won’t rank for “what to wear whitewater rafting in Colorado” or “best time to float the Arkansas River.” Those informational searches bring in people earlier in the booking process, and a blog is how you capture them.
Squarespace’s blogging tools are decent. You can add categories, tags, featured images, and custom URLs to each post. The key is writing about things people are actually searching. Deciding what to write about starts with understanding what your customers type into Google before they’re ready to book.
Trip guides and “what to expect” posts work well. Gear lists, seasonal conditions, comparisons between different trips or locations. Each post should target a specific search phrase that real people use. “Best half-day rafting trip near Denver” is a real search. “Our awesome day on the river last week” is not.
A few blog-specific Squarespace settings to check: make sure each post has a custom URL slug (not the auto-generated one if it’s long), a unique SEO title and description, and alt text on every image. Set your blog to display full posts rather than excerpts if possible, since thin excerpt pages can create duplicate content issues.
Publish regularly during the off-season. Even one or two posts a month signals to Google that your site is active and maintained. Outfitters who publish year-round consistently outrank those who go silent from October to March.
Connect google search console and check it
This is free. It takes about fifteen minutes. Most Squarespace outdoor business sites still haven’t done it. Google Search Console shows you which searches bring up your site, where you rank for each one, which pages get clicks, and whether Google is having trouble crawling anything.
In Squarespace, go to Settings, then Connected Accounts, and link your Google account. Then verify your site in Search Console using the method Squarespace recommends (usually DNS verification). Once verified, submit your sitemap URL. Squarespace generates this automatically at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
Check Search Console at least once a month. Look at which queries you’re appearing for, which pages are getting impressions but few clicks (those need better title tags or descriptions), and whether there are any crawl errors or indexing issues. This is your feedback loop. Without it, you’re guessing.
If Search Console shows that a page gets impressions but almost no clicks, rewrite the title tag and description. If it gets clicks but no bookings, the page itself is the issue, not your rankings.
