Substack SEO: A Guide to Ranking on Google

A member of our community sent me a question last week that I've heard a dozen times over the past year. Her Substack growth had stalled. She wanted to start doing SEO to bring more traffic. And a coach had just told her that Substack doesn't really support it, that she was building on borrowed land, just like she had been on Instagram.

She wasn't planning to leave Substack. She just wanted to know that she was making strategically sound decisions for the future of her brand.

So here's the answer, because theres a good chance you probably typed "substack seo" into Google to get here and you have a bit of anxiety over this if you've decided to go "all-in" on Substack.

Yes, SEO on Substack works. Your posts live on real web pages that get indexed by Google. Substack generates a sitemap for your publication automatically, gives you SEO settings on every post, and lets you connect Google Search Console. Writers rank Substack posts on the first page of Google search results every day.

And also, there are some limitations that are good to know about. Substack was built at the beginning as an email-first approach, which means search engines were not the primary focus. If you know the specific limitations, you can work around them and get great results. If you don't, you'll conclude the whole thing is hopeless, which is roughly the conclusion that coach handed my client, which was super unhelpful.

This guide covers the whole picture. What Substack does for you, what the SEO options inside each post actually control, what the actual numbers say about AI search (the GEO and AEO conversation), and the publishing strategy we now use for Sacred Business Flow that ends the "borrowed land" debate completely. It's written for the writer, solopreneur, coach, or creator running a Substack newsletter who wants more eyes on their work without having to become a search specialist, or pay someone to handle this aspect of their online business.

Carolina and I run a Substack publication of around 30,000 subscribers (Sacred Business Flow), grown organically, alongside our own website. Everything below comes from our experience of running both.

Does SEO on Substack actually work?

It does, and Substack says so clearly in its own help center documentation. The platform handles the technical aspects behind the scenes so that every publication gets indexed and ranked. Clean page structure, a sitemap at yourname.substack.com/sitemap.xml, and fast pages that Google is able to crawl.

That's the part the platform does quite effectively without you needing to do anything at all. The part you own is everything that determines whether a specific post ranks in a way that attracts your audience. The keyword you target, the quality of the writing, the title, the links pointing at it.

Which is the same situation you would be dealing with whether you use WordPress, Ghost, or any other separate website builder. No platform ranks your writing for you. The difference with Substack is that some levers are simpler (the technical setup is handled) and some are limited (more on that in the AI section).

One more thing worth naming before we get to the practical details. SEO work is slow. It's good to be thinking in months, not weeks. If your growth has stalled this month, SEO work is like a seed that you plant now and harvest later, not the thing that saves the day when you are having a bad month. That's not a Substack limitation. That's how organic search works everywhere.

Where the borrowed land warning holds up, and where it doesn't

I want to take the coach's comment seriously instead of just dismissing it, because there's a real observation buried inside it.

Let's start with the part it gets right. If your publication lives at yourname.substack.com, every link you get from elsewhere points at a subdomain of substack.com. The brand equity in every search result and every browser bar accrues partly to Substack. And if you ever leave, the ranking history tied to that subdomain doesn't come with you the way a custom domain would.

That's a real trade-off. It's worth knowing.

Here's where the comparison to Instagram falls apart.

On Instagram, your audience is an algorithm's audience. You can't contact your followers directly, you can't take them with you, and the platform decides who sees your work each day. If Instagram turns the dial down, you have no recourse. That is borrowed land in the true sense.

On Substack, your audience is an email list. You can export every subscriber as a CSV file today and email them from any tool tomorrow. The single most valuable asset, the direct line to your readers via your email list, is fully portable and fully yours.

So the most accurate version of the statement is this. The Substack subdomain is "rented". The audience is owned. A coach who collapses those two into "borrowed land, just like Instagram" is missing the entire mechanism that makes Substack different, and I'd gently hold everything else they say about platforms up to the same light.

And the "rented" part has an easy fix that costs $50. We'll get there.

