The Webcomics Handbook

The Webcomics Handbook

Improving SEO on Substack

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Brad Guigar
Sep 29, 2025
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One of the benefits of publishing comics on Substack is its powerful SEO capabilities. Since comics are image-based, they’ve traditionally missed out on such opportunities, and this platform nicely compensates for those deficiencies. The only problem is that most of us are ignoring this step entirely.

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Post Settings

Many creators rush through the next step — the Post Settings — after formatting a comic update or a newsletter edition. After all, it’s the same old stuff we hate: Tags, social-media previews and SEO options. But spending a few minutes here can help drive your work to new eyes — and that’s the reason we’re all on the platform in the first place. If you look at the Post Settings, under the scheduling data, you’ll see two important fields: Social preview and SEO options.

You’ll notice that it’s already populated with content from your post. It uses the first image in your newsletter — cropped according to a preset in your settings. The text is pulled from your subhead. If there’s no subhead, Substack defaults to the first sentence in your post. None of these are optimal.

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