Does your membership site have a comprehensive SEO strategy? If not, it’s time develop one.

Without proper optimization, your site will not be indexed by Google and will not receive the traffic it needs. For Google to understand what your site’s about and send the right searchers there, it needs to be optimized.

Membership Sites: A Double-Edged Sword

That said, if you’re operating a membership site, you likely present a conundrum in the search engine world. The advantages of having a membership site or membership program are immense. Building a supportive community, helping members solve a problem, and teaching people a new skill are all worthwhile benefits of membership websites.

However, you can't lean entirely on producing paid content for your members because you also need to attract visitors to your website. A key component of the promotion puzzle is the ability to draw organic traffic from search engines. However, keeping all your content behind a protected paywall makes it challenging or even impossible to experience the very benefits you are in search of.

Enter: SEO.

What Is SEO And How Does It Work?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It refers to practices and tactics designed to improve the rank of a web page in organic search results. In plain language, it gets your website seen by Google, which in turn gets seen by people searching on Google. If you don’t employ SEO, Google won’t find your site and send the right people to it.

SEO practices involve the strategic use of keywords, chosen for their high search volume, throughout a site’s content and metadata. These are the terms people are entering when they’re searching for information related to your product, service, and site. The terms also tell Google what your website is about, so it will appear in search results when people type in your keywords. Successful SEO relies on keywords and your site’s linking structure, including both on-page internal links and external links from other sites.

Sound complicated? It’s actually not hard to do if you’re willing to put in some time. There are also SEO specialists who provide services to work on the backend of their websites. However, you can handle your own SEO by learning a few strategies and tricks. It is much less complicated than most people realize.

Why Your Business Needs an SEO Strategy

There are several reasons why an SEO strategy is essential, whether you’re a large company or a small business trying to expand its online presence.

Organic traffic is free

The main motivation for small businesses to adopt an SEO strategy is that organic searches, not paid advertising, will be the primary source of your traffic. Companies who pay for clicks have a large advertising budget. Small businesses need to get creative.

Most people stay on the first page

With organic traffic, people visit Google and type in questions or queries related to your product, service, or business. SEO helps your site appear on the first page of Google’s search engine results for selected keywords, alongside the paid ads.

This greatly increases the chances that the link to your page will be seen by people searching for those terms. Most people don’t look beyond the first page of the SERPs, so it’s a great benefit to your site if you can get on page 1.

More traffic means more sales

Increased traffic through organic search means higher conversions. This could mean more sales for your business, downloads of your free eBook, subscriptions to your newsletter, sign-ups, or whatever business goal you want SEO to help you achieve.

Higher ranking implies expertise

In addition to traffic, SEO is important for building trust and credibility. If your site appears in Google’s results, this tells people you’re a legit website that’s worth visiting. More people will see you online and this will help to frame you as an expert in your niche and a reliable source of the products and services you offer.

SEO research provides customer insights

Another benefit is that SEO helps you better understand your customer. Through keyword research, you’ll discover what problems your customers face and what questions they’re asking. Your website analytics will yield valuable insights that you can use to further refine your marketing strategy.

In the end, SEO helps you grow traffic and authority so that you can get more results for the effort you put into online marketing.

SEO Best Practices Yesterday and Today

SEO has changed a great deal over the years. It used to be heavily focused on keyword density and quantity of backlinks. You could stuff your pages full of high-search volume keywords and the search engines would index your site and send traffic.

However, over the years, Google has become dominant among search engines mostly because of its smart algorithms. It did this through directing web traffic to sites that offer valuable content and a good user experience. As a result, the methods that worked in the past no longer work. Now, it’s all about quality over quantity.

What does this mean for your site? Here are a few things Google looks for when evaluating websites:

Fresh Content. Google likes sites that are updated regularly. This is why it’s a good idea to add a blog to your static company webpage. A blog gives you the chance to add content on a regular basis, which tells Google it’s up to date.

Real Value. Real value means that your site solves problems, answers questions, and provides relief for your visitors. People come there looking for information and your site delivers on its promises. It’s not stuffed with low-quality content and it’s not purely promotional.

