02 Aug Why You Should Be Using Medium In Your SEO Efforts
Medium is a writing platform that attracts 180 million monthly visitors. It’s a great place for anyone to publish their content. But it’s also a great place for you to improve your SEO. Here’s why you should use Medium as a tool to increase awareness of your business through SEO.
Why Medium?
Over the years, Medium has become a popular destination for writers and thought leaders. There’s strength in numbers on Medium, and because so many influential professionals have chosen Medium to broadcast their thoughts to the world, the stature of Medium has risen significantly. Today, Medium has the reputation of being a safe site where readers can go to learn something new and something important. By publishing content on Medium, you’re aligning your business, your brand, and yourself with the top voices in your industry, and your work will be featured alongside those individuals.
Medium is also a great destination for your content because of its layout. Those who come across a link to your Medium post will be greeted with an ad-free experience, as well as an indicator of how long it will take to read your post. This gives the reader an idea of what to expect, helping them to settle in with your content. You’ll have a more engaged audience that’s eager to listen, and readers who like what they see can follow your posts, like or comment on your content, or share your pieces with others.
Medium and SEO
Medium’s own help pages speak about the dangers of relying on Medium solely for SEO — and that’s a good thing. Why? Because Medium’s goal is to prioritize quality content. Medium doesn’t want low-effort posts blatantly geared toward SEO to dilute the quality of the site and drag down its PageRank on Google. Therefore, Medium has stated that it won’t make spammy and overly self-promotional content available to search engines for indexing purposes. The idea is simple — to avoid associating Medium with garbage content that hurts the integrity of the platform.
The end result is that it provides you, the creator of quality content, with an opportunity to shine. Because of Medium’s efforts to clean up its sites for the search engines, you can be sure that well-written and effective work that’s within the spirit of Medium’s mission will be prominently featured on search engines. And again, given Medium’s reputation for quality reading material, viewers will be more apt to give your content a chance.
What’s more, readers and potential customers — not to mention the search engines themselves — will have a much easier time finding you than if you just used SEO tactics on your own site. Those 180 million monthly viewers do a lot to make Medium more prominent in the search engine rankings. Publishing on Medium helps you to get a piece of that pie, elevating your voice and making it easier for your message to be seen.
On-Site SEO Tools
One great thing about Medium is that its SEO capabilities aren’t merely limited to posting content to a platform that gets a whole lot more visibility than your company’s website. You can also take advantage of some resources available within Medium to increase your chances of ranking high on the search engines.
When you post on Medium, you can create a custom URL for your post. That URL could, and should, include the keywords for which you’re trying to optimize through your content. Use those same keywords in your article title, description, metatags, and H2 and H3 headers to make sure your keywords are as prominent as they could possibly be. (However, be careful to not be too excessive with your efforts; as discussed, that could lead to your content not being indexed by Medium.)
Another way to bolster your SEO efforts on Medium is through links. Medium links are nofollow, which means that if a higher profile page on Medium links to your work, you don’t automatically get the rub that comes from being recommended by a reputable source. That said, any links to your work on a site as popular as Medium are highly desirable. You can use the community features on Medium to gain attention and popularity, and you’ll see a residual SEO benefit as other users link to your content.
You can also use links to your advantage in a different way. By linking to your other posts on Medium, you’ll call attention to your content that isn’t as popular with the search engines. You can even break up your content into multiple articles, each highlighting a different keyword; you can then link each of those smaller pages back to one page to which you want to call attention.
Each of these techniques play within the rules of Medium’s SEO policies, while also raising your profile on the platform. The community functionality on the site is a great way for you to not only get noticed, but to form partnerships and to learn about what other businesses in your space are doing.
Lastly, you can build your own Web presence by using Medium. Many businesses publish blogs to promote their business and to establish themselves as thought leaders in their respective industries. Medium can help you to achieve just that. In addition to the keywords you place within your articles, you can also use those keywords in your personal bio. It’s an additional way for you to get your name out there, while also promoting your business and adding an additional boost to the keywords you’re utilizing.
Category Tags
One final option Medium provides for SEO purposes is content tagging. Much like hashtags on social media, category tags help readers to find content, and they help content creators to group their work alongside others so that their articles can more easily be found. A Google searcher who finds a tag they’re curious about might come across one of your articles, giving you another way to use the search engines to your benefit.
Medium is a great platform for anyone who wants to use the written word to gain a greater audience. But it’s especially great for businesses who want to get the word out about their brands and their industries as a whole. Using SEO as part of your promotional efforts will help you to get the most out of your usage of Medium, increasing the profile of your company while also establishing your own credibility as a reputable source of industry knowledge.