The SEO options inside every Substack post

When you open a post's settings, Substack gives you a small set of SEO controls. My client noticed these and asked whether they mattered for Google or for Substack's internal algorithm. Her instinct was right, and so was the answer she'd already gotten: these are for Google.

SEO title

This is the title search engines display, and it can differ from the post title your subscribers see in their inbox. Your email audience already knows you, so the inbox title can be curious and personal. The SEO title is for strangers typing questions into Google, so it should carry the keyword directly and stay under 60 characters. Sprout Social's analysis of Substack SEO found headlines between 40 and 60 characters earn a 33.3% higher click-through rate.

SEO description (the meta description)

The meta description is the two lines of text under your title in Google search results. It doesn't directly change your rank. It heavily influences whether a person clicks. Write it like straight forward ad copy, one or two sentences that tell the searcher exactly what they'll get, with the keyword included because Google bolds matching words.

The URL slug

Substack lets you edit the URL of every post before you publish. Cut the filler words and keep the keyword. A short, clear URL like /substack-seo-guide beats a 14-word sentence in both search visibility and shareability.

These settings take about ninety seconds per post. The number of writers who skip them is the reason a little care here puts you ahead of a surprising amount of your competition.

How search engines see your Substack publication

Understanding this part will save you from scrolling through a lot of confusing Reddit threads.

Google sees your publication as its own small website that happens to sit on Substack's platform. You don't inherit substack.com's domain authority in any meaningful way. Your subdomain builds its own reputation, link by link, post by post.

This is why brand-new publications sometimes feel invisible in organic search for their first months. Google is still learning that your corner of the internet exists and deciding how much to trust it. Every inbound link from other websites speeds that trust up. Every indexed post that people find, read, and stay with tells Google your content resonates.

It's also why "does Substack rank well?" is the wrong question. Some Substack publications rank beautifully. Others never see a search visitor. The variable is rarely the platform. It's whether the publication or writer wrote something searchable and earned links back to it from other publications or reputable online sources.

Keyword research for writers who have no desire to do SEO

You don't need paid tools to start. You need to answer one straight forward question. What is a person typing into Google that your post is the best answer to?

Here are a few practical ways to approach this, and these are the same seo techniques I use personally:

• Write down the questions your readers and clients actually ask you. Real questions, in their words. Each one is a keyword.
• Type your topic into Google and read the "People also ask" boxes and the autocomplete suggestions. That's Google telling you what has search volume, for free.
• Look at what already ranks. If the first page for your phrase is all major publications, pick a more specific phrase. You're hunting for questions where the current answers are thin, and you know you have a interesting, unique point of view.

Then match one post to one keyword. Not five keywords per post. One post, one search intent, answered better and with more specificity than anything currently on the first page.

Notice this is doing a different job than your regular newsletter. A newsletter issue is for the readers you have and going deeper into relationship with them. A search optimized post is for the new readers you don't have yet. Both belong in your publication, and knowing which one you're writing changes how you write it.

Writing a Substack post that can rank

The essence of it, is high quality content aimed at a question people actually search. But a few things are important to focus on, and they're the same practices that work on any blog post, no matter where you have chosen to publish.

Answer the question fast. Put a clear, direct answer in the first few paragraphs, then go deeper below. Searchers bounce off long introductions, and Google notices the the number of people leaving without scrolling or longer time spent on the page.

Make the post long enough to offer a comprehensive answer to the reader. The posts that rank for competitive phrases usually run well past a thousand words, and the length is a byproduct of covering the question so completely that the reader never needs to hit the back button.

Use post headings. Break the post up with descriptive section headings, and reach for an itemized list when you're walking through steps or options. Include a related phrase in a heading wherever it flows naturally. Headings help readers scan and help Google map what the post covers.

Tag your posts. Substack's searchable tags categorize your writing, and they give readers, search engines, and Substack's own discovery surfaces one more way to find related articles in your catalog.

