A guide to SEO on Substack
Simple steps to improve the search and discoverability of your writing
For some writers, the idea of SEO and “simple” don’t seem to go together.
But Substack’s SEO tools are designed to offer customization where it counts. We take care of making posts appear in search, so you can focus on writing.
This guide aims to empower writers with knowledge about Substack’s tools to improve the search and discovery aspect of your work.
Identifying keywords for your publication
Keywords are the ones most commonly used by people typing words and phrases into search engines to discover writing, podcasts, or videos like yours.
You intuitively know some of the words and phrases your target audience is searching to find you. It’s a worthwhile exercise to sharpen your understanding of keywords by stepping back to think like the searcher outside of your day-to-day writing.
Ask:
Who am I trying to reach? Jot down a sentence about the group of people you want to reach. Include key traits they bring as readers (e.g. relevant skills, interests, motivations, experiences, or backgrounds). Describe their reading habits and think about how they might typically discover new writers.
What might they be looking for? Think about your readers’ motivations and the language they might be using when searching. A lot of searches start as a question. What kinds of questions might the person trying to reach you ask? Make a list of keywords and phrases that come to mind.
If you want to do a deep-dive keyword exploration for your publication, check out
's keywords 101 post.
Advanced SEO options in posts
In the post settings, there is an option for SEO optimizations. Here you have the option to edit the SEO title (title tag), SEO description (meta description), post URL, and social preview image.
These fields do not impact how your post appears when sent to subscribers via email or in the app, or how viewers see it displayed on your Substack website. The job of the SEO title and SEO description is to talk directly to search engines and suggest how they might display your post in search results.
We set your SEO title, SEO description, and post URL by default based on the title and content of your post. The default is strong, and many writers never need to touch it. For writers who want extra control, below we walk through best practices to customize these fields.
SEO title
The SEO title is the title tag of your post and is meant to be a clear and concise description of a post’s content. This is the information search engines use to create the clickable headline in search results.
Some writers will include keywords in their regular post titles, while others might go for something more abstract. Having a separate SEO title allows you to create a straightforward title with keywords relevant to the post and your audience.
To write a good SEO title, consider the following:
Be brief. If your title is too long, search engines may change your display title by adding an ellipsis (“...”), removing words, or rewriting the title entirely. The recommended length for a title tag is under 60 characters.
Use your keywords wisely. Search engines can tell when you stuff a title with keywords, and this ultimately leads to a bad experience for search users. The SEO title should be legible and coherent, not just keywords mashed together.
Give your post a unique title. For writers who run ongoing series with the same name, using a unique post title can help search engines recognize your posts as distinct pieces of content and lead to a higher click-through rate.
Use your brand. If you have a recognizable name or project name that people often search for, use it! Putting your name, or brand, at the end of an SEO title is valuable for search.
SEO description
The SEO description, or the meta description, acts as a brief summary of your post on search engine result pages. The default uses the post subtitle.
For SEO descriptions, some best practices are to:
Avoid repeating yourself. Move the title forward with new context and information that will ultimately make people want to click. A good meta description expands on the title and includes other keywords and phrases that are relevant but don’t fit in the title.
Think like an advertiser. Use your keywords strategically, and remember the reader you are trying to reach on the other side.
Post URL
A good URL is readable by both search engines and real people. It’s better to think in phrases over codes or numbers.
For every Substack post, a unique URL is automatically generated based on your post title, with hyphens in place of spaces. It should look something like this: https://yourdomain.substack.com/p/post-title.
More often, this default URL is the best URL for your post. You might consider editing the end of the URL, also called the slug, if you have an obscure post title and changed the SEO title to something more legible. Follow the same SEO title best practices for your URL.
Remember: You only want to edit the post URL before you publish a new post. If you edit the post URL after the post is published, all existing links, for example any links shared on social media or private messages, will break.
Social preview image
Posts with social preview images get an average of twice as many signups and 40% more clicks than those without images. The default social preview image is the first image in your post. If you don’t have an image in your post, it will default to your publication logo.
You can add or update a social preview photo from your post settings.
