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Enhancements to ensure your content is getting discovered

Hey beehiiv crew! I'm excited to introduce another roundup of platform updates that we've introduced in the past week.

With these updates, we've tripled down on ensuring your website and content are SEO optimized, so it can be discovered by the world organically.

β›“ SEO enhancements✍🏽 Post editor updatesπŸ“Š 3D Analytics updateπŸ‘‹ Welcome email dataπŸ–₯ Additional website flexibility

β›“ SEO enhancements

These are some of the most powerful updates we've made to date. Creators are gaining a toolbox full of cutting-edge tactics for growing readership from organic search traffic. beehiiv now comes standard with advanced SEO capabilities rivaling any CMS on the market.

EJ White, Senior Growth Manager

Customize post URL

Rather than beehiiv auto-generating URL slug for you, you now have full control to customize it from within the post editor. Your post URL is one of many factors that contribute to SEO and Google properly indexing your web posts.

Slug update GIF

Customize meta tags

Along with the title of your post and the post URL, post meta title is the third in the trifecta of core on-page signals that search engines use to rank content.

Your post title is what user see at the top of your web post while meta title is what users see when they're browsing the search engine results page (SERP.)

In addition to the meta title, you can also update the meta description. While the meta description has no impact on SEO directly, it's the summary that people read before they click on a links, so a strong meta description can help click-throughs which helps content rank higher.

Preview of SEO interface

This can be found under SEO Settings when creating a post

Beyond meta tags, we also now enable you to customize the title and description attributes for both OpenGraph (Facebook) and Twitter tags used to modify the appearance of posts shared on social media networks.

This can be helpful because social media headlines' effectiveness rely less on target keywords and more on compelling hooks and calls-to-action.

Preview of OG tag updates

This can be found under SEO Settings when creating a post

Sitemaps + Robots.txt

We've added comprehensive auto-updating sitemaps to every beehiiv publication making it easier than ever for search engines to crawl and index web publications.

To make best use of this update, create accounts with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, register sitemaps (found at example.beehiiv.com/sitemap.xml, and monitor the keywords for which your publication ranks grow.

In addition, we've added a robots.txt file to efficient direct web crawlers' activities.

These updates bring beehiiv publications squarely into focus with best practices.

Pagespeed improvements

Since launching the newly revamped websites, we have made several additional optimizations to enhance the pagespeed of your website, which is another leading factor regarding SEO.

Pagespeed is a core metric that Google uses when ranking web pages, so a faster page means a higher rank, which leads to more users.

In addition to being some of the fastest, best-optimized sites on the web, publications are fully mobile-responsive, conforming with best-practices indicated by Google's optimization guidance.

No index tag

This should only be used if you're pushing content published on beehiiv downstream into a separate website (i.e. your primary website is not the one we provide). In your Publication Settings you can now toggle to disable indexing, which will prevent Google from indexing your beehiiv website.

This solves the problem of having duplicate content on the internet (one post on your beehiiv site and one post on your other website), which Google dislikes.

No Index toggle

Note: if your primary archive is hosted by beehiiv, we'd strongly recommend not enabling this. By enabling this setting you are telling Google to not index your content.

More to come...

There are still a few additional optimizations we have slated to launch in the next couple of weeks regarding SEO. We'll make a note of these in an upcoming product update email.

✍🏽 Post editor updates

Full screen editor

Due to popular demandβ€”we've introduced the ability to go full-screen when your creating content to give you a fully immersive writing experience.

Full screen interaction gif

Update post publish dates

To date we've always auto-generated the date of your post when you publish it, but in certain circumstances it's possible that you may want to update or override this date.

You can now simply update the date of any post after it's published by jumping into the post editor and choosing a new date.

πŸ“Š 3D Analytics update

Your 3D Analytics Subscriber Report now includes the following data:

  • Unsubscribes broken down by acquisition source

  • Referrals broken down by acquisition source

  • Upgrades to premium broken down by acquisition source

Analytics interface updates

Note: 3D Analytics is our premium analytics tool that's only available to users on our Scale plan. Upgrade to Scale here.

πŸ‘‹ Welcome email data

We now aggregate and display all data from your welcome email. In your Publication Settings under Welcome Email you can both create/update your welcome email there and now toggle over to the Analytics tab.

Welcome email analytics

πŸ–₯ Additional website flexibility

When we launched the new website layout last week we added a few widgets, like the Written By tab in the top left that showcases all of the publication's authors. A few users requested to have that removed, so we have added the ability to toggle this off if you so choose.

Just visit the Publication Settings and toggle of the Written By widget.

"Written by" toggle

If you have any additional feedback about anything, please hit reply and let us know. All of these improvements featured above came from user feedback.

And be sure to follow us here on Twitter for real-time product updates and announcements.

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