Developing a Winning SEO Strategy for Paywalled Content

We worked with Mexico News Daily (MND) to restructure their paywall setup about a year ago and as a result, a year later, they have seen significant growth in three areas:

1. Their website traffic
2. Their email list size
3. Their paid subscription growth

If this sounds hopeful, read on to understand how they did it. We will take you through the implementation and reveal some numbers in our mini case study below.

Why be worried about SEO?

As a publisher, you might wonder about how to set up your paywall to increase paid subscriptions without hurting your ad revenue. A paywall should limit website traffic right? It blocks more page views, It can’t be good for SEO or social sharing.

Yes, it can cause these issues, we see it all the time. Badly constructed paywalls do drive visitors and revenue away. MND was running a third party SaaS paywall that was not working well and was the motivation to come to us for help. With the right setup their paywall (Leaky Paywall) morphed into a nurturing funnel and then, everything started growing.

This article will delve into the ways to grow traffic, audience, and subscriptions, using the tactics of a nurturing paywall implementation. We find that setting this up the right way improves SEO, traffic, email list size and ad revenue. This also opens the door to increased sponsorship opportunities due to increased traffic and email list size.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Start: Optimize your paywall for maximum SEO impact

A previously mentioned concern is that paywalls might deter traffic, leading to a decrease in ad revenue. This concern is magnified for publishers heavily reliant on advertising. These publishers often pack their websites with advertisements to maximize revenue, fearing that restricting access through a paywall will reduce the number of visitors and thus their ad income.

This is old thinking.

The right paywall approach will actually grow your website traffic. Rather than shutting out casual readers entirely, you can use a metered and freemium model to draw visitors in, gradually convert them into paying subscribers, all while keeping your content fully indexed by the search engines.

More on this later, let’s first tackle the technical side of SEO.

Optimizing and balancing visibility and revenue: Hard vs. soft paywalls model for maximum SEO impact

A hard paywall is a strict way to block access to content unless the reader pays for access. This works for well-known brands or websites with lots of visitors with a loyal audience where a percentage will be willing to pay. However, hard paywalls don’t work well with search engines and social media because the content is gated and isn’t fully visible. This means that Google can’t index the full article text, and people don’t want to share blocked articles on social media.

A hybrid paywall is a mix of both free content and hard restricted content. This means some articles are available for everyone to read, while others require a subscription to access. With a hybrid paywall, the publisher has to decide which articles to restrict. This can be tricky because unless the restricted content is clearly better than the free content, it can be challenging for the publisher to know what visitors think is premium.

On the other hand, a soft or leaky paywall usually meters all content which lets people choose which content to see before being asked to subscribe. This method usually allows one or more free articles before asking the reader to pay for access. This helps because search engines like Google can still index the full article text, making them easier to find in search. It also encourages people to share the articles on social media. This approach attracts new readers who might later decide to subscribe, while still keeping the content visible in search results and on social media.

Bottom line: treat all your content as premium, meter it, and let the paywall do the work. This approach lets the inbound reader decide what articles are important to them, to get their first free taste of your content. More on this start of the subscription funnel later.

Let’s talk paywalls and traffic growth for your publication

Want to learn more about growing your audience and subscriptions with your paywall? Get in touch with Pete (CEO and Founder of Leaky Paywall).

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Crafting compelling previews to enhance SEO for hard paywalls

Creating interesting previews can help with SEO. With a hard paywall, publishers need to carefully write short previews of their articles, but even then, it’s hard for these articles to show up in search results. On the other hand, a metered setup lets Google read and index the full text of every article on the website. This means that the article has a much better chance of appearing in search results, making it easier to attract new readers and improve the website’s visibility.

Leveraging Core Web Vitals for paywalled sites

Leveraging Core Web Vitals is important for all websites and something you really do need to pay attention to. Yes, Google is always changing their algorithms, so it’s best to think long-term by simply giving your readers a good experience.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure how fast a webpage loads, how quickly it becomes interactive, and how stable it is while loading. Make sure your website and content load quickly, are interactive, and look great on mobile devices. Fast loading times and good mobile design will help improve your site’s ranking in search results and (most importantly) provide better interactions for your readers.

Next steps: Implementing your paywall strategy

It’s time to talk nurturing your website visitors with your paywall. Accomplish this with a free registration to engage readers and drive more traffic to your website

The most effective approach today to grow traffic is to implement a free registration in your subscription funnel. Take a look at the larger publishers and see how they approach it. Some (like the NYTimes) will restrict all their content and require a registration to read more. Typically most allow readers to access a very limited (1-3) number of articles for free before prompting them to register to access additional content. For instance, you might allow (meter) two free articles per month and then require a registration to read 2 more articles.

Here is a great example of a free registration approach. This message shows up after the website visitor reads 1 free article and clicks to read a second article:

This free registration serves multiple purposes:

Building Your Email List: By requiring registration after a limited number of free articles, you capture more email addresses, which builds your email list much faster.

Segmentation: Once these readers register, you know they registered, are higher quality (since they jumped through your hoop of choosing a password), and you can target them with email promotions to upgrade their account and pay for full access to your content.

Increased website traffic: Your newsletter plays a critical role as it will drive drive more traffic back to your website from your newsletter. Even if you have been great about promoting your newsletter, the free registration will do it for you faster than any other method, and drive more readers back to your website.

Nurturing your audience: The free registration helps establish a relationship with these new readers. They get a taste of your premium content and newsletter without immediate commitment, which leads to higher conversion rates down the line.

Your newsletter provides value to your readers even if they can’t read entire articles. It also drives them to your website, significantly boosting traffic, and where you can easily target them with upgrade messaging.

