How to boost Google Feed and Google News Traffic for Substack Newsletter Writers

The Google News and mobile Google Feed SEO Case Study

Photo by NisonCo PR and SEO on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

I often come across SEO speculation of Substack writers on Discord and other places, which demonstrates a pain point, the general lack of traffic from Google on Substack.

Substack’s SEO is improving gradually as it gets more human-driven content and relevant headlines.

Since many Substack writers work in a niche, in theory over the long-term the SEO on related keywords can get stronger. Writing on Substack is a marathon not a sprint. Typically the writers have been on here the longest, are the most successful. This is not an accident.

Just like on a Wordpress blog, it takes a while to establish authority and a body of work related to keywords, links and the possibility of backlinks of high quality.

Substack’s Native SEO

SEO is a very long-term game, and our ability as Newsletter Creators is somewhat limited to optimize for SEO.

Substack in its short history, simply does not have enough quality backlinks to truly shine yet in SEO. Since a lot of Substack political trending posts are Op-Eds that are less likely to be linked to in an authoritative way, Substack has some particular challenges to improve its SEO.

Substack is a top #1000 website in the United States, but simply does not have enough writers to fast-track its domain strength. High volume content mills like Medium (which rely on clickbait headlines) have a much higher density of articles and have been around for years longer.

Substack’s domain authority and page authority are not great, but it has room for improvement. It’s global rank as a website is just outside the top #2000 globally according to SimiliarWeb.

What Can We do as Substack Newsletter Writers?

• Headline priming: Always search your own headlines after you write an article in Google (of your country), Google USA, Bing, Duckduckgo, You.com, Yahoo and others. This priming can be helpful, you will also get an idea from your location’s perspective as to where you rank.

• Links on Reddit for example, get a much higher boost to their visibility. This is because Reddit is considered high quality due to being a human-driven forum. If you have a Reddit account, use the service as normal and only share your own links on rare occasions, otherwise you will be flagged for spam.

On Substack, we can’t all be Bari Weiss, where the average reader reads for nearly 3 minutes. But suffice to say that getting a viral Tweet is not going to help our SEO woes.

However on the bright side, niche content in some weird domains on Substack could do pretty well over the long-term. The more wacky, the better, as long-tail traffic works in mysterious ways. There’s simply less competition on those topics.

I go a lot deeper on this topic for premium members. I’m actively studying the pain points and stories of early-stage Newsletter writers on Substack.