Use SEO to Grow Your Posts
How to grow your most lucrative posts using search engine optimization
Goal: Increase readership for certain posts
I have a couple of posts that do pretty well right now with the traffic that I have. But, I want to grow my readership and also my earnings. The best way to do that is to get traffic to my posts.
One way to do that is to promote within this ecosystem. Another way is to promote specific posts outside. We have been doing SEO for a lot of our posts here on ILLUMINATION. That is a great start.
Why would you want to do this?
You will want to take a second step beyond that for particular posts you want to highlight.
№1: You can do this for extra exposure so people see and appreciate your work, or
№2: To increase your revenue by capturing Medium users who might be searching Google for topics.
My recipe for optimizing to have a search engine pick up my post
If you have missed my article about targeting long tail search terms, please review it as it is packed with much valuable information that will help you.
An easy way to find popular long tail keyword phrases
We are going to target long tail keyword phrases for the subjects our posts are about.
One way to figure out what long tail keyword phrases to use is to run a search on Google to find what people are asking the search engine about your keywords.
Cynthia Marinakos writes about how to run this type of search in her post “A Quick Google Trick to Find Out What Your Customers Want” in Better Marketing.
Next Step: Write up a blog post outside of this platform pointing back to your post
After finding the keyword phrase that will work well — or a couple of them, write up your post using the keyword phrases and point them back to your post or story here. Remember to use anchor text reflecting the long tail keyword phrase for maximum search engine optimization.
I wrote a blog post for one of my experimental search engine optimization posts: “How to Achieve Success on Medium.” This platform redirects links, so I’m not sure the SEO value this particular link from here, but it is a way to show you the idea of what I’m doing. But, my goal is to get search engines to weigh my original post higher, so it really doesn’t matter that my blog isn’t getting full power. But, if it shows up high in search results, it will also send traffic back here, so it is a win.
It make take a couple of weeks to see new traffic, unless the topic is obscure
I will keep an eye on where I want the post from here to show up on the search engines. If there is some serious competition, I will need to keep building similar pages linking back to the original post. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, so just make sure to change up your content. If you aren’t writing super long blog posts, this will be easy to do. You can cover several different facets of your original post that you want to rise in the results. Maybe spend a week going through each point with a quick blog post using your long tail keyword phrases.
It isn’t very hard, but just takes effort
Like everything else in life, it isn’t necessarily hard once you figure out what to do.
Paul Myers MBA, writes, “As an ex-swimmer, I always recall my coach saying: ‘10 percent talent and 90 percent hard work.’”
Keep experimenting and building out little blog posts to amplify your message using your keyword phrases
You can keep experimenting and building out pages to your best posts. You can tell which ones are the most lucrative on your partner report. Work on one the first week, then the second highest earning one the next week, and continue down your list.
You can check your traffic statistics to see the effect and how well your efforts are working.
Just keep up the hard work and after a little time, you will start to see results.
🦄 Chris Hedges, BA, JD, is an editor at ILLUMINATION.
