How to Help a Medium Article Rank on Google

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!

November 2026: would I still use Medium to rank?

Reading my 2020 post back, I can hear the SEO enthusiast in me. Huge authority figures, millions of ranking keywords, and the idea that a big publishing platform might give your article a head start. I won't pretend those screenshots are today's numbers. They're a snapshot of what I was exploring six years ago.

Would I publish on Medium now? Sometimes. But I would first decide whether I want Medium's audience or whether I want somebody to discover my own website. Those are different jobs. A third-party platform can be useful distribution, but it doesn't hand you the same control over design, internal links, the reader's next step or the long-term home of the article.

Can you index a Medium article yourself?

You can make the article public, give it a clear title, connect it to relevant writing and earn genuine links to it. You cannot force Google to index it, and being able to inspect or request indexing for your own verified domain does not give you control over Medium's Search Console property. Publishing is not the same thing as indexing; indexing is not the same thing as ranking.

If I were doing the experiment again

1. Pick one specific question your intended readers actually ask. Check the results: are they looking for a guide, a review, a product or a first-hand account?
2. Write the article properly. Include the example, the result and the parts that didn't go to plan when you can verify them. A familiar generic article won't become brilliant merely by living on a strong domain.
3. If the topic belongs to your business, decide which version should be the original. Publish it on the owned site first if that's the page you want to build over time. If you syndicate it to Medium, use the platform's canonical/original-source option where available and check the resulting page.
4. Connect it to related pieces for readers rather than dropping the link onto a hundred random websites. Let the distribution make sense.
5. Check whether Google has found the public article and whether it starts earning relevant search visibility. Give it enough time for a sensible comparison. Don't call a screenshot of a position-one result a business outcome.

The bigger lesson for me is how easily an SEO tactic can become a distraction from the page itself. I now spend much more time asking whether the content helps somebody and whether there is a sensible next click. If you're working on a site you own, my updated hidden-keyword method begins with your own Search Console data, not a promise that any page can rank overnight.