How to Improve the SEO of your Newsletter?

Your Newsletter's SEO actually matters.

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

Hey Welcome Back!

This is a straight up listicle related to SEO optimization for Newsletters. A lot of Newsletter owners think SEO is some technical jargon that doesn’t apply to them, that would be wrong or possibly incorrect.

• As you begin to turn on paid subscriptions you begin to realize how important SEO is on people actually finding your niche Newsletter. After all, isn’t being discovered the key to finding yoru 1000 true fans?

• A lot of my paid subscriptions on my flagship Newsletter actually come from Google, because they are aligned to what I write about. They pay without hesitation right on arrival.

• Here are some tips on improving that process:

1. Write high quality Content in your Niche

Your Newsletter should be loyal to the core topic or intersection of topics that your Newsletter represents. In covering those topics well, you will organically be mentioning the keywords you should be and starting to rank in them over the process of many months and a few years.

2. Get Shares from Sites Where Human Conversations are Really Happening

Creating content that gets more comments, shares and shares to platforms where comments are more likely to occur like LinkedIn, Reddit, Threads and X is really important. Ultimately Google will also look at the social relevance of what you are writing, and how much it has an impact on chatter around your niche.

3. Make a List of the Keywords related to your Niche

Having a map of the keywords and some more long-tail evergreen keywords related to your niche that you might want to rank in over time is a good idea. Doing research on SEO and keywords will give you a better chance of creating content that’s optimized for it.

4. Optimize the URL Stub and Write Good Short Subject Lines / Titles

Taking out connecting words on the URL stub is pretty important so you have a higher chance of ranking with the keywords in the Title. You can do this on the advanced SEO settings.

48 characters is not a lot to work with.

Take some time and deliberate on the best choices of Titles that are somewhat keeping SEO in mind and the keywords you want to rank in over time and what people might actually be search for around your topic.

5. Get Referrals from Platforms with a High Domain SEO Strength

You want to be getting clicks from places that already have really incredible domain SEO. These places have been around for years (decades often) and have millions of monthly active users. Places like LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium and so forth. Getting traffic from these places will help improve your SEO.

6. Link High Quality Sources and Articles

Having some links in your content is usually good for SEO, but take care that those links are recent, high quality, provide references or additional context to what you are talking about in your Newsletter.

7. Visual Design and MultiMedia

A lot of Newsletters now make their own infographics, charts, audio voice-overs and embed videos. All of this can drive more clicks to your Newsletters, especially the visual design elements of adding infographics, charts and visual stimuli that can be teasers on social media. All of this tells Google you are optimizing your content for the real environmental press of declining human attention.

So when you invest in designing an infographic, chart or visual (even a doodle), it actually tethers with your SEO strategy. Anything that benefits the “reader experience”, the RX, is actually improving your SEO and clickability of your content. Don’t sleep on this one.

8. Write Great Content in your Niche

It’s not enough to write great content or write in your niche, you need to put the two together. Do research on your top competitors and identify what they do well and how you could do it even better. Sometimes on a Newsletter this will mean writing a longer piece and doing more indepth research. Writing a higher quality product takes more time and research. Some the tradeoff on content quality vs. frequency is worth it in SEO terms too.

What if you wrote some of the best content on your niche available on the internet? You’d see the SEO bump. It’s that simple, but writing great content on a consistent level in a specific niche is relatively hard.

9. Create an SEO Strategy and Battle Plan for your Newsletter

Dive into SEO and create an SEO strategy for your Newsletter, identify the current traffic you get from Google and set a goal for how much you’d like to get in the next 3 months, 6 months and 1 year from now, and take concrete steps to get there and implement your plan. A lot of Newsletter writers imply don’t take the time to understand SEO optimized content well enough. Try to be the most professional ambasador to your niche that you can, and it will pay dividends in the future.

10. Consider Using A.I. to Improve your SEO

Considering using a tool like ChatGPT to come up with better Titles, subtitles, and subheads within the Newsletter post you write. Use A.I. to help you find related quotes to your topic, and other kinds of miscellaneous add-ons that you can use to create higher quality content. Use A.I. to help you determine the most important keywords to go after and use some SEO tools to determine long-tail keywords you also want to target. A mix of A.I. and SEO tools in your toolkit will enable you to be more focused with how you optimize your content for this important parametre.

11. Consider Having Sections or a Series in your Newsletter

Having Sections in your Newsletter or a multiple different Series of articles on a specific topic or keyword that is part of your core pillars of your Newsletter niche is rather important. This enables you to keep covering those things in a way that’s easy to read since it fits into a coherent narrative that your Newsletter represents. A series of posts on a common theme can obviously help you rank in keywords related to it.

12. Get Press to Coverage on your Newsletter and Insights

Getting links from major publications and the Press is rather important for the SEO benefits. A substack peer who was employed at a publication, it was Fast Company, randomly interviewed me and it got me a steady stream of traffic but also some SEO credibility. Substack has a nice guide on how you might consider reaching out to the Press. You are your own PR agency for your Newsletter, nobody else is going to do it for you.

I go into quite a few more salient points below.