Good User Experience. A good user experience simply means your site is relevant and easy to use. It’s visually appealing with plenty of images. It’s easy to understand and navigate. You clearly tell your visitors how to find the information they’re looking for on the site’s pages. It also provides a great experience across all devices your visitors use to access it.

Topic Relevance. Your website’s content is relevant to the keywords it targets and the products and services it offers.

Quality Backlinks. The backlinks coming into the site are from authority websites in your niche or relevant to your topic. The quality of these links is more important than the number of links you have coming in.

This means that your site should:

Target keywords relevant to your topic
Use keywords naturally throughout the text and in key places that Google considers important
Use secondary keywords wherever appropriate for further traffic
Use these terms in URLs, descriptions, images, and metadata
Have an internal linking structure that helps Google understand the site’s architecture
Employ some off-page SEO like backlinks from authority sites
Frequently update with new content.

How to Get Started

Are you ready to get started learning SEO and creating and implementing your own effective SEO strategy?

Step 1: Choose one page to optimize.

The best option here is to pick a blog post you want the world to see. Choose a post that’s your best “start here” content or write something original on a very popular topic in your niche.

Step 2: Pick a long-tail keyword to optimize the page for.

A long-tail keyword is a term that is 3-5 words. It could be an entire sentence or question. These are preferable because there is less competition for them in searches and they’re specific, so you can get targeted searches.

Step 3: Use the keyword in your text and metadata.

You should also optimize your site in other ways using a plugin like Yoast or RankMath. The plugins will walk you through a variety of techniques to optimize your site’s data so that it’s easier for Google to index.

Step 4: Monitor results by periodically checking how you rank.

Check your ranking for your chosen keyword and by reviewing your website’s analytics. This will tell you what’s working and what isn’t so that you can adjust and improve.

When Content is Behind a Paywall

It’s easy to forget that search engines care about one thing and one thing only: The user’s experience. More specifically, providing the best experience possible for its users.

With that in mind, it’s rarely a good thing to keep all of your content behind a paywall because Google and other search engines don’t want to send someone somewhere with no value.

For a membership site, or when you have content behind a paywall, it is critical to balance the desire to give away your expertise for free to ensure growth, versus charging for access and making money from that content. There are four routes you can take for each piece of content:

Keep it behind a paywall.
Show an excerpt or snippet, with the full content restricted.
Allow site visitors a fixed number of free content views.
Allow anyone to see the content as often as they wish.

Search engines are unable to view locked content, so some content needs to be visible to get indexed. Showing a snippet of content means that bots can only read and access part of the full content. While the content will be less impactful for SEO, you can optimize what is visible for maximum impact.

Allowing site visitors access to a fixed number of views is a great approach to build an interest in your membership site. This method ensures the content is fully accessible to the world and, more importantly, to the search engines. Bots are anonymous and exempt from limits, and as such can read and index all of the protected content on your site. Naturally, this has a positive effect on organic SEO.

How Membership Plugins Can Help

Fortunately, many creators of membership plugins are aware of this deficit and have adjusted their features to help membership site creators. Though not all of them have such capability, they often allow you to accommodate SEO by doing the following:

Use excerpts from your protected content that are both readable by visitors and indexable by search engines.
Use Shortcodes or PHP snippets to protect only a specific portion of your content. For example, you might display an entire article but make a small, integral portion of it restricted to members only.

Or Just Offer High-Value Content for Free

Offering free content may truly be the best approach when it comes to promoting your membership program. Although it goes against everything you are trying to accomplish with a membership site – and indeed, I often tell clients to give away the ‘what’ and ‘why’ yet keep the ‘how’ restricted to paying clients -- if you have confidence in the value you are offering behind a paywall, free content has the potential to draw in more members than nearly anything else.

To clarify, I’m not talking about free content that promotes your membership site. I’m referring to free content that provides massive value. So much value that visitors can't help but recognize how much better off they would be by joining your membership program.

Are you interested in starting or optimizing a membership site for your clients? Would you like some help making that happen? If so, I’d love to chat. Let’s have a zero-obligation virtual coffee to discuss the possibility. You can schedule that here.

What Is SEO and How Does it Relate to Membership Sites?