Write for evergreen value that is not time-bound. Personal essays are the soul of a newsletter, and they almost never pull search traffic. Evergreen content, the how-to guides and explainers that stay relevant for years, is what compounds in organic search. My approach to this is simple: keep publishing the writing your subscribers love that build a strong connection and inspire action, and add searchable evergreen pieces at whatever cadence you can sustain over time.

Give your images alt text. It's an accessibility kindness first to those who need it, the relevant keywords in it are one more signal about what the page covers, and it helps your images get found in search, which is another doorway into your publication.

Writing for search engines vs writing for real humans

There's a difference between writing that ranks and writing that compels someone to act. Search-focused writing answers a question thoroughly and neutrally. Persuasive writing makes an argument, tells a story, and invites a decision. Billy Broas teaches that marketing is an argument, and most of what we publish is exactly that, an argument made with care for the real human receiving it in their inbox.

So here's how we hold this at Sacred Business Flow. The overwhelming majority of our writing is for the person reading it. Essays, stories, and teaching pieces that build relationship and inspire action. And then we choose specific topics, like this very guide, to also structure for the robots. When a question has real search volume and we know we can give the best answer available, we write the piece so both audiences are served. The human gets a complete answer in a voice they can trust. Google and the AI engines get the structure they need to find it and surface it in ways that will attract new audiences to our publication.

If you try to write every piece for the robots, you'll likely feel that you are losing your voice and boring the readers you already have. If you never write for them, you leave a compounding source of new readers sitting on the table. A small number of deliberately chosen search pieces, living inside a publication full of writing in your own voice, is the balance I would suggest striving for.

Internal linking, the practice almost nobody is using for Substack SEO

Every time you publish a new post, link to two or three of your older related posts inside the body, and go add a link to the new post from at least one older one.

That's internal linking, and it does three jobs at once. It keeps readers inside your publication longer, driving them deeper into conversation with you. It helps Google discover and re-crawl your back catalog. And it tells search engines which of your posts relate to which topics, which sharpens how your whole publication gets understood.

Your archive is an asset. Writers sit on years of Substack content with no links between any of it, which leaves each post needing to stand alone. Weave the catalog together and the older pieces start receiving new life instead of being seen once to never see the light of day again. While you're in there, update anything stale. Google favors content that stays current.

Internal linking is a great use for AI. Simply feed it your sitemap and ask it to find 2-3 optimal internal linking opportunities.

Our sitemap for example is https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/sitemap.xml

Backlinks still carry the most weight for SEO

Substack's own documentation says this directly. The best way to improve your ranking is inbound links, links from other websites pointing at your publication.

For a newsletter writer, the realistic paths look like this:

• Guest posts and collaborations with other writers in your space, which Substack makes unusually easy through guest authorship and recommendations. Hosting a guest writer works in reverse too, introducing their audience to your work and bringing you new subscribers.
• Being interviewed on podcasts and blogs that link to your publication in the show notes.
• Adding your publication link to your own website, your bio pages, and your profiles on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Writing things worth citing. One genuinely useful guide earns more links over time than fifty announcements.
• Repurposing your long-form articles into Notes and short posts on your social channels, with each version pointing new readers back to the original.

A quality warning that Sprout Social's guide also flags. Low-quality backlinks, the paid-link schemes and spammy directories, can hurt you. If someone offers to sell you a hundred links, just say no.

Collaboration, the most underrated Substack SEO strategy

Almost everything in that backlink list has one thing in common, and it's worth calling out. Collaboration.

Guest posts, interviews, recommendations, cross-posts. Every one of them is a relationship first and a backlink second. The writers who grow fastest on Substack aren't the ones trying to outsmart an algorithm. They're the ones consistently in conversation with other writers and other audiences.

Our live show, Sacred Business Stories, has become one of the biggest authority builders we have. Every episode is a collaboration with a guest who shares it with their own audience. Every episode page is a piece of content that earns links and mentions over time. And every conversation deepens a relationship that leads to the next guest post, the next recommendation, the next introduction. The SEO value is tremendous, and it arrives as a side effect of relationships we would want to be building anyway.

