Your Substack Is a Blog
Treat It Like One. Here’s how!
Most Substack writers think of themselves as newsletter writers, I believe.
That framing shapes everything. How we write. What we write about. When we hit publish. Whether we think about SEO at all.
The thing is, I think this framing is mostly wrong.
Substack is a website/blog that also happens to send email.
Every post you publish has a public URL. Google indexes it. People can find it years from now through search, without ever having heard of you, without being on your list, without any algorithm deciding to show it to them.
None of that is newsletter-territory. It’s blog land.
The newsletter mindset
Substack markets itself as a writing platform. Not as a newsletter platform.
When you think “newsletter,” you optimize for the inbox. You care about open rates, subject lines, send times. You think about what your current subscribers want to read this week.
That’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete.
The open rate tells you how your existing audience responded to this issue. It tells you nothing about whether anyone found you through Google.
Nothing about whether a post you wrote six months ago is still bringing in 50 readers a day. Nothing about what you could rank for if you tried.
And that’s why many Substack writers are running newsletters that nobody outside their list will ever find. Because they don’t publish for the web.
The blog mindset
Every Substack post is a web page. With a title tag. With a URL. With a meta description you can control. With a custom domain option, and with Google Search Console foundation.
And Google reads all of it.
If you write a post called “How I Finally Fixed My Sleep” and someone searches “how to fix your sleep schedule,” you have a shot at showing up. Not guaranteed. But a shot, especially if your domain has some age and your content is good.
If you write a post called “Issue 47” with a subject line optimized for your existing subscribers (and put behind paywall), Google has really little to work with in terms of showing this to potential readers.
The framing difference is that simple.
What treating it like a blog means
You don’t need to become an SEO nerd. I’m not.
But a few habits make a difference.
Write headlines that describe what the piece is actually about, in terms people would search for.
Think about whether the topic you’re covering has search intent behind it, meaning, are there people actively looking for this information?
Use the Substack SEO settings to write a proper meta description.
The most important first step is connecting your Substack to Google Search Console. Free. Takes twenty minutes. Tells you exactly which of your posts Google is indexing, and which ones are showing up in searches.
Most Substack writers have never done this. It’s the single highest-leverage thing you can do to understand your actual search footprint.
The thing is, though, this works best when running your Substack on a custom domain. Which is something I highly encourage! It gives you leverage, it gives you freedom.
Search traffic is connected to the domain. If it’s your domain, you can take it with you. Even if you move on from Substack some day. And I bet many will.
Compounding posts
Email newsletters decay. In bleak terms.
You send, people open or don’t, it disappears into the archive. The half-life of a newsletter issue is about 48 hours.
A blog post can grow for years. Exponentially even.
Some of my best-performing pieces traffic-wise are articles I wrote a year or more ago, ranking for terms I didn’t even deliberately target.
They just answered a question people were asking. Consistently. Month after month. And Google search traffic has become my #1 source of Substack growth now.
That’s the compounding effect of treating Substack like a blog. It doesn’t replace the newsletter relationship with your subscribers.
It adds onto it. With one that doesn’t require you to show up in someone’s inbox to get read all the time.
Niches and search are friends
The writers I see growing the fastest on Substack through search tend to have one thing in common: they write about specific, searchable things.
Not just their general take on life. Specific how-to content. Specific comparisons. Specific answers to questions that people type into Google.
Those don’t have to be boring listicles, reviews, or how-tos though. People search for many things. And want many different results.
You don’t have to abandon your voice or become a content farm. Just be intentional about a portion of your output. Write what you want. But occasionally write what people are looking for too. Or in a way they’re most likely looking for.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive. I firmly believe, Substack writers (and Medium writers too) should do both.
If you want a system for making this work, I’ve mapped out everything I know about Substack SEO in my Substack SEO guide, from Search Console setup to keyword strategy to the specific settings most writers miss.
The Bottom Line
Your Substack has two audiences:
the people on your list
and everyone who hasn’t found you yet.
The newsletter mindset serves the first group pretty well. The blog mindset reaches the second better.
Most writers only optimize for one. Do both instead.
Substack gave you a blog. It’s yours. Use it.
This is definitely a different approach to Substack. I truly just thought of it as a newsletter.
You’re not wrong! In my case, I don’t have (nor will have) a custom domain (I keep all subscriptions to a minimum). I’ve tried to connect Google console but have never been sure if it is working or not. How would I check?