This instills the sense that your content is valuable and they should consider paying for access to it. This nurtured time based approach is what converts more readers into paid subscribers

Lastly: Leveraging your email newsletter to drive more traffic and convert paying subscribers

Frequency and messaging is key

Your email newsletter is a crucial tool for engaging your audience and driving traffic back to your website. It serves as a direct line of communication, allowing you to keep readers informed about your latest content, special offers, and subscription benefits.

Purpose: The purpose of your free email newsletter is to own your audience (your 1st party data), bring more traffic back to your website, and include messages that encourage people to upgrade to paid subscriptions. This way, you can build a direct relationship with your readers, get more site visits, and get more people to become paying subscribers.

Let’s talk paid subscriptions

Want to learn more about growing your audience and converting subscribers with your paywall? Get in touch with Pete.

Let’s talk

Targeted Email Messaging: When targeting your audience via email, segment your free registered readers from your paid subscribers. In every free newsletter you send, include upgrade messages. Ideally, place a small callout near the top and a larger benefits-oriented subscription message at the bottom (see below examples). This way, you can consistently remind free readers about the advantages of upgrading to a paid subscription.

Here is a good example of MND’s slim promotion near the top of a newsletter:

Here is an effective example of a subscription promotion near the footer on a free segmented email newsletter:

Newsletter Frequency: Generally, the more frequently you send your content during the week the higher your conversion rates will be. Yes, you can oversaturate your audience with too many promotional emails. Standalone promotional emails carry a greater risk of triggering readers to unsubscribe from your lists. Content emails encourage engagement. Most of the the time you should be working your promotional messaging into your content.

If you are a news site send daily, or even more frequently. Ex: if you have an evening edition (which could be premium for paid subscribers). If you publish lower volume evergreen content, supplement your weekly email with articles from the past on different days.

The simple formula is to send your quality content as frequently as you can stand, and your traffic and subscription conversions will improve dramatically. Send standalone promotional emails very sparingly.

Case Study: Mexico News Daily

Results:

• 20% growth in traffic
• 20% email list growth
• 20% growth in paid subscriptions

Let’s take a look at what happened when Mexico News Daily got their paywall right. We helped implemented a tight free registration model a little over a year ago, allowing only two free articles before requiring a registration. After registration the reader could access 2 additional articles.

Initially hesitant to set up this more restrictive approach, they have since observed significant growth in their website traffic, email list and paid subscriptions. Here’s a closer look at their approach and results:

1. Restrictive Free Registration: Mexico News Daily allows readers to access only two free articles each month before requiring a registration (asking for an email & password) for an additional 2 free articles. This simple step significantly boosted their email list as readers were willing to register to continue reading and get their newsletter.
2. Two Daily Newsletters: They implemented a robust email newsletter strategy, a daily news update and well as a daily “most commented” articles to keep readers engaged. This consistent communication nurtures their relationship with the audience, driving them back to the site regularly. They send upward of 15 content newsletters per week.
3. Targeted Upgrade Messaging: In every free newsletter and on their website, they included clear and compelling upgrade messages. Readers are sent back to their website more frequently encounter gated articles with prompts to subscribe for full access. This reinforces the value of the content and increased conversions.
4. Significant Website Traffic: Over the past 12 months, Mexico News Daily experienced significant, 20%+, growth of their website traffic. They did this will modest attention to SEO. This level of visitor traffic resulted from the metered setup of Leaky Paywall to promote search and sharing, and their email list growth from their free registration setup.
5. Email and Subscription growth: Both their email list, and paid subscriptions also increased over 20%. With a larger list and frequent twice daily newsletters the upgrade messaging is consistent enough to get their readers attention and compel them to subscribe.
6. Nurturing ftw: The first few months of implementation saw the ratio of free registered readers vs. paid subscribers run at approximately 10%. In other words out of every 1000 free registerred readers they were getting 100 paid subscribers. At the end of their 1st year this ratio has now ballooned into 20%+ which makes sense as some time has gone by to nurture uncommitted readers into subscribing. Readers sometimes pay right away, but most of the time readers want to see more of what you publish before paying up. This takes time.
7. Open Rates for their newsletter are around 60% which is very good audience engagement
8. MND runs their email newsletter on flowletter which lets them send newsletters right from WordPress, keeps free and paid segments clean, and also lets paid subscribers past Leaky Paywall to be able to read content without having to log in.

Conclusion: How to approach your paywall considering SEO and traffic growth

Here are the lessons we have taken awy from MND:

1. Make sure your website loads quickly does well with Google’s Core Web Vitals
2. Meter your content, 1 – 3 free articles per month depending on the amount of content you produce per week. The lower your article count produced each week the lower your meter should be set (more restrictive). Metering to allow at least 1 free article per month will let Google to index all your content so it ranks better in search and promote social sharing. Consider a hard, locked down setup if you have a strong brand, traffic, and email list and are ready to only let paying subscribers at your content.
3. Set up a free registration as the first subscription message to capture the readers email address, allow them to read the next article or 2 and send their email to your newsletter list into your free segment
4. Email your newsletter daily or more if you can. This increases your upgrade messaging visibility
5. Set up compelling upgrade messaging in your free newsletter
6. Set up upgrade messaging on your website paywall to trigger when free registered readers have run out of their 1-2 free articles.

Be patient. The above nurturing funnel will exposes more and more content and upgrade messaging to your casual readers over weeks and months. This increases the chances of them pulling the trigger on paying for access to your content.

Implementing these strategies will help you develop a winning website traffic strategy for your paywalled content, ensuring sustainable audience growth and revenue.

Want to learn more about growing subscription revenue? Get in touch

Let’s talk paywalls and traffic growth for your publication

Want to learn more about growing your audience and subscriptions with your paywall? Get in touch with Pete (CEO and Founder of Leaky Paywall).

Let’s talk