How to build SEO for your subscription service

The popularity of subscriptions has boomed in recent years, as customers have come to appreciate the convenience they offer whether that’s for everyday essentials or trying new and interesting products from brands they love.

Subscription commerce is a big opportunity for merchants looking to boost both sales and their customer experience. It’s no longer just subscription-only brands that are making the most of recurring commerce; almost any business can adapt to offer subscriptions in one form or another. That may be recognizing that customers typically buy a particular product regularly, and deciding to offer that on a subscription replenishment model. Perhaps you want to encourage customers to try new products, so you start offering a curated box that gives them the opportunity to sample items before making a full purchase.

Regardless of which model you choose, much like any other product within your store your customers need to be able to actually find it. More than half of consumers say they’ve used Google to find a new brand, and 59% say they use it to research a purchase they plan to make. If a customer is in the market for a coffee subscription, or wants to know where to get oat milk on a recurring order, chances are they’re going to turn to Google. 

That’s why it’s so important to have an SEO strategy to promote your subscription offering - the more you do to improve discoverability, the higher your subscription sales will be. So, let’s look at 4 ways you can build SEO for your subscriptions.

Create a subscription landing page

Landing pages are a really important tool for building SEO if you’re targeting a specific audience and topic. You can include a lot of specific keywords and phrases, as well as more information and details on the topic at hand. Creating a landing page for your subscriptions will give you the opportunity to direct search users to a page that is essentially an extended product page exclusively about your subscription products. 

By having a hub of information on one specific product, rather than customers having to search through the rest of your site. This is especially useful if subscriptions aren’t your primary product, or if they’re offered as an option on product pages. 

There are a few SEO essentials you need to make sure are included on your landing page:

• Subscription related keywords 
• Information on how your subscription actually works 
• Product links
• FAQ section 
• Reviews

Tick off these items, and you’ll have a landing page that will start ranking and bringing in engaged customers. 

Encourage, gather, and feature reviews

Have you ever taken a look at just how many coffee subscriptions there are online? With so many options available for customers to choose from, they’re going to look for the best of the best. One way they do this is by reading reviews. According to Trustpilot, 89% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase.

It’s no secret that reviews are important for ecommerce SEO, and subscription products are no different. You need to ensure you’re encouraging and gathering reviews specifically about subscription products. It isn’t enough to have reviews about your other products, as there are additional considerations customers make before they decide to purchase a subscription. They need to know the experience of subscribing to your brand is worth their time and money. 

You may already have a plan in place to gather reviews from customers, but it’s worth creating a separate plan with its own incentives and encouragement for subscriptions. You want to have reviews not just on your site, but on other trusted sources online such as Google and Trustpilot. It’s one thing to read a review on your site, but customers will trust these third party sources even more. 

Once you have those reviews, it’s time to start showcasing them throughout your site to boost SEO. As well as your subscription landing page, you should feature testimonials more on product pages and even on your homepage. This will ensure throughout your site you’ll have glowing reviews for your subscriptions on key pages.  

Create consistent blog content around subscriptions

So you’ve got a landing page, and you’re in the process of building up reviews for your subscription - what’s next? Time to create some regular content around them! Blogs are an effective way to add fresh SEO content to your store, and target different audiences, search intent, and keywords all at once. 

To identify which articles you should write, you should start by looking at who your target audience is for subscriptions, and which questions they’re asking. Are they just researching different subscriptions, or are they looking into the benefits of a subscription generally? Are they buying for themselves, or looking for a gift? 

From here, you can start to create content that answers their questions and search intent. For example creating buying guides around subscriptions - it may be “how to pick the right coffee subscription”, or including your subscription in a buying guide around “Best decaf coffees to drink working from home”. Speaking of including your subscription in guides, gift guides are a really great way to promote products and target SEO during key sales periods like Mother’s Day and Christmas, and for other occasions year-round like birthdays.

Keeping a consistent, regular flow of content featuring your subscription products will benefit not just SEO for your subscriptions but for your store generally as well.

Look into subscription focussed link building

We mentioned earlier that with so many options available, customers look to other resources to decide which subscription they want to purchase. Just as there are many subscriptions, there are almost as many articles looking at and comparing them. Not only do customers look to these articles for advice and guidance, but they’re also hugely beneficial for your off-page SEO. 

Backlinks are those links which come from a source external to your own site, for example an article on Food Network’s blog linking to a cooking tool they mention. Gaining backlinks from high quality, high authority sources is a big boost for your SEO, as it demonstrates to Google that your content can be trusted to show to search users. Link building is the process of researching and acquiring backlinks for your store. 

Building backlinks for your subscriptions starts with looking at what content is already out there. Which sites do your target customers trust or spend time on? Input different keywords into search engines to look at which content and sites rank highest for the subscription focussed terms you want to target.

This will give you an idea of the sites you want to target. Input more niche keywords to find even more content, and you can start reaching out to these sites to consider your subscription for a future article. Be mindful that you don’t pay for backlinks, as this is a black hat tactic and can do harm to your store’s SEO if caught by Google. Another link building tactic is to identify where your brand has been mentioned but not linked; if you come across your product in any articles without a link to your store, simply reach out to the site owner and request one. 

—-

Subscriptions are a great way to build a highly engaged base of loyal customers and increase your monthly revenue. In order to get to that stage, customers need to be able to find your subscriptions. By doing as much as possible to build SEO for your subscription products, you’ll improve discoverability and attract more customers.