How to maximize SEO on Substack

The easiest guide on how to increase your Substack's visibility on search engines without hacks and millions in budget.

While Substack is a platform designed to draw most of your readers via email subscriptions, organic search can also be a great evergreen traffic source if the content matches user queries.

Substack SEO is far easier than you think

Many SEO guides will be replete with tips on keyword research and utilization of those keywords to maximize SEO. You can skip all of that. If subscribers regularly open and read your Substacks, you better understand what your users want to know than people who craft all of their content based on ideas they find within keyword research tools.

For an advanced guide on how to build SEO around users, read my book Product-Led SEO and subscribe to my Substack. These are the practical steps you can take to improve your SEO visibility based on what you already write.

Set up Google Search Console

If you focus on SEO, you need data to show that you are generating SEO traffic. There’s no need to subscribe to any external tools, as all they do is scrape the web and guess at visibility. If you use Google Search Console, you can see the data that Google shares to see your visibility within Google. There may be sampling issues with the data Google shares, but it is still the best free data source.

1. Go to Google Search Console

2. Add your Substack as a URL prefix.

   

   
   

3. On the next screen, the second option will be the HTML tag; copy the full meta tag.

   

   
   

4. Paste it into your substack settings under analytics.

   

   
   

5. Go back into Google Search Console and click “verify.”

6. Within a few days, you will have some data to start analyzing.

Use your own domain

This may be somewhat controversial, but I don’t think you will fully maximize your SEO visibility if your Substack remains a subdomain of Substack.com. There are many theories about the visibility of subdomains generally in Google. Still, for a mere $50 (plus annual domain registration fees), you can avoid all the questions while building out your own brand.

Purchase a custom domain for your website and set it up in Substacks settings under domain. You can read Substack’s guide on how to do that here.

Put your primary keyword in your title

My approach to SEO is focused on user value, and I generally don’t obsess over keywords; however, I don’t entirely ignore them. For the foreseeable future, users will search with keywords, and rankings on search results will be tied closely to the searched keywords.

When you write an email, the title/subject of a post will typically focus on what will encourage the email to open rather than ranking on search results, but you can do both.

A great email subject that gets many opens might be “This new feature was mindblowing” without needing to provide that much more context because the user has already permitted you to be in their inbox and knows who you are.

Given current search engine algorithms, if this post were about iPhones, it might be very challenging to be visible on iPhone queries without using “iphone” in the title.

Without hurting email open rates, you can modify the title by adding those all-important keywords to the end of the title and even where ellipses might cut them off in an email box. Merely having that focus keyword or object in the title will be enough to be visible on that topic.

Here’s an example of a longer title I wrote that included the word "SEO" (for SEO, of course) when I didn’t really need that word to appear in my subscribers' email inboxes.

How my lunch with Zapier turned into billion dollar SEO

and here’s how it appears AND ranks on Google:

Write a subheader

A search results page is a list of potential websites for users to click, and while a large percentage of clicks will go to whatever is ranked #1, users still do click those other results and even go to the second (or more) pages of search.

What makes users choose to click any result is the title of the URL and the snippet of text beneath that title. There are many instances where Google will modify the title and/or the snippet but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to put the best one out there that you can.

We addressed how to maximize the title in the previous paragraphs, but the second element is the snippet AKA the meta description. On Substack, the meta description becomes subheader text that is shown on the social preview just before you publish.

If you have filled out the subheader on the writing page, it will pull in the subheader; otherwise, it will be the first lines of text from a post. Unless you have written a fantastic opening first paragraph, you potentially don’t have the best meta description.

Improve how you will appear on a search result page, by putting that amazing click-worthy text in the subheader section right underneath your title.

Add internal links to your other posts

One of the most neglected and most accessible SEO best practices is to add links within your website to your own content. These links are entirely within your control and go a long way toward helping search engines see relevance and relationships between your content.

I have written a whole post on this here, but the key takeaway is link to your own content as much as possible.

Ask for links to your substack

Links from other websites to your Substack are a critical component of how search engines calculate a website's brand and authority. If you write content that people love, you will likely be earning links and mentions without too much effort; however, if you put in a little bit of effort, you will generate even more links.

• If someone mentions your content, ask them to add a hyperlink

• Ask to have your site listed in directories of your topic niche

• Create ego bait posts about companies and people that you know will want to share and link on their websites.

• Work with digital PR agencies that can help promote your substack (message me for any recommendations and introductions to my favorite agencies).

Look at your search console data to find data to improve

SEO is a constantly iterative process without a defined playbook to follow. Just like your Substack doesn’t have a defined content roadmap because you follow your readers’ curiosity, SEO data should help you shape your search visibility journey.

Check in on your Search Console regularly to find ideas on where to improve and topics where Google thinks you are relevant and you could spend more time writing about.

As an example, when I look at my own Search Console data, I see that I can spend more time writing about SEO forecasting and SEO funnels since I haven't really delved into these topics, which have a lot of impressions on search.

Don’t overthink SEO

If you follow the suggested steps above, you will likely see significant improvements in your traffic, but either way, there’s no reason to overthink SEO. Your readers are far more critical than any search engine audience, and if your readers love your content, you will generate search traffic despite any failings in SEO best practices.

Google (and other search engines) need to send search traffic to the vast majority of websites that have never done SEO, so if you ignore it, you will be in great company.

However, if you are curious about SEO and want to explore it further, please subscribe to my Substack and/or get in touch if I can help you on your SEO journey!