As a content creator, you already know the power of organic search to grow your business online.
People are out there looking for you, whether they've heard of you before or not, and your job is to intercept their search, show them your products, and sell them a subscription to your site.
Typically, the more traffic you get, the higher the conversion rate – let your content do the talking and it will sell itself. There is no risk involved and it couldn’t be easier.
There's just one problem: if you list of azerbaijan consumer email put all your content behind a paywall, you're blindfolding the search engines. All that valuable content your potential customers are looking for remains hidden.
It makes as much sense as a shopkeeper turning off his shop window.
Luckily, you can have the best of both worlds: there are ways to paywall your content AND allow search engines to index your protected posts, you just need the right tools and a little know-how.
Stay tuned as we explain how to optimize your paid content for search engines.
Google's history with SEO for paid content
As the world's largest search engine, Google has of course extensively investigated options for indexing paid content.
Historically, if you wanted your paid content to be indexed by Google, you had to opt into their controversial “First Click Free” (FCF) policy.
Unsurprisingly, this policy was unpopular with publishers. Major online media organisations incluido News Corps have opted to significantly reduce their traffic for allowing Google users free access to their content.
Thankfully, Google scrapped this policy in 2017 in favor of using “Flexible Sampling” to optimize premium content for search. Let’s take a closer look at what that means along with more of Google’s tips for paywall SEO.
