Imagine a social network for writing and telling business stories. A community maintained and operated by young, qualified, and passionate writers who want to share their ideas with a wide range of people. It is similar to Instagram but used for storytelling and valuable for SEO activities. In addition, it even individually curates publications or relevant content to recommend to target audiences based on their interest in the content you’ve written before. These are the characteristics of the Medium online content publishing platform, and you can fully give great value to your website through building Medium Backlinks for SEO. Learn the importance of Medium backlinks for SEO and How to create backlinks step by step on Medium.
✅See also: What Are Backlinks? How to Increase Backlinks for Free? +10 Techniques
In this article, MakeMoneyTactic will help you learn what Medium is, why you should (and shouldn’t) use this social network, and how to evaluate some of the challenges of using Medium to push your SEO activities.
Importance of Medium Backlinks for SEO and How to Create Backlinks Step by Step
Before learning How to Create Backlinks Step by Step, we shoud know the importance of Medium Backlinks for SEO. Like other social networking platforms, backlinks from Medium all have a nofollow attribute. But does this mean that these backlinks will not bring any value?
Certainly not. As you may already know, nofollow links still have SEO value.
In addition, there are two ways to put backlinks on Medium. The first way is to use a regular standard hyperlink with anchor text, as shown in the screenshot above. The second way is to create hyperlink blocks in the form of blocks like this:
The advantage of this approach is that they will divide the story’s content shared on Medium, becoming more prominent instead of sinking in the middle of many other words. These eye-catching hyperlink blocks can generate traffic from Medium to your blog if used strategically. And then, you can leverage the power of the Facebook Pixel tool and retarget these visits from Medium, so your brand is always top of mind. Or you can also build an email list of potential customers and exploit the conversion opportunities from there.
Remember that the ultimate goal of SEO is not only to generate more traffic to your website – but also to help your business generate more profits. So any tool that can help drive relevant and highly relevant traffic to your target audience will work.
Medium Backlinks for SEO: Why blog on medium?
It’s clear that nofollow links offer no direct value. So should you invest in SEO activities on Medium?
Depending on what your goals are, let’s take a look at some of the pros:
1- ACCESS TO A LARGE AUDIENCE BASE AND THE ABILITY TO BE FOUND ON MEDIUM
If done right, posting quality content on Medium will help you gain thousands of readers daily.
Besides the organic feed, there are different ways you can get your story in front of your readers:
- Followers: If people are interested in your content, they will follow you on Medium. They will receive a notification every time you post a new article.
- Tags: If you understand how hashtags work on Instagram or Twitter, you will understand Medium’s tags. You can select up to 5 tags for your posts. People can flip through the content related to the tags and see which articles have been recently published.
- Interact with other authors: Because of Medium’s nature as a social networking platform, commenting below someone’s story and creating a conversation with them is a great way to bring content into the world. If your content reaches more people, one thing to keep in mind is that don’t treat Medium like Instagram – you need to focus on quality and valuable feedback.
- Write articles for newspapers on Medium: A newspaper (publication) is a collection of selected articles on a particular topic (for example, on economics, there is The Economist on the topic). For startup topics, there is The Startup newspaper). An editor runs these newspapers, and you must submit your articles for their review if you want to be published here. But newspapers often have a huge audience (both of the newspapers mentioned above have more than 400,000 followers), so this is a great way to start investing in your presence on Medium.
2- Build potential relationships with other creators and businesses
Commenting and writing for newspapers are great strategies. Still, they’re only really worth it when you start having meaningful conversations with your target authors—the people you want to build a relationship with.
Sure, you might want to get a few organic backlinks from their Medium posts or blogs at some point, but the real value here comes from the potential for future partnerships – or merely adding a valuable name to your personal network.
3- EFFECTIVE MEANS OF CONTENT TESTING
If unsure if something appeals to your business’s target audience, you can post the topic on Medium and start a community survey. The feedback you get – or not – are valuable indications of whether or not the topic resonates with your target audience.
4- SYNDICATING/CROSS-POSTING ON A THIRD PLATFORM
You can insert your articles directly from WordPress using Medium’s insert function. Medium will automatically tag rel=canonical (to let search engines know which articles are genuine), so you don’t have to worry about competing with your own website in the search results.
The downside is that these reposts are not eligible to appear in Medium’s newspapers. Only followers or people who search it organically on Medium will see it.
So why do we still choose to repost content on a third-party website?
- Reuse your best articles. Updating new articles weekly on Medium and the blog can take a lot of time.
- Stay active on Medium. Scaling on Medium requires regular activity. If you’re running out of time (or ideas), reposting old content will help you stay active when you don’t have a timely plan.
Of course, the above reasons will help generate more backlinks from Medium.
Medium Backlinks for SEO: Why not blog on medium?
As mentioned above, nofollow links offer no direct value and raise questions about whether Medium should be used as a growth lever for SEO. Here are some downsides to consider:
1- OPPORTUNITY COST
If you choose to blog and aim to collect backlinks from Medium, you