We have had Square online for about a year, and have seen our numbers going up. But since the July Google Algorithm Update, our numbers have been slowly dropping.
After a lot of research and site testing, I have discovered that Google has now made its Core Web Vital site statistics play a Big role in how it considers your site for SEO Ranking and search visibility.
Core Web Vitals measure how fast your site loads, and other related speed issues. I ran a bunch of tests and these are the results:
Sitechecker:
Google Page Speed Insights
There is a big issue with page loading speeds, I thought it might be our site, but when I went deeper into the causes, I found it is related to a JavaScript issue on Squares platform (which likely affects everyone's site I would think), as details in Googles Page speed insights show:
This seems to be unused JavaScript! Here are more details:
So this seems to be an issue within the framework of the Square Website. I spent some time searching for anyone else who noticed this and found this person from the UK, who found pretty much what I did:
I think this person says it all, and over the course of months, square has not addressed this problem. You should read that whole discussion.
So this issue was reported to Square back in March, and as of recently, Square had no real answer to it. I dont think they will even bother to do anything about it, since I saw in another post that square does not even have a development team!
. But now, this issue is likely affecting ALL your sites as well! I implore everyone to run speed tests, I will provide a few below, but you need to check and see if your traffic is starting to drop (I use Google Analytics), and see how the Core Web Vitals is effecting your site, since a Big part of Googles SEO Rankings NOW depend on how fast your site loads!
Here are a few sites you can check and verify if your site is affected by this.
Google Page Speed Insights:
Sitechecker
https://sitechecker.pro/speed-test/
There are a lot of other free speed checker sites you can find with a simple Goggle search, I ran about 6 of them, and got the same results as Google, so this is a very serious issue. I would love to hear back from as many people as possible to see if this is as widespread as I fear. Check you site, look at your numbers since July, and see if we can get an idea if this is happening a lot.
Another big issue with square is that you cannot optimize your Title Tags on your images. When square uploads them, they assign a huge number for your image name (just download one and see how it is named). What that means is you lose a lot of SEO with Google, as Google will ignore your images and your images will NOT appear in Google searches for Images, and in the long run, it will affect your SEO with Google negatively.
There are a lot of other issues that make Square a very poor website to use for getting ranked with SEO on Google. I am in the process of setting up a Wordpress/.Woocom site, and will be transferring my site off Square. If Square fixes these and other SEO unfriendly issues, I would consider coming back and using them again, as the integration with our POS is really great. But it doesn't help when Google is not ranking you due to very poor SEO choices that Square has available. I don't know what part Weebly plays in development of Square online, I would think little to none now.
As far as resolving this, there is something called AMP integration, and although it does not work with square, it can be made to integrate with a little programming finesse (mentioned in the article). I would think this could be a possible fix.
https://www.thelogocreative.co.uk/how-amp-integration-can-speed-up-your-website-and-seo-rankings/
The funny thing is Square is owned by Jack Dorsey, who owns Twitter and other companies. You would think they would be able to get a professional team in to make this a really great platform?? I hope they will.
