Maximising Visibility: A Step-by-Step Guide to making your substack visible to Google search traffic
Substack is a great publishing platform, but by default, your publications are not visible to Google search traffic. In this brief guide you’ll learn how to make your substack automatically visible
Heres an excerpt from my step-by-step guide to making your substack visible to Google search traffic:
Lets look at a substack with many publications but no visible footprint on Google
When you search your blog posts on google, do you find them?
Make your publication discoverable on Google
Set up Google Tag Manager for your substack
Set up a Google Search Console account for substack
Creating a Sitemap For Free
Submit your Sitemap via Google Search Console
Other ways of indexing your publication
Manually add your publications pages via Google Search Console
Speeding up discoverability with paid tools
Why cant people find my substack?
It can be hard to for people to find your publication when searching on google if you dont have a sitemap
Having a sitemap is like a map for your website. Just as a map helps you find your way around a city by showing you all the streets and locations, a sitemap shows search engines like google all the pages on your website.
A sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs for a site to help search engines crawl and index the content more efficiently
It can take a while (months!) for your publication to be discovered by Google. You can speed up the process by adding a sitemap for your publication
Lets look at a substack with many publications but no visible footprint on Google
Heres an example substack that is not indexed by google
You can navigate to https://chriswolfgang.substack.com/archive and see the list of publications
You can search the substack on google using site://chriswolfgang.substack.com and google comes back with two references from google's own crawling
You can navigate to https://chriswolfgang.substack.com/sitemap.xml and see that substack has not created a sitemap for this publication. This is why nothing appears on google.
When you search your blog posts on google, do you find them?
Search for site:https://<yoursubstack>.substack.com in your browser. If you see anything, at least some of your publication has been indexed by google and is available for search results. Initially google will show a blank page for a new web page.
Make your publication discoverable on Google
Read the full how-to guide at Maximising Visibility: A Step-by-Step Guide to making your Substack visible to Google search traffic