Images also have a downside. Search engines like Google penalize your website when images are too large. To ensure that your images don’t hurt your SEO ranking and offer the optimal reader experience, Substack compresses your images, without distorting the quality. For mobile devices, we automatically resize the images for the size of the device to save bandwidth and allow faster load times on cellular connections.
We also tell search engines when you have multiple images in posts so they can prioritize downloading the images at the top of the post first and loading the remainder of the images as the reader scrolls.
SEO optimizations for your publication
Going back to the basics and doing some hygiene for your publication can strengthen your SEO. Below we share guidance on picking the best Substack URL and the best places to link to your Substack.
Substack URL
What’s the primary keyword people who know you and your work search for when they try to come back to it? For some writers, that will be their name, and for others, especially groups of writers working together, this will be a brand or project name.
If people primarily search for your name to find your work, we recommend using your name in your Substack URL, also called the subdomain.
You can still use a unique name for your publication. In a few words, a good title captures what your publication is about at the highest level. Test your ideas by imagining that you are on a podcast saying your publication name aloud. Is it memorable, short, and easy to say and spell?
Note: On Substack, you have the option to create a custom domain or use the default yourdomain.substack.com. There is benefit in the default, as you can borrow from the existing, strong Substack SEO reputation.
Link to your Substack everywhere
The more places where your Substack URL link lives, the stronger your SEO reputation is. We encourage you to link to your publication everywhere you can.
Add your Substack URL to your personal website. You can embed a signup form directly on your personal website.
Check out how Virginia Sole-Smith embedded a signup form on her website. Update your social media bios to include your Substack URL. Not only is this good for SEO, it’s a best promotional practice.
Noah Smith includes a link to his Substack in his Twitter bio.
The best way to improve your SEO ranking is to get more inbound links to your Substack publication. An inbound link is a link on another site that directs readers to your Substack.
Search engines change often. At the end of the day, the best SEO work you can do for your publication is to write high-quality content with your target reader in mind.
To go deeper on SEO, visit:
If you’re considering starting a blog or a newsletter, don’t start it on your own and fight for traffic. Start on Substack—we’re on your team.
It would be great to see actual/real-world examples of optimal SEO descriptions of various articles/posts, and links to them, so we can see how each SEO description fits with the article/post. Also it would help to see how the SEO description correlates to the number of clicks generated from Google.
This is a great article! Thanks for making this info available to us:)
How do I set the title/description for my home page?
Same doubt here
Generally speaking, how do the big search engines -- primarily Google Search, handle, differently, if at all, the following three types of "blog posts" coming from a writer on substack -- where said writer's blog is housed on a subdomain on substack (not a custom domain name):
* The "blog post" is not behind a paywall.
* The "blog post" is behind a paywall and with NO "free preview". Note: just headline-1 and headline-2 are visible to the non-paying reader.
* The "blog post" is behind a paywall and WITH a "free preview". Note: headline-1 and headline-2 are visible to the non-paying reader -- as well as a portion of the body text.
In other words, is the Google Search webcrawler-bot built to be able to detect "paywall" walls, and, if detected, de-rank that "blog post" -- regardless of how "good" the SEO Title and SEO Description used are?
Here is the reply I received from the Substack support team:
* Paywall or non-paywall doesn't make a difference here.
* The ranking on Google for all three is based on general SEO factors: the keyword searched being in the page's title, how many sites have linked to the page, etc.
The note about "borrowing" from Substack's SEO reputation is misleading -- Google has stated that they see subdomains as individual sites, and SEO reputation does not carry over from subdomain to subdomain.
It's possible that reputation doesn't carry over from subdomain to subdomain, but the Substack domain itself does lend some credibility to your subdomain?
Sure, why not? And depending on the reader, it may also be a toxic brand that hosts COVID denialists and "cancelled" writers. You never know what people will associate with Substack, and since that's out of your control, I wouldn't bank on it to improve your credibility or reputation.
I think you might be equivocating on the word "reputation". My understanding is that being part of a huge, established domain is positive for SEO, even if people have questions about the site's content.
Ah, I misunderstood your question. No, I don’t believe being part of a larger subdomain helps at all with your SEO. Google sees it as a new domain.
