Medium SEO: How To Rank Your Medium Article In Search Engines

If you are a writer on Medium then learning search engine optimization is a part of your job. My stories on Medium never get curated nor published in popular publications but one thing that made me stand out is my understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and using it the right way to get more viewership and Medium member views on my articles. Even if I don’t write on Medium, I will still make $200 a month writing on Medium. That’s why I love to write on Medium.

This article is one of the detailed guides about learning Medium SEO. I have an experience of over 4 years of writing on my blog and almost two years of experience writing on Medium, so I think this article is one of the best resources you could find about learning about Medium SEO. You can also read another version of this article on Medium: Medium SEO: How To Rank Your Medium Articles In Google Search

Why do You need to learn SEO as a Medium writer?

None of my articles on Medium ever get distributed. I know this is not a good thing but this is a ray of sunshine for anyone who wants to write on Medium and make money writing on Medium. Medium is one of the best platforms for writers who want to share their thoughts, knowledge, or anything online. Some writers write stories like “I like her more than anything” as a title in your Medium story then for search engine optimization it has zero value. But if you write an article like “Why I like her more than anything in my life” or “She was my love, This is why I love her more than anything” it may have more value.

This is why every writer needs to learn search engine optimization. Another reason to focus on SEO is that a writer spent a lot of time writing an article or the best 1,500 words about a topic and the piece just vanished in a sea of articles because it is not optimized for the search engine.

Medium SEO Title:

The title is the most important part of your Medium article. There are two types of keywords; the primary keyword and the secondary keyword. The primary keyword is your main keyword. It has more search volume, it is fairly competitive in most cases.

Let me share a title with you that did really well in terms of search engine optimization.

As you can see this article got me over 300K views, $30 in Medium Partner Program, and $600 in dealing with an affiliate company that works in the same industry. As you can see, I am targeting three keywords here; “How to get famous on TikTok”, “How to get likes on TikTok” and “How to get views on TikTok” This article is ranked on the Google first page on all these three keywords.

The primary keyword should be first to write and it should be followed by the secondary keyword. You can add a little flavor to your title to get a higher CTR by making it a little clickbait.

The title is followed by a sub-title like the one shown in the picture given below;

As you can see, you shouldn’t avoid the subtitle in your Medium story. You can also repeat your primary or main keyword or use your secondary keyword to getting ranked for that too. This is what we called Medium SEO title and sub-title. Optimizing the title and the sub-title is 60% of the job. The rest 40% is related to the content and how you use other on-page and off-page SEO tactics.

The on-page SEO is to use the SEO techniques in the articles like internal linking, adding alt-text to images, adding external links when necessary, adding images or rich media like videos, and the structure of information.

The off-page SEO is to make your blog post load faster, making a backlink for your blog post and sharing your blog posts on social media also called social signals.

Medium SEO Description:

As you can check out the Medium SEO title appear in the title preview which you can change here too if you want to add another, a new title to your story. The SEO Description is the description that appears beneath the title in the search engine listings. This is a very important part of search engine optimization as the search engine crawl also uses these words too for ranking purposes.

You should use your primary and secondary keyword in the SEO description, you can also use the synonyms of your main keyword so that you get the attention of those minority writers who are searching for this keyword.

[Video] Medium SEO: How To Rank Your Medium Articles In Google Search A Complete Guide With a Case Study

In this video, I have discussed in-detail Medium SEO. Watch the video completely as this is probably one of the best videos about understanding search engine optimization on Medium.

The whole SEO process:

The whole process of SEO on Medium is easy and I will share my personal process of Medium SEO with you guys.

Step#1: Start with keyword research: This is a standard for any blogger who is doing search engine optimization. The keyword research starts with searching your desired keyword on any keyword researching site like SEMrush or AHREF, you can also do manual keyword research for looking at the competition.

Step#2: Plan your article: Now, this is also a very basic process. You have to write your title, sub-title, and the sub-headings you are going to use. Use all the sub-heading before you start writing anything. This will help you to just write about sub-headings and your article will be done.

Step#3: Edit your SEO Title and Description: Now, you might be thinking, why I need to change the title? don’t. Don’t change it if you think it is optimized but do change the SEO description of your Medium article because Medium chooses the first 160 characters from the very beginning of the article so if you change it, it will have a huge impact on your SEO strategy.

[Video] Medium Search Engine Optimization (SE0) Case Study Of An Article That Got Over 150K Hits From Search

This video is the case study of one of my most famous articles on Medium. I have analyzed my Medium article and why it did really well, we find some of the things.

Tips For Optimization of your Medium articles

Optimize your titles, sub-title, headings, and the body of the content: Put your keyword in all these sections of the article.

Write long-form content: There are a lot of studies that show that writing long-form content could help you get more views and a good ranking in search engines.

On-page and off-page SEO: If you are adding an image, add a JPG image as it takes less space. Learn some On-page and off-page SEO tactics that could help you get more views on your Medium articles.

Add alt-text to your images: You should add an alt-text to your images as it will help search engines crawl to find what is in the image.

Just write quality content: Just write the best quality content. Content is still king. If you know about a topic, just write the best information you have about that topic.

A new version of this article is available here on my blog: Medium SEO: How To Rank Your Medium Articles In Google Search?

About The Author:

You can check out my Medium handle here: Aamir Kamal 🚀🚀🚀 and my YouTube channel Aamir Kamal, in both these platforms I upload content about Blogging and Marketing and everything connected to it. You can subscribe to our Newsletter where every Sunday I will submit some of the best content related to Blogging, Medium, Ghost, Quora, and Marketing, or anything related to these topics.