Let's Talk About SEO, Baby

Some basics about SEO for writers

Today’s post is part of my “Writing Resources and Tips” section. Friendly reminder that if you are not interested in writing topics you can adjust your subscription preferences by visiting this link and unselecting any sections that don’t interest you.

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not a topic I thought much about in my first several years as a writer but after writing a few pieces that got decent search traffic, I’ve realized its usefulness.

SEO is essentially about how users find content on the internet via search engines like Google. For writers, this means that your writing can have a wider chance of getting seen if it is SEO-friendly.

I am not an SEO expert but I’ve learned enough about it to get traffic to some posts and articles, so I’m going to share what has worked for me in this post.

When I taught a Writing for the Web class for the first time, I realized that there are a lot of SEO rabbit holes you can go down and the info can get confusing fast, so my hope is to just give you the basics here.

Why you might want to know about SEO as a writer

• Freelancing: I’ve seen calls for pitches where editors mention that having an SEO-friendly pitch can be a positive and some pubs may want you to add SEO elements to an article you submit. I’ve worked with pubs where I needed to upload things like the SEO description into the content platform when I submitted a piece.

• Substack/Medium/Website Traffic: Having content that a search engine finds can be a good discovery tool for your self-published posts as well. My most-viewed piece on Medium is a list of humor writing markets and has over 80K lifetime views and according to my back-end stats, 57K of those came from Google. I’ve also seen some decent traffic coming to my Substack from Google (something I’ll talk more about later). And if you are trying to get more subscribers or sell more books or bespoke belt buckles, SEO might help with discovery.

How you can make your writing content more SEO-friendly

What is effective for SEO is constantly evolving (and continuing to evolve more with AI). Some people say that AI is going to kill SEO and that may happen, but for now, I’m still getting enough traffic via Google searches for it to feel worth my time.

The basics that have worked for me include:

1. Having quality content. This is advice I’ve seen in a lot of online SEO articles and I think it’s true. In order for search engines to serve your page up to users, the first thing you need is good content that people will actually click on and find useful.

2. Having posts that answer a question that someone is searching for. The humor writing markets piece I mentioned above isn’t something I set out to write because I thought it would be good for SEO. I just noticed that in online spaces I was in people would often ask where to submit humor pieces that were rejected by McSweeney’s, and I realized I had a good list of pubs to recommend to people. So I wrote the piece and it did a lot better than I expected because a lot of people were also searching for that topic online. (And sidenote, I actually recently updated the list and moved it to Substack in part because of, you guessed it, SEO). So thinking about what people might be searching for that you have an answer to can help. There is some more involved keyword research you can do related to this so you can see what topics you have a better chance of ranking with, but I typically don’t spend a lot of time with this. I just think about whether or not something I’m writing might be something people might be doing a web search for (and ideally a topic that hasn’t been written about a lot already) and if it is, I try to tweak a few things to increase its chances of getting seen.

3. Spend time on the headline. SEO-friendly headlines need to be clear since the whole idea is to get someone to click on them on a search results page. This often means clearly stating the main idea of the article in the headline. There are lots of guidelines and headline analyzer tools out there to help with this like this one.

4. Publish your article in a place with good SEO traction. Bigger websites that you might be writing freelance pieces for typically have this covered. If you are posting something yourself, not all websites are going to give you good traction with SEO as it needs to be indexed and there is an authority score that can help your stuff get seen higher in results. I have had some luck with SEO traction on my website, but I’ve also built up some authority to it over years of freelancing and having bio links direct to it. However, I’ve found that places like Substack and Medium already have the authority to get seen in web searches and so are good places for SEO-friendly articles.

5. Use good web-writing practices. This goes along with number 1, but using some basic principles of good web writing (e.g. using headings, lists, links, and strategic bolding) can also help. Like it or not, most online content is being skimmed so making it easier on your readers can make your content rise up.

Substack-specific SEO tips

The main place I’m writing for SEO these days is on Substack and I am getting decent traffic via Google to it right now (my stats so far for this year show Google is the 3rd highest source of traffic for my Substack and has led to 57 subscriptions and over 4000 views).

So given that it does feel worth my time currently, this is what I’ve been doing:

1. Optimizing certain posts for SEO. Not all my posts are going to work well for SEO — e.g. my monthly links roundups are not something someone is likely going to be searching for so I don’t worry about doing anything differently for those. If I do think something might get picked up in search (for example, this article that you are reading now), then I try to write an SEO-friendly headline and then use the Substack Advanced SEO tools to adjust the SEO headline and description. (Note: My actual title for this post “Let’s Talk About SEO, Baby” is not a good SEO headline, but I adjusted the headline in the advanced settings for that post to one that I thought was better for it — “Some Basics About SEO for Writers.”)

2. Thinking about posts that may work well for SEO. I’m not doing this all the time but I do try to periodically write posts that people can find through internet searching. If you primarily write something like personal essays on Substack then most of your content may not work well for SEO. But you might be able to put together a one-off post that does draw writers in (like a list of books with your favorite personal essays in them).

3. Looking at the stats: Some amount of my posts have been picked up by searches without me intentionally trying to target SEO. For example, this post by the authors of Jokes to Offend Men seems to be getting traffic when people search for “feminist jokes.” This is not something I anticipated but is interesting to see. It’s worth looking at the stats on your Substack dashboard to see what is getting Google traffic. You can see overall traffic sources for your Substack under “Stats”; and in individual post stats, you can also see how much traffic is coming into that post via Google or other search engines. When I see that a post is getting good web traffic I will sometimes go back in to update the content on it/make sure that I have subscribe links or other things in it that may lead to subscribers.

Resources for learning more about SEO:

• General advice: The Substack WTF is SEO (bonus points for that name) offers a lot of SEO explainers.

• More stats: If you want more stats, it’s worth setting up Google Search Console for your Substack. Here is one guide to setting it up. This took a little bit of time for me to do but it is really nice to now see more detailed stats and the searches people are doing to find me.

That is it for today! Do you have other SEO resources, advice, or lamentations? Feel free to share them in the comments.

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