Pages and SEO vs Posts

Using Ghost
1

Hello,

I am new to Ghost, and I think I have not used it as I should.

I have some static (tutorial stuff, very detailed, lots of graphics, explanation) pages (not posts) without any tags. This is the added-value of my website, and what should be used first for SEO. All those are free, but referenced using a navigation link (primary menu) on top of the page (for example mysite.com/strategy). None of those pages has a tag.
Should I change my setup ? Most of the SEO tools for testing my website say that the content quantity is low, but when I look at the sentences and keywords most seen by those SEO tools, all of them are those referred in the newsletters (that are all with a paywall). A page with links to the posts ? Or a post featured with links to other posts ? Or all those pages converted to posts, with a “Strategy” tag and a link in the navigation to direct to those ?

I have also a newsletter that is for paying suscribers only, so with a title, a few words for others, an image, and then the paywall directly. I have a canonical to redirect to a common newsletter post that is free for all paying posts, but maybe I should use also a meta no index no follow to avoid wasting crawl time of SEO robots ?

For the moment, the user experience was for me quite good, but I am worried google is not having the same point of view and ignoring the top links because the posts (the newsletters for paying suscribers) are considered at top, and the primary menu would be considered second.

Any thoughts ?

2

I get the sense that Google doesn’t really like anyone that uses Ghost. I’m trying just about everything to bubble up my results, from going through all of my posts and updating the headings and trying to get it to match specific keywords to manually updating meta data in each post, and i’m still not seeing any increase in traffic. I am in the process of updating, and a third of my site is recently updated but I hope i’m wrong on Google not liking us all that much haha.

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So pages without content (which is how a paywall with only ‘a few words’ looks to Google) will not get indexed. Setting their canonical to a single other post tells Google not to index them, and omits them from the sitemap also. Consider instead exposing the first few paragraphs of content (using the “public preview” line in the cards menu) and removing the canonicals. That’ll make those posts indexable by Google, and give potential new members a bit more taste of your content before subscribing, which can be good for conversions.

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