This is going to be a short but hopefully very useful blog.
Did you know that aside from having its own inbuilt audience –
Medium also has huge domain authority –
And therefore ranks incredibly well on Google! But the big question is how to rank Medium article on Google?
Look HOW MANY keywords Medium ranks for according to SEMRush:
52.8 million keywords currently rank in Google according to SEMRush – which probably means over 65 million if we were to get access to Medium’s Google Search Console.
But if you take this one step further – you’ll see that Medium has 420,000 keywords in top 1-3 positions on Google JUST in the United States.
So now that we’ve got here – the next step would be to identify a keyword that is connected to your business:
In this instance I’ll take the example of a client who has a CBD business:
This demonstrates there are 13 articles that rank top 3 on Google for the ‘CBD’ keyword – that would theoretically drive 608 visits based upon the search volumes staying the same.
An actual Google search demonstrates this result for ‘CBD dosage’ (1,600 searches per month in the UK) to be accurate – with a medium article coming in 3rd.
Then it’s a case of examining the actual Medium post itself:
This one is a 19-minute read which means to do better than this one we’ll need to make it more extensive – which means writing a monster blog at 1900 words.
Furthermore, if you analyse this title’s backlink profile:
You’ll see that it’s got a total of 32 backlinks and 14 of them which are do-follow.
And looking at the article itself I can see it has a link to the ‘money website’ of Alphagreen:
(see just below the image)
[convertful id=”197358″]
And then the authors themselves are from the same company and have a clear Medium strategy in place:
They have taken the pain to build a whole publication themselves to drive traffic from Medium to their brand.
Quite clever really.
When you combine that with reading a blog like this which walks through how to rank on Medium and rank your Medium article on Google and talks about:
There are some fundamentals here that are important.
You do need to produce amazing content to ensure that it ranks above the currently existing content – and then you need to throw some links + social signals behind it.
The CBD Oil is quite a challenging one to compete against because of all of the work that’s gone into putting it together as well as it actually having its own link profile.
However, there will be many many more blogs that are under optimised for which there will be more opportunities.
Furthermore, you can build some simple web 2.0 links to your post to help bolster it’s backlink profile.
Something such as reposting it onto Tumblr, Blogspot, or LinkedIn and adding a canonical link would be potentially enough to give the article more weight than others that have no links whatsoever.
I quickly took a look at a DIFFERENT keyword – ‘entrepreneurship’
I immediately found 9 articles that are ranking top 3 of Google and took a quick look at them:
I then took a quick look at UK searches to determine if it really is number 2 (in regards to the 1st search):
As you can see it is.
And then when you go ahead and take a look at the article itself:
You’ll notice it’s a 3-minute read with no images and can definitely be ‘better written’.
Furthermore, when looking at its backlink profile you’ll see that it’s got 2 ‘do-follow’ links and we could probably rewrite the article and reach out to the authors to replace the old content with ours:
Some final thoughts – make sure you add alt-text to your images so Google can read them and do all of the things outlined in the screenshot above – and drive yourself to Medium success.
Let’s get writing!
