The SEO Challenge for Membership Sites
Many MemberSpace customers have valuable digital content locked behind a paywall. Courses, memberships, and resources that could attract new members are invisible to search engines. This creates a problem:
- Search engines cannot index that content.
- People searching for those topics will not find you.
The Fix: Make Your Content Discoverable
People do not search for “Awesome Membership Site.” They search for specific courses, guides, or resources. If your content is hidden, they will never find you. The solution is to create a public-facing page for each product with:
- A preview of what is inside
- A clear description of the value it provides
- A call-to-action to sign up or subscribe
Stick to SEO Basics
The key to SEO is sticking to the fundamentals. You do not need to be a coder to do it well.
Finding the Right Keywords
Not sure what people are searching for? Watch this video on how to do keyword research: [Keyword Research Video]
My Biggest SEO Tip
SEO takes time. The last thing you want is to spend months trying to rank for a keyword only to find out it does not convert into sales.
Run a small Google Ads campaign first to test keywords:
- See which ones actually bring in leads or sales
- Focus your long-term SEO efforts on those keywords
- Once you rank organically, it is free traffic for years
SEO Tip for MemberSpace Users
Some of your gated pages may be indexed by search engines, which presents two challenges:
- Only high-level pages will be indexed. Content within categories and subcategories will not appear in Google search results.
- For the gated content that does get indexed, users will only see a signup or login page, not the actual content.
To fix this, I recommend:
- (Optional) Disabling indexing for gated content to prevent duplicate pages in Google search.
- Creating public landing pages as described in this newsletter.
This simple shift can make a huge difference.