CBD-Intel: SEO and content for subscribers

One of the monetization models of a website that has grown the most in recent years is paying for access to premium content. Its approach is simple: in exchange for a fee (periodic or fixed), the user can access quality content. This implementation is sometimes also called Paywall.

This type of website presents an SEO challenge, which we want to explain to you through the case of CBD-Intel , a reference portal for information on the CBD industry.

The SEO problem in paid content

Many of the contents of a website like CBD-Intel are only shown to users with a subscription. When an unsubscribed user enters one of these pages, he/she only sees a title and a small excerpt from the article.

Similarly, Google's crawling bot also doesn't see the full content of every subscription-restricted page. And this is a problem because Google will not have the complete content of each article to index it, and then consider it at the ranking level.

How do we work on SEO if the content is not available to Google?

Leaving aside link building for the present case, there are several strategies to work SEO on websites with content for subscribers.

On the one hand, we can configure our website to deliver to GoogleBot the content that a user with a subscription would see. In this way, Google will be able to index all the content and evaluate its ranking accordingly. This implementation must be done technically with great care, since only the GoogleBot and subscription users should be able to see the paid content. It involves implementing GoogleBot verification and applying the Schema data described here .

On the other hand, we must take advantage of the existing content on the web that is not part of the paid subscription for our SEO strategy. Some of the most common cases are:

• Content listings: for example, categories, tags, or other groupings. These listings can be targeted to more generic keywords, reinforcing them with their own content, internal and external linking.
• Free articles: the publication of content open to everyone can be an entry point for organic traffic on our website.
• Landing pages: for those key issues for our SEO strategy we can create specific pages.

As you can see, there are several options to work SEO on premium content websites such as CBD-Intel. If you find yourself in this case or have another web project in mind, do not hesitate to contact our SEO agency.