How to Do Substack SEO 2026
Last longer than email
If you’re on Substack and you feel like your articles disappear right after the email goes out, you’re not imagining it.
That is happening. To many of us.
I hit publish, watch the open rate climb, feel good about it, and by Friday the piece is already buried under the next one. Nobody finding it. Nobody coming back to it.
It used to bug me. Now I do something about it. And it’s not that complicated, I promise.
Substack SEO 2026
SEO just means writing in a way that Google can find your articles later. Not just on the day you publish.
That’s it. There’s really no trick to it. You’re not gaming anything. You’re just making it easier for someone searching “best substack SEO advice 2026” to land on your piece about it, instead of someone else’s.
For most of us, the email blast is one good day. Search keeps going.
Both matter. But the latter is for long-term.
Get a custom domain first
This is the one technical step. Substack lets you connect your own domain for $50, one time. Mine is letters.byburk.net.
It matters because Google takes your own domain more seriously over time. The default substack.com address is shared with everyone else. Yours is just yours.
Bonus: You can take it with you and SEO traffic is yours, not Substack’s.
$50 might feel like a lot to some people, I get it. But it’s the single biggest thing you can do for your SEO credit, and you only do it once.
Write titles people would search for
This was the hard part for me.
For years, I wrote titles that I liked. Personal. A bit clever. Or vague on purpose.
Those titles don’t get found on Google. Usually. Nobody searches “the newsletter thing I keep thinking about.”
What people do search is more boring. “Medium vs Substack.” “Best newsletter platform.” “How to start a paid newsletter.“
(Side note: Those are way too generic to actually use.)
I started writing titles closer to those phrases. A bit clearer on the content and topic. The piece can still have your voice inside. The title is just the door, and the door has to say what’s behind it. At least for Google.
If you want to check what people search, Google’s own autocomplete is free and pretty good. Type your topic and see what it suggests. Or you use the Google Search Console.
Link your old pieces to your new ones
Every time you publish something new, link to one or two older pieces inside it. Then go back to those older pieces and add a link to the new one.
Busywork. It is, a little. But it’s what tells Google your archive is alive and connected.
I do it every time now. Five minutes per article.
AI can also help automate the boring tasks very well.
Some pieces will rank, some won’t
Not all of your work is going to find readers through search, and that’s fine.
Would be too easy, right?
What tends to rank, in my experience: comparisons, how-tos, pricing breakdowns, anything with a year in the title. Partly kidding.
What doesn’t, usually, unless it’s really done well: personal essays, opinion pieces, anything too generic.
Those still matter, they’re just for your subscribers, not for Google.
You don’t have to choose one or the other. Mix it up. The personal pieces feed your list. The searchable ones bring new people in.
It takes a while
I started seeing search traffic about three months after I changed how I wrote.
By month six, a few articles were getting 30–80 weekly clicks from Google. A handful pulled more. Most still got nothing.
Over time, it adds up. Compounds. And it doesn’t go away the way an email open does.
If you’re hoping for a magic month, this isn’t that.
Frustrating things
Substack’s editor is basic. No fancy headers, no table of contents, no schema markup. You work with what you’ve got.
SEO writing also might feel a bit stiff at first. That’s why I don’t overdo it. I still want to write naturally about what I want and like. With some SEO in mind.
And it’s slow. I keep saying that because I really mean it. A custom domain Substack starts from zero on Google’s trust meter. You’re building it up, one piece at a time.
If you want the longer version
I wrote down everything I figured out in Substack SEO. The keyword research I do, the title patterns that work, the internal linking system, the templates I use.
You don’t need it to start. Everything I said above is enough to get going. The guide is just for if you want deeper insights.
The Bottom Line
You don’t have to be a marketer to do this. Or an SEO expert. Might help. But I can’t imagine that being fun. You just have to write a little differently than you would for an email.
Pick a topic people search for. And you still enjoy writing about.
Write the piece you’d write anyway, just with a clearer title. Link it to your older work. Wait.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
The email gives you today. Search gives you next year. You can have both.
I figure you probably need their server information so the SEO will work, that's what you pay the $50 for. Makes sense.
What if you have your own domain and just did a redirect from your domain using your domain's masking service to Substack's domain without paying the $50....would that work for seo purposes?