This article shows how to do SEO for a newsletter, using my newsletter as an example.
The changes I made to my newsletter landing page SEO did not take long, and the results have been outstanding.
What I’ll share below are optimizations anybody can do.
Initial SEO data
This recent week was good for this website’s SEO.
Since mid-December, I’ve put more thought into the SEO for Edwardsturm.com.
Now, a month later, I’m seeing results.
The SEO that I’ve done for https://edwardsturm.com/newsletter/ is a good example.
On December 20th, 2023, a feature came out about me in a major online publication.
One of the things written is:
“Growth hacking newsletter,” it said – linking to my newsletter.
So I started wondering, do people search for this?
They do.
0-10 isn’t much. However, as I wrote in a previous article, keyword volume estimations are always low.
This is because if you rank #1 on Google for one keyword, you will also rank high for many variations, misspellings, and similar keywords.
In reality, ranking #1 for this keyword will make the page get 500-1,000 monthly clicks from Google by people looking for a growth hacking newsletter or digital marketing newsletter to subscribe to.
A lot more than 0-10.
Also, this keyword has a low difficulty score and high intent. The people searching are likely to convert – and it’s not too competitive – it won’t take much effort on my part.
On-page SEO
Before December 26, the page had no mention of “Growth hacking newsletter.” It had “growth hack” in the heading, but nowhere else.
I knew that to rank well for “growth hacking newsletter” it would be easiest to put this exact phrase in my:
- Page title.
- Meta description.
- Somewhere on the page.
I could put it in other places, too, but I felt this was the bare minimum.
So, I started with the page title. This is what you see when you hover over the page tab on a web browser.
You can see there I also put it in the meta description.
Finally, I added it to the copy on the page:
I needed an excuse to use the keyword in the copy, so I put in: “Question: What exactly is this?”
This made the keyword flow with the rest of the page’s writing.
All these changes took 5 minutes. It took me longer to make this write-up than it took to make these changes to the page.
The results:
The next day, I showed up in position 15 on Google for “growth hacking newsletter.”
The week after, #5.
One week ago, #7.
And this most recent week, #2.
Something to note here, by the way: often, it takes time to rank. Even after you put in the work, it may take weeks or months to show up in the top spots. Sometimes, it’s instant, but this is unusual. Typically, expect some waiting time. Don’t get discouraged if you have to wait.
Building links
Ranking #1 is more competitive.
The page I’m competing with is authoritative, has growth hackers in the URL, and has the direct keyword in the page title.
Additionally, the individual page has a bunch of backlinks.
However – and there’s a big however.
This is the page:
There’s virtually no copy.
So, by sheer virtue of having a lot more copy, I believe I can beat it.
I’ll need more links, though.
I’ve already successfully been using Featured.com to get links to my main website.
But I’ll also need more links going to my newsletter page.
This will tell search engines that the newsletter is reputable.
Two mornings ago, I Googled “newsletter directories” and found a big list of directories to submit my newsletter to.
And that’s just what I did.
I created a spreadsheet to track the language I use on each directory – this makes it easy in the future to change language and have it stay consistent across directories.
Then, I submitted my newsletter and the URL to each directory.
The beauty here is you get to craft the language around your brand yourself.
I did some keyword research and found that “digital marketing newsletter” will be a good keyword to go after in the future. So I made sure to put “digital marketing” into each directory along with “growth hack.”
This tells Google that Edwardsturm.com has a reputable growth hacking newsletter and digital marketing newsletter.
And that’s it.
I suspect I’ll have to do a few more weeks of waiting to get to #1 for “growth hacking newsletter”- though I’m already getting traffic and sign-ups from being #2.
And I’m inspired by what else I can use this method for.
There are directories for everything.
I can use this to get backlinks and relevant SEO language to every aspect of my brand.
And you can with your brands, too.
But for starters, this is an easy and fast way to optimize your newsletter for search engines.
