How to Optimize Your Medium Articles for Search Engines

Tips to get your stories to rank on the first page of Google

I recently started to get into a good momentum with publishing on Medium. Around half of my articles show up on the first page of a relevant Google search, but two of them in particular do very well.

“3 Security Pitfalls Every React Dev Should Know” pretty consistently ranks first to third for “react security,” and Google uses my diagrams from “A Gentle Explanation of Logarithmic Time Complexity” to illustrate the search for “logarithmic time complexity.”

Since I’m a tech writer, most of this applies to tech writing. If you’re not a tech writer, there may be some useful information in here, such as how to structure articles and get them out there.

I also only cover Google because I’ve so far been unable to get my articles to rank on other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, at all.

First, a disclaimer:

I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

Wait, I can explain!

Anyone giving SEO advice, with the exception of spokespeople for search engines, will be guessing. Ranking algorithms may or may not work in the ways we think they do, and only the folks working on them know for sure (maybe even they don’t really know). Vendors jealously guard their secrets to prevent hackers from gaming the system and to stop competitors who would steal their technology.

Methods they use for finding good content can and will change with the times. In fact, Google recently made a huge change to how their ranking algorithm works, supposedly making it better at understanding the more subtle meanings of your search terms. Search algorithms change all the time to the point where advice can go out of date really fast.

I am qualified to give advice on this topic. However, even though I don’t know that I’m right about the inner workings of search engines (beyond what I can read in Google’s documentation), I have a good track record across a range of applications — so I must be doing something right.

My experience comes from activism, small businesses, and working at a digital agency. Playing with algorithms is something I enjoy so I do it casually for fun and try a lot of different things.

One thing I’m not qualified to do is to give writing advice. Good writing is an important component here, but I can’t cover it in detail.

Why Care About SEO

SEO is a big business buzzword because search engines are how most stuff on the internet gets found. Getting good placement on Google or DuckDuckGo can mean everything for a company. But what about a Medium writer?

Medium writers get most of our payouts from paying members who read our stories. Random people from the internet who may or may not get blocked by the paywall aren’t really the ones we’re optimizing for if money is what we’re after.

Medium actually changed its policy for payouts recently. Now we also make a small amount on view time from folks who aren’t paying members (if they sign up later).

However, if you write on Medium more for exposure, to make professional connections, and to get recognition for expertise, getting articles on the first page of Google is a great way to do that. I’ve had companies offer me senior React developer positions (even though I’m not senior, not a React dev, nor even a front end dev) because I wrote one popular article about the library.

So is SEO important for Medium writers? It’s up to you. Most of this advice will apply to Medium’s internal distribution as well. In fact, internal distribution is important for search engines so we’ll optimize that as well.

On to Optimization

There are two sides to SEO: technical and marketing. There’s a big mess of stuff that’s very important like page speed, accessibility, mobile-friendliness, etc. that we don’t have to worry about.

Since Medium takes care of all the technical aspects (and some of the marketing), we can focus on the two prongs of internet content marketing: creating something that people are looking for and making it easy to find.

How tech writers can create good content

Tech writing is different from most other forms of writing, but it shouldn’t be. People who consider themselves smart think it’s cool to write things that are harder to understand because only other smart people should be able to follow. Personally, I think this is just an excuse to be lazy.

Principles of writing apply here: have a hook, break it into segments, write at a fifth-grade reading level, etc. I won’t go over those here, but there are some concepts that are unique to creating content on the internet.

The web puts everyone on it at equal distance from each other. What that means for us is that more niche stuff can do well alongside content with popular appeal. If you want something, other people do too — and they’ll be searching for it.

In my case, I write the technical tutorials I wish I’d had when I was learning. While I’m researching a topic, I take notes on what I learned, what phrasing would have made the process faster for me, and facts I thought were surprising when I learned them.

This has two benefits: People who are learning after me are likely to stumble upon my articles and find them useful, and my article will contain the exact search terms I used when I was looking for it (but didn’t find because it didn’t exist until I wrote it).

If there’s something you wish you could read but can’t because it doesn’t exist, write it! I guarantee there are other people who want to read it too.

Making it easy to find

Medium takes care of creating links and making content visible to Google’s crawlers — but it can’t guess what pieces of your article are important unless you tell it. Writing good titles, headers, and a subheader are crucial to being seen by ranking algorithms.

