This is probably the number one question I've been asked over the years: is it better to have a blog or a Substack [or LinkedIn publication, Medium page, etc] for search engine optimization (SEO)?
It's a good question. The answer is always "blog content on your own website is best for SEO." But that doesn't mean a blog, and only a blog, is the best choice for your entire marketing plan.
Why a blog and a Substack aren't the same thing
When you publish on Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, or another platform, you're doing two things:
- Putting your content and name in front of people who use that platform
- Planting your content in a walled garden that not everyone can access
Item number two is the most important here: when you use Substack and other blogging platforms, the company that owns the platform can choose to delete, restrict, or suspend your content at any time.
This doesn't mean that publishing on Substack is bad. It just means that if you’re engaging in content creation for SEO (and not solely building a newsletter list to monetize it) you need to think of Substack as a secondary place to distribute your content, not the single spot in which to publish it.
Your blog, along with your email list, is something that you own. As long as you pay the bill for your domain name and web host (i.e. your annual Squarespace fee) and aren't, like, selling illegal goods and weapons, nobody is going to shut down your site. You can freely export your content and move it over to WordPress or Wix. It doesn't matter how many people like, share, or "clap for" your content: as long as your website works, and you put attention into SEO, people can find you.
Does Substack work for SEO at all?
Platforms like Substack and Medium do have some SEO value, as results from those platforms do show up in Google search results. (LinkedIn less so; I categorize that more in the realm of pure social media than blog/newsletter content.)
But if Substack ever goes out of business, gets de-prioritized by Google search algorithms, or changes its terms of service, you can lose access to and control of your content. It can even become nearly impossible for people to find it in search results.
Yes, this is a worst case scenario situation. But web platforms can and do go out of business. So it's important that you approach Substack as just one of several marketing channels.
How multi-channel marketing supports SEO
The goal of SEO is to get people to find you through organic and AI search.
The goal of marketing is to get people to find you through multiple channels: and SEO is just one of those channels.
Your marketing channels can include any of the following:
- A blog
- Content platforms like Substack
- Social media
- YouTube
- TV and radio
- Podcasts
- Paid ads
I am not saying you need all of these. You don't. I personally only use a blog, Medium, one social media platform (LinkedIn), and YouTube.
But if you pick a few of these channels you can begin to grow your reach in different ways, including organic SEO.
POSSE: The easy multi-channel content plan
POSSE is an acronym I can't claim to have invented, but I love it: Publish on your Own Site, Share Everywhere.
This simply means that any time you are going to publish long-form content—I'm talking blog posts, not Instagram captions—you put it on your own website first and then you share it out to Substack, social media, or wherever else you want to connect with your audience.
In my business, I approach POSSE like this:
- Publish content on a site I own + email it out for the first time
- Put the post on Medium (sometimes)
- Share on LinkedIn
Because all of my content originates on a website I own, I don't have to worry if LinkedIn accidentally deletes my account or Medium goes out of business. Sure, that would suck, but I wouldn't lose my content library that I've worked so hard to create.
The SEO and marketing gains I get from this process are:
- People find the original content on my website through search and AI chat tools, which will drive traffic and boosts the SEO value of my site.
- Other people find me and follow me on Medium, which grows my total audience base.
- I gain website clicks and newsletter subscribers from LinkedIn posts that include a link to the original content on my website.
There's another reason why it's important that I publish content on my own site first, too: it signals to search engines that my website is the version they should show in search results.
How to avoid the duplicate content trap
In SEO, there's a problem called duplicate content. This means that the same exact text appears in two places online. This very specifically applies to webpage content and does not refer to links or snippets that you share on social media platforms.
If you publish an article on your site and on a publicly-viewable Substack page, you now have the exact same content in two places. If this dual publication happens on the same day, and there are no other instructions, Google will choose to display only one version, typically the version on the more well-established site. In this example, that would be Substack. Your own website would only appear if someone decided to click "show ommitted results" on the very last page of Google search results. And there's no option like this in AI search.
The way to avoid this, and ensure your site is always the preferred option shown in search results, is to set the canonical URL correctly. A canonical URL tells Google what the original version of the page is...i.e. the one that's canon.
If you're sharing the same post on two company websites, such as yours and a client's, you can set this canonical URL with a short line of code on the page. Over on Medium, a built-in import tool makes it very easy to do this automatically. But Substack doesn't offer a similar tool.
How to correctly publish on Substack and your own blog
Here's how to correctly publish on both Substack and your own blog for the best SEO outcomes:
- Publish content on your own blog first.
- Wait. Ideally about two weeks, but if that's too long, give it as long as you can; several days at least. You can share your blog post on social media during this time!
- Copy the text of your post and put it on Substack. Before publishing, add a line at the bottom that says Originally published on (your URL).
No matter where you publish, you need good content
Ultimately, whether you decide to publish on your own blog, a Substack, or both, you need really good content. There's no other trick or hack you can do to get your site to show up in AI search results: the large language models (LLMs) that power AI search tools look for content that clearly answers questions and provides real expertise and insights.
These search algorithms also prioritze human written content, as human content is what's most likely to contain unique and first-person insights. Google even said that insert quote about content not working if it could be easily written by an LLM.
You don't have to spend hours trying to get your SEO content "right," either. Just grab the Simple Blogging System—it’s specifically designed for business owners and contains eight reusable templates that make writing a full blog post in an hour (really) easy.