🚀 Advancing your SEO

Do you feel seen? Heard? Maybe a little ignored? If you felt like 2025's spotlight was on other publications and not your own, it's time to get unapologetically loud in 2026, and having a well-polished SEO plan roaring into the new year is just what you need. This week's newsletter is about leveraging search engine optimization for your protected content, what SEO trends to watch for, and why discipline will be your winning strategy. Let's go!

In this week's issue 📨

• Optimizing for membership sites
• Top SEO trends and predictions
• Building a strategy with discipline

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Lower the gate

Should your SEO strategy change if you have a publication with protected content? Well, yes! Lots of businesses offer paid memberships in exchange for access to private, premium content. This work is so exclusive that it doesn't even show up in Google, so how does search engine optimization function when it comes to paywalled content? We're here to help sort it all out.

Let's examine how SEO can be utilized as a growth channel for your membership website, even if you have lots of protected content.

Full vs partial content protection

• Full content protection is member-only content that's never publicly available anywhere, even to Google. This is because platforms like Ghost protect your content at a server level, which prevents site visitors from accessing your content unless they become a paid member of your publication.
• Partial content protection is when a site uses JavaScript or CSS to hide member-only content within the browser itself. This type of shield can be easily bypassed by visitors or bots, potentially allowing search engines to see the content. This can also result in a site being penalized for cloaking.

Preparing for SEO

• If you want SEO to work in your favor when you have protected content, you must develop a segmented content strategy. This is all about consciously creating different content with distinct goals, like which pieces can help you attract more site visitors and which can help you grow your paid memberships.
• To help make your strategy a bit more streamlined, platforms like Ghost have built-in SEO features, including sitemaps, robots.txt, structured data, semantic markup, automatic canonical tags, clean permalinks, and custom metadata. This saves you time and lets you focus on your content.

Public vs freemium content

• The classic way to increase your chances with search traffic is through public content and the use of a custom domain. This allows new readers to easily find your publication using search engines and gives them a taste of what they can expect if they're eyeing your premium content offerings.
• Freemium content is the next level, where the content is still free, but it's not public and not picked up by Google. Your site visitors will need to enter their email and become a free member to access it. This can help deepen your relationship with your audience, which can turn into paid product leads.

Publish your best content for free

• Yes, you read that right. The best way to get your paywalled work noticed is to make your most widely attractive content freely available, so that's what web surfers see in their Google search results, which leads to clicks, which leads to conversions, which leads to paid memberships, which leads to paid content.
• Your free content that shows up in search engines should cast a wide net, attracting as many clicks as possible, while your paid content should captivate a specific audience that's willing to pay for it. What content is "best" for this is totally up to you. Just be sure you nail your first impression.

Interesting stories & ideas 📚

• The 100 connections challenge – Social Currency
• How the world is changing – Digital Native
• What are you bad at? – Jason Fiefer
• Your sceptical AI reader – One Man & His Blog
• The most important advice for creators – The Nathan Barry Show

All you can EEAT

No matter how SEO has evolved in the last few years, it still boils down to trying to match your content to what people are searching for. That's it. However, some marketing experts are still stuck on the complexities of what SEO is, how it works, and what the future holds. If you're in the same boat, taking a look at some of next year's trends may help you start 2026 on the right Googley foot.

Omid G, Editor-in-Chief at Marketer Milk, shares some top SEO trends and predictions for 2026.

#1 2026 will be all about EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Google rewards smaller publishers who write about lived experiences. Combating AI-generated content is all about social proof.

#2 If you want your brand name to be associated with specific keywords, social media will be your best friend. Positive word-of-mouth marketing gets people to search for your brand name along with their favorite thing.

#3 As AI advances, more of us crave real-life human interaction. That's why personalizing your content titles using pronouns makes everything much more organic. Include yourself or an expert in the title to get more clicks.

#4 Has TikTok and AI helped bring YouTube back in a big way? People are craving more video content (with real human faces), so consider turning some of your best blog posts into YouTube videos to help your written content rank better.

#5 Don't shift your entire SEO strategy in favor of AI search just yet. Google is still leading the pack with 82.6B monthly visitors, so if your content is showing up there, it'll appear in ChatGPT and Perplexity, too.

#6 Search engines will continue to get smarter about what's AI-generated content and what's created by your favorite niche solo blogger. Creating original content will always be the way to your SEO heart.

Disciplinary action

Now that you know how SEO can work for your protected content, and you're familiar with next year's trends, what should your 2026 SEO strategy be? Mastering the delicate balance between short-term wins and long-term gains for your publication doesn't have to be complicated. As the new year quickly approaches, let's slow down and center in on not getting stuck in panic mode.

Maria Georgieva, author at Search Engine Land, breaks down why discipline will be your winning SEO strategy in 2026.

‣ Before you dive into optimizing your content for search engines, remember that staying focused on yourself, your business, and your goals, rather than chasing cheap trends or solely depending on fancy tools, is what's going to set your publication up for SEO success. Start with a clear head, and you'll see clear results.

‣ Don't discount your short-term wins and projects. They may be small, but they're mighty, like adding structured data markup or expanding pages with relevant FAQs, which quickly improves your visibility in Google. Do these wins drive long-term growth? Maybe not, but they help keep you motivated.

‣ Long-term goals are much slower, but provide lasting results and strengthen brand trust. A more robust action to consider is making your presence known on community sites like Reddit and YouTube. Building a reputation on social media takes work, but the benefits can last a lifetime.

‣ It may not be very exciting, but don't skip your business-as-usual tasks, like SEO checks, reporting, and monitoring changes. These jobs prevent future problems and keep everything running smoothly, so you can focus on your big-picture items or play around with experimentation.

‣ Remember that balance and discipline evolve, and it's up to you to decide what that looks like for your business. Regardless of how you mold your SEO/content strategy, you ultimately want it to be sustainable. Set SMART goals, use the 5 Whys to find root causes, and prioritize with RICE/ICE.

‣ Trends and tools come and go, but what you'll always need by your side to reach your full SEO potential is discipline. Focus, patience, and rigor are what distinguish publications that make real progress. If you keep your short-term results constant and commit to your long-term goals, 2026 will be a breeze.

Curator's pick ✍️

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