These are a few tips that I really think help in order of importance:

1. Fill out the headers, subheaders, preview image, tags, etc. Write them with humans in mind, not algorithms. Clickbait-style titles are surprisingly still OK with a technical audience as long as they’re not misleading. Use these fields to communicate to a potential reader what your piece is about. It’s better to be honest and get fewer clicks than to mislead and get most people hitting the back button. This takes a bit of practice to get right. It’s OK (and even good) to go back and edit these after the piece has been published — just remember to actually edit them under “Change display title…etc.” under the top right dot menu.
2. Write headings and break your piece up into sections. Notice how I’ve done that in this article? Breaking up an article into chunks makes it easier for human readers to follow, but it also (maybe) makes it more informative to the robots reading your piece. This also makes human readers more likely to scroll to a segment they’re interested in instead of losing interest and clicking the back button. A higher ‘read ratio’ tells Medium your piece isn’t clickbait junk.
3. Publish in publications. For tech topics, I like The Startup and Better Programming. The former is just really big and brings in a lot of views. Better Programming is nice because they actively promote your content and even edit your articles for free. Stories I publish with them seem to do better on Google than any other pub.
4. Add your story to the metered paywall even if it’s only for a week. Getting curated in a Medium topic will display your article alongside many more similar high-quality articles. Search engines look at context and where the content is linked to when deciding how relevant something is to a search (Allegedly. Again, I don’t know any of this for sure). If it’s money you’re after, hey! Two birds, one stone.
5. Post to social media and content aggregation sites. This is supposed to be one of the more important things to do, but to be completely honest, I never bother and my articles still do great. Not getting trolls from Reddit and Hacker News is more important to me than views so I don’t usually post there. If you’re willing to risk it, posting to relevant subreddits (especially if they’re communities you actively participate in) is a good move.
6. Update them! Google seems to prefer newer content over stuff that’s been sitting there for years. This also means that if you see an article in the first place slot that hasn’t been updated for decades, it can probably be unseated if you just write an updated version.
7. Check search suggestions. For example, I noticed that ‘react security checklist’ is a common search term that matches an article I wrote (since it is literally a react security checklist). However, Google wasn’t including my article on the front page for that search so I added this line to it: “Use it a bit like a react security checklist to make sure your apps aren’t vulnerable.” Now it shows up at the top of that search too.
8. Include quality diagrams or original images. This is a hunch of mine that may be wrong, but Google seems to like my original diagrams on tech topics. Graphs and illustrations are probably good to include if you have them.
9. Write articles on similar topics. Having them all grouped together makes you look like an expert in the given field. Not just to people but to algorithms as well.

A Note about backlinks

Backlinks are when sites link to one another, thus increasing each other’s reputability. It’s one of the aspects of SEO that gets a lot of the focus because we do actually have evidence that it helps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t apply to Medium writers as much.

Medium sets all links in articles to ‘nofollow,’ which in theory tells search engines not to crawl the external sites. This is probably to stop spammers and scammers from making the whole platform look malicious, but it still kinda sucks.

However, Medium articles do really well on Google (and not other engines as much) despite this. So either backlinks don’t matter as much as we think they do, Medium compensates with its own distribution, or Google is intelligently ignoring some indicators.

Most likely Medium distributes articles that curators manually choose and that drives most of the traffic from all sources. However, I wonder if Google is a bit smarter than that. A few of my articles that were not curated, that I didn’t share on any social media, and haven’t done well on Medium at all get hundreds of views from Google each week.

Maybe (big maybe) PageRank will recognize a page it has already indexed and classified as trustworthy, but the crawler will still refrain from following links it has never seen. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Google and Medium work together in some way to more accurately index articles.

Again, these are my hunches based on anecdotal evidence.

Citing sources is a considerate thing to do, though, so I like to include links to other helpful material. It probably won’t help with SEO, but it’s still worth it to help readers and to show appreciation for other creators who put out good content.

Classic SEO strategies

For the past decade now the old strategies of stuffing keywords into everything has been actively detrimental to search ranking. Don’t do that. Write for humans first and the algorithms will follow.

Check How Well You’re Doing

1. Look at your traffic sources. I don’t think there’s a way to see what search terms are bringing people to your articles (if there is, please tell me), but you can at least see how many of them found you via Google.
2. Use the dashboard to keep tabs on social media posts. If you have enough traffic from sites like Twitter and Facebook, you can click on their names in the dashboard and look at exactly what posts are doing well.
3. Try search terms in an incognito window. Your searches are tailored to you, and I find that stuff I’ve written generally ranks lower when I’m searching in a private window.

That’s it! Thanks for reading. As always, if you find something misleading or incorrect, please leave a highlight comment.