Great Work
I'm glad Substack is addressing this issue. Thanks! (I wonder if Dan read my article, kind of similar:)
https://pau1.substack.com/p/6-steps-for-more-substack-subscribers
Paul, could you write some actual SEO description examples:
https://on.substack.com/p/substack-seo-guide/comment/12817642
Hi LE! Here is some info for you right from google.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#use-quality-descriptions
If you read the rest of the article, you will know more about meta tags than 99% of the people. Reply if any questions!
This is great Paul! That's exactly what I was looking for, actual examples of good and bad SEO descriptions. But of course I would never have been able to find this page without your help. They're using different terminology, "snippets." It's a whole confusing world, and it feels like one needs to take a class in order to understand. Thank you for being a guide and taking the time to answer my questions. It's overwhelming sometimes, and I really appreciate your help! 🤗
Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into making our Substacks stand out.
So helpful - thank you!
For some reason I am not seeing Google Site Verification on one of my publication's settings. Is there a limit to how many publications I can verify?
Very helpful post, thank you. Can you slow down the movement a tad as it took me a few times to realize the settings are at the bottom right hand corner of the page.
Thanks for including our keyword 101 newsletter in this guide! We love questions – post your burning news/publishing SEO questions and we can try to cover in a newsletter!
While it would be helpful to see real-world examples of optimal SEO descriptions, it's important to note that the "optimal" description can vary depending on the content and target audience. Additionally, the number of clicks generated from Google is not solely dependent on the SEO description but also on other factors such as the relevance of the content, the search intent of the user, and the competitiveness of the search results.
checkout the examples: https://sevenxsports.com/
Y'all are amazing. I feel so cared for! 🥹
If you want a more detailed guide to SEO on Substack, including how to ensure your pages are visible on Google Search, check out my free set of articles on this important topic:
https://boodsy.substack.com/p/the-essential-guide-to-substack-seo
Would like much to enhance my newsletter stats.
Please I need urgent reply. I want to start a publication on substack but I don't know which is best for SEO, custom domain or Substack subdomain. The blog posts I've been reading are all confusing.
Thanks! I'm still struggling beyond linking my substack everywhere
https://hiddenjapan.substack.com/
Please help me; I need more specific help with Substack SOE. I am ghostwriting on behalf of a client and managing their Substack in my account. The problem is that my name comes up in a Google search for my client Substack, despite my settings being private. How do I change this?
Did something change regarding image compression? Suddenly I started having artifacts in my image uploads. That completely kills the photographic experience in Substack !
Great article! I doubt Substack SEO beats individual Blogs or web pages ranking on the 1st Google page, but it still is a good start!
Sorry, nice article in which you explain SEO techniques but what use are they if then every page of a Substack subdomain has the NOINDEX and therefore tells Google for example that it should not be indexed?
maybe I could share my substack with you:
https://newschu.substack.com
Is there a way to set the SEO image and SEO description for my substack publication as a whole? (not individual posts). When I embed my substack URL to my Medium articles, the SEO preview is auto generated and looks horrible.
Link my Substack everywhere, you say? Hey, I'm love from, hannah (https://hannahday.substack.com) I write about books, films, pop culture and personal essays!
Here is my latest! https://hannahday.substack.com/p/our-wives-under-the-sea-2022
Thank you. Great info for those embarking on this journey.
Thank you, this was helpful 😊
thanks for share helpful post
https://pmkisanyojanastatus.com/
Maybe there's no longer a page called "post settings"? If there is, I'd sure like to see how you get to it.
Ugh, I hate videos. All I want to know is HOW DO I GET TO THE SCREEN WHERE I CAN ADD IN THE SEO TEXT? I don't see the same screen you show here. How about instead of a video you show a screen shot and point to exactly how we get to it?
Useful information, thank you!
This is great info thanks! But I must say in all my years of Google searches I’ve never seen a page with a Substack URL in the search results with the exception of the Substack website itself. Am I missing something? Thanks!
When you place a Substack subdomain with existing posts on a custom domain, does Substack automatically 301 redirect those urls to the new urls generated on the custom domain?