If reaching out to potential collaborators feels uncomfortable, start with the people you already know. I wrote about the hundred contacts you haven't messaged for exactly this reason.

Should you pay for the custom domain?

Substack charges a one-time $50 fee to connect a custom domain, so your publication lives at yourdomain.com instead of yourname.substack.com.

If you're taking search seriously, this is the best $50 you will ever spend for one reason. Every backlink you earn from that day forward builds authority on a domain you own. If you ever leave Substack, the domain, the links, and the ranking history all move with you to whatever platform hosts you next.

This is the structural answer to borrowed land. With a custom domain, Substack becomes a tool hosting your owned property rather than a landlord. The subdomain trade-off from earlier in this guide simply stops being a thing.

Two caveats here. Your emails still send from Substack's infrastructure regardless. And if your publication already has years of history on the subdomain, the switch involves a transition period while Google re-maps everything, so it's better done sooner than later. I recommend all our clients to set up a custom domain as soon as possible when they launch their Substack.

GEO and AEO, what the AI search numbers actually show

My client also asked about GEO, and this is where I want to be as precise as I can with my answer.

Quick translation first if you don't know the meaning of these terms. SEO is ranking in classic Google search. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are about getting your work cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google's AI Overviews a question. Same goal as SEO, being found, just in a new context.

The data for this can be a bit sobering. Michael Brito at Zeno Group analyzed 1.7 million AI prompts in early 2026 and found Substack content earned about 0.07% of all citations. Medium earned five times more. The AI engines lean heavily on established institutional sources, freely accessible pages, and consolidated domains. Substack's paywalls, email-first structure, and thousands of fragmented subdomains all work against it.

So anyone telling you Substack is an AI visibility machine isn't telling you the entire story. But the practical moves that are completely in your power help balance out any potential downside, and they're mostly the same exact actions you would take for good SEO:

• Keep your best explanatory content outside the paywall, because engines can't cite what they can't read.
• Answer questions directly, near the top, in simple, straight forward language. AI engines quote clear, quotable passages.
• Get cited by other websites. The engines trust sources that the wider web already links to and mentions.
• Fill out your About page so both readers and machines can tell who you are, who you serve, and why you're credible.

And notice the pattern. The fragmented-subdomain problem is a platform problem. Which brings us to the structure that solves it.

A long-term platform decision that ends the borrowed land debate

Here's how we actually have things set up at Sacred Business Flow, and what I'd suggest to my client as the long-term play when the timing is right.

First, a note on order of operations, because this trips a lot of people up. It's likely you'll want a standard website at some point. But if you're a solopreneur trying to wear all the hats, keeping things simple and starting with Substack is usually the way to go. We only switched to our current publishing strategy about two and a half years in. We value simplicity, and we had many other things to get into place before we could effectively manage both a publication and a full brand website, which also had to be built using SEO best practices to be worth the effort. Claudia Faith's story of going from CEO to all-in on Substack is a good reminder of how far the platform alone can carry you.

Our own website is the "canonical" home. This just means that long-form essays and guides publish there first, on a domain we own, where all search authority compounds for us. Then the piece goes out through our Substack newsletter and publication to our community, with a link back to the original. Substack does what it's genuinely world-class at, distribution, community, recommendations, and the network effect of Notes. The website does what Substack is average at, compounding search equity and AI visibility on owned ground.

You don't need to start there. The right sequence depends on where you are:

1. Just started writing? Stay on the free subdomain. Apply everything in this guide. Prove to yourself that search traffic is worth pursuing before you spend anything.
2. Growing and committed? Pay the $50 for a custom domain. From that day, everything compounds on land you own.
3. Running a real business and looking to create more momentum? Consider the dual setup, a separate website as the canonical home plus Substack as the distribution and community engine. It's more work. It's also the only version where no platform decision can ever touch your foundation for growth.

At every one of those stages, your email list remains the asset that makes the whole question less dramatic than it sounds. The list comes with you no matter what.

