Gated Сontent
What is Gated Content?
Gated content is anything on the web that requires users to fill out a form or register for an account in order to access it. The form typically asks users for their name and email address. Some gated content is placed behind a paywall.
Gated content tends to be more premium or exclusive in nature because it asks users to trade in valuable information in exchange for access to it.
One of the most common types of gated content is a lead magnet. In the example below, Hubspot gates a downloadable guide in exchange for information about the lead.
Another type of gated content is a paywall, where users can’t continue reading the article until they make a payment. Paywalled content is quite common for news sites.
Why is gated content important?
Gated content is an incredibly effective way to generate qualified leads. Whereas users can access ungated content and immediately leave your site, gated content lets you gather valuable information about them.
Some websites rely on gated content as a primary means of monetization (particularly subscription-based platforms).
But one of the major downsides of gated content is that it makes SEO challenging. Search engines like Google rely on the ability to actually see (or crawl, more accurately) content in order to index and rank it. If Google can’t see the same content as website visitors, they may interpret it as cloaking and hit your site with a spam violation.
It’s difficult to have gated content that generates leads and also gets loads of organic search traffic. You can still get gated content to rank, but understand that you’ll need to make tradeoffs.
How to rank gated content on Google
1. Post a summary
One way to help Google see what your gated content is about is to post a summary of it. That way, you don’t have to give it all away but can clue in search engines and visitors on what’s behind the gate.
The summary should be written so that Google understands what the page is about. This is also an opportunity to include relevant keywords. Apart from the summary, make sure other parts of the on-page content, like page title, description, URL, etc, are also optimized.
2. Follow Google’s recommendations on Flexible Sampling
Flexible Sampling is when a publisher allows users to access a certain number of articles for free before putting up a paywall. This way users get to “sample” the content before committing to a subscription.
Google recommends allowing readers to access 6-10 articles per month before blocking them with a login or payment.
3. Indicate gated content with structured data
To make sure Google doesn’t mistake gated content for cloaking, you can add specific structured data to your site.
Keep in mind that even if you add this structured data, Google still won’t rank gated content as it would rank ungated content.
4. Use the “noarchive” robots meta tag on gated content
Even if you gate content behind a lead form or subscription, some people can try to learn to bypass the paywall by accessing the cached version of pages on Google. This means viewing the pages the way Google sees them.
To prevent that from happening, you can add a “noarchive” robots meta tag to the pages with the gated content page.
FAQs
What’s the difference between the lead magnet and gated content?
Generally, lead magnets are a certain type of gated content. Lead magnets tend to be premium content, like PDFs, templates, or webinars that aren’t supposed to be indexed. Gated content can refer to lead magnets but can also be used to describe paywalled articles.
What is ungated content?
Ungated content is any content that’s free and open to access without needing to fill out a form, register for an account or pay a subscription. Most content you read online is ungated.
Is gated content automatically considered “thin” content by Google?
No. John Mueller from Google says that gated content is not automatically thin. In the Twitter thread, he went on to say that word count also isn’t considered a ranking signal.