Are You Using Medium Tags Correctly? Increase Your Exposure 1000X Times

Examples, common mistakes and how to choose the right tags

Graphic by Paulett-Marry, edited on Canva

I used to have my own blog and knew how to drive traffic using SEO to it. On Medium, I jumped right into things with a similar mentality. One of the important tips in SEO is to use long tail keywords and related keywords. So I started doing this on Medium.

Until I discovered this was a mistake.

I will explain this with an example. I wrote this article a few weeks ago:

This is How Climate Change Affects Our Mental Health

The Serious and Hidden costs of climate change

medium.com

It is about mental health and climate change. So I went for the following tags:

“global warming” “mental health awareness” “psychology” “environment” and “climate”. Now, they are all indeed related to my article, and “mental health awareness” could count as long tail.

However, there was a problem.

I was limiting my exposure. My article wasn’t reaching a lot of people. Here is the number of followers for each of my tags:

Climate: 737 followers
Environment: 5800 followers
Global warming: 400 followers
Mental health awareness: 809 followers
Psychology: 1.7 million followers

Now, if I changed global warming to “climate change”, I would get this:

That’s right: a 174900% increase in potential readers. There are 400 people following the topic global warming compared to 700 THOUSAND members following climate change. Let that sink in.

But hey, at least you chose “psychology” as a topic and it has more than a million followers! The thing is, psychology is a relevant tag, but, it is too broad. Articles under this tag could be about productivity, kicking bad habits and relationships. The kind of article discussing research on climate change and its effect on mental health isn’t the first thing that people think of when they decide to follow this topic/tag.

Choosing The Most Relevant Tags

First, Medium will helpfully use its algorithm to suggest relevant tags when you start choosing the 5 tags for your story. Study them and make sure they have a good follower count to maximize your exposure. You can find the follower count by using the search bar in the Medium mobile app.

After that, search for a few relevant tags, and see what other topics are suggested. Try to find a more specific tag but also one with big follower count. If two tags are nearly equal in terms of followers, choose the more specific one. A frustrating example of this is the the topic “self”. Yes, it has a large following, but are you writing about self care, self improvement or self publishing? Or is it “self driving cars”?

Obvious But Important

Spelling

I made this mistake before, please don’t fall in this trap. It takes a few seconds to check and can make all the difference when it comes to the number of followers.

Good practice

Use all 5 tags.
Don’t spam or use irrelevant tags.
When submitting to publications, read their submission guidelines. Many will advise on topics or even require that you use a certain tag.