Set up Google Search Console before you optimize anything

If you do only one technical thing after reading this, do this one thing, because you can't improve what you can't see.

Google Search Console is Google's free tool that shows which queries your publication appears for, your impressions, your clicks, and your average position in search rankings. It's the difference between guessing and knowing whats working.

Substack supports it directly. In Google Search Console, add your publication as a URL-prefix property. Choose the HTML tag verification method, copy the tag, and paste it into the Analytics section of your Substack settings. Save, then verify. With a custom domain you can verify at the DNS level instead. Substack's basic stats tell you about your subscribers; Search Console gives you the valuable data about the strangers visiting your publication through search results, and Google Analytics can be layered on later if you want even more visibility.

Then let it starting collect information. After 30 days, look at which posts are getting impressions and for what queries. That's Google telling you where you're already receiving visibility, which is exactly where small improvements often produce the fastest results.

Keep an eye on your Substack stats alongside it, where your traffic actually comes from and how your followers grow. And don't dismiss your open rates in all of this. An audience that opens your emails is a brand people recognize, and recognition feeds every search click you'll ever earn.

The 80/20 of Substack SEO settings

I want to be clear about something before handing you a checklist. Remembering to fill in every SEO title, edit every slug, research every keyword, and write every meta description can feel incredibly tedious. And for someone already wearing many hats, tedious extras become one more reason to give up on publishing altogether.

This is why we don't put a ton of emphasis on these settings with our clients until they've proven to themselves they can publish consistently. That consistency for your audience is so much more important than getting every one of these settings right from day one. A publication that shows up every week with nothing optimized will beat a perfectly optimized publication that went quiet in month two, in Google's eyes and in your readers' hearts. The same principle sits underneath attracting aligned clients consistently: your steadiness is the ultimate strategy.

The settings can also be backfilled. You can hire someone like a VA down the line to go back through your catalog and fill in SEO titles, descriptions, slugs, and alt text.

At the same time, if you are resourced and willing to do these things earlier on, you receive the gift of time being on your side. SEO value grows as posts age and links accumulate, so the pieces you set up well this year continue to work for you every year after. Just never let the settings become the reason you stop publishing out of overwhelm.

A first-month plan if you just started doing SEO work

If all of this is new, here's the whole guide compressed into four weeks of light work you can do without having this become a full-time job:

1. Week one. Connect Google Search Console. Fix your About page. Make sure your publication name and URL make sense for what a stranger would search.
2. Week two. Pick three real questions your readers ask. Check the first page of Google for each. Choose the one with the weakest answers.
3. Week three. Write the best answer on the internet to that question. Direct answer up top, real headings, over a thousand words, SEO title under 60 characters, clean slug, strong meta description.
4. Week four. Link to it from two older posts. Mention it anywhere you legitimately can, your site, your profiles, a collaboration. Then start question number two.

That rhythm, of one strong evergreen piece at a time while your regular publishing continues, is a strategy you can follow to build more traffic over time. There is no trick to it really, its just being willing to put in the work.

What turns search traffic into new subscribers

One last piece to mention, because ranking is only half the goal. A search visitor is a stranger in the middle of a question. They came from Google, not from being a loyal follower, and they'll leave the moment the question is answered unless you give them a reason to stay.

So end every searchable post with a soft, clear next step. What your publication is about, who it serves, and an invitation to subscribe. Substack puts subscribe buttons everywhere, and on a post built for search that button is doing its most important work, converting one-time search traffic into subscribers who then get everything else you write, no algorithm in between.

That's the win you are optimizing for. SEO brings you a stranger. The email list, the part you own outright, keeps them, and helps them become a loyal reader of your Substack publication.

My client's question was a really good one, and the fix isn't dramatic. It's following this simple playbook. Keep writing the content you know your community loves reading, add searchable evergreen pieces with the seo settings filled in, claim your space with a custom domain when you're ready, and let the compounding effects start to kick in. You're not on borrowed land. You're on a platform with a rented storefront and an owned mailing list, and now you know exactly which is which.

Phil (& Carolina)