We notice millions of creative souls don't want any affiliation with the Google gulag digital graveyard folks. the creative people's merely want publicity to flow like rivers of living water. in the hope ..the dream...that substack would not be merely another iteration of Farcebook..MICROSHAFT,..lifelog..or any other series of odious onerous and obvious honeypots that are relatively easy to expose We hope substack will find better horizons than the social media hive minded traps of the invidious insidious enervating..silicon valley technofacist past..analogue humans are fed up ,enraged,ready to find a trillion ways to subvert the digital gulag administrators...no one we know requested a digital graveyard ..a digitized monster mash. a lock step compliant or die-graveyard smash..most humans actually want to learn..to contribute beauty..to enrich others and themselves in a non big pig big government methodology..sure..it's a long running battle..about as appealing as watching Julian assange sitting..rotting away in prison ..for the crime of exposing what big pig governments routinely do..yeah..its as attractive as watching the current Holocaust exterminations of Gaza(sarc)..we do hope substack will. straighten up ..open up...and fly right..open up the floodgates of unfettered unchained real human communication for sure..!....but..hey! We didn't say we don't like MR AI either! We think..all hellywood fearporn....hellywood preternaturalized fearporn aside ...AI could be great fun and terrific helpers ,! Our view is let AI do well... just disallow psychosis in programming..sooner or later substack will find a clearer finer easier way to publicize ..not digitally bury.....not only monetize..great creative writing that is not computer dependant..meaning..use computer if you want...sure..but don't be used or..consumed..subsumed..enveloped by computers......we're of course not holding our breathe in anticipation of immediate unfettered greatness from team humans in substack..we get it..they're just pawns in the big pig big brother social -satanistic...-social. ... massmedia honeypot
entrainment..entrapment..occult micronudging.. game...but..yeah...we can only...you know..hope for the best. Fact is there's a lot of fine writers and really fun folks on substack.com!..Big fun for the entire family! Anyway...Americans still always say anyway...less automation dogma s..more free unrestricted publicity and we're rocking out...!thanks to all the really great commenters here..too.! But hey guys...some of this digital dreary graveyard computer prison type stuff is about as fun as rubbing 2sticks in the rain together to make a fire!.Thanks anyway....All best to Mr.(or Ms.)AI.....
How can I set the correct Block AL training in the settings so that AL recognises my writing ?
although this is logical, it doesn't really help for those trying to publish on substack under a pseudonym as they want to keep work, social, and publishing life separate. Any insight would be appreciated. thanks.
Great info, thanks for making SEO little easier! Excellent suggestion to link to our Substack posts from other sites. I will be sure to link from my website to every Substack post at least once. Thanks much!
This article provides guidance for writers on how to use Substack’s SEO tools to improve their search and discovery results. The first step is to identify keywords for your publication based on your target audience and their search habits. The use of advanced SEO options in posts, including the SEO title, SEO description, and post URL. It will very helpful to rank their publication. The article provides best practices for writing a good SEO title, meta description, and URL, including using keywords strategically, avoiding repetition, and keeping the URL readable. I will implement all these points for https://calculadoraprimaria.com/ .
This was helpful because I'm new to Substack. Thank you!
I have found having a custom domain set up can really help with SEO- you can check it out in the settings... a one time cost that pays dividends over time...
$50 to switch the subdomain to your own domain. That is in addition to registering your domain with a domain registry. I've never seen a blog hosting platform charge a fee just to add your own domain.
So exciting to see more robust seo features hit substack. i used to be a digital writer at a magazine and something I found helpful was learning that the body of your text (ideally within the first 100 words, at the time) should reflect the keywords in your metadata. Google crawls this information and is looking for those terms to match up and relates that to story authenticity. Unsure if the algorithm still works in this way but thought I’d share as I’m newly back at the editorial universe with this new venture - mixed feelings! 💕
Loved this!
Thanks for increasing my SEO knowledge. I'm already doing SEO from last few years on (https://huntingmonitor.com/) and this post helped me learn some new techniques and strategies about implementing SEO. Thanks again.