SEO for Substack growth - is it worth it?
Things are changing with Substack and search engines. Here's what you need to know
Happy Friday, Substackers,
I’ve been thinking about search engines as a source of new readers and subscribers, lately, as part of the small group workshop I’m currently hosting.
With search engines on my mind, I was thrilled to see this message from Google Search Console in my inbox last week.
That’s 5,500 people clicking through to my free publication Pubstack Success from Google search results.
If you could get this many clicks from searches, and convert half of the people who click though into subscribers, then your publication would grow by 2.3K new subscribers in one month. With no active promotional work at all.
That’s brilliant!
For me, the news was extra exciting, because my click count has increased from 3.5K for the previous period. That’s an increase of 2,000 clicks - almost 60% - in one month.
How did I achieve this?
It’s impossible to know exactly what drives search engine performance for a website or publication because Google (and its competitors) don’t share specific details about how they rank their search results.
Without nerding out on the techy details, I can tell you that posts which are long and detailed with lots of subheadings and which contain specific answers to questions perform well with search engines.
Additionally, if search engines see that people who click on a result stay on the post or page for a long time, that page is judged to contain valuable, helpful information, and its ranking is improved - that is, Google will show it to more people.
My posts do well because they are long, detailed and answer specific questions about Substack.
But that ain’t new, I’ve been doing that for years. Why was there such a big increase in the past month?
I don’t know for sure but here’s what I think caused the growth:
Content hosted on Substack.com is doing better on Google overall - I’ve seen significant improvements in my post rankings in recent months, without doing anything differently. Other creators have noticed the same trend.
Since I noticed that my posts were doing well on Google I have spent a little more time optimising new posts for search engines, especially crafting headlines more carefully and making sure post URLs contain keywords.
In the past two months, I have posted more frequently and encouraged more readers to binge on my back catalogue with this post. Google may be rewarding the increased activity on my site.
Can you do this too?
Search engines could be a good source of traffic for your publication if you write posts that answer questions people need answers to.
For example, posts like “How to catch a marlin with a handline” can rank well because they answer a specific question - particularly if there’s not a lot of other information available online.
Search engines probably won’t bring you new subscribers if your posts don’t answer specific questions or address topics that people actively search for online. If that’s you, then you’re better off investing your energy into other sources of traffic.
Want to know more about SEO for subscriber growth?
I’ve been using SEO to get traffic to my websites and sell digital products since 2015, so I know a thing or two about using high-quality, SEO-optimised content to get leads and sales on autopilot.
SEO hasn’t really been a major part of my Substack growth strategy until the last 3 months, but in that time it’s gone from a ‘nice to have’ to a significant source of traffic and growth for me.
I’m thinking of running a webinar, masterclass or workshop about SEO for Substack creators (not free, but less than $100). Would you be interested? Tell me in the comments.
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That’s it from me for this week, see you next time,
Karen
I’d be super interested in the class - thanks for this.
I'm interested as well. Been using AI to create SEO optimization within each post. It's worth a little extra effort considering all the time I put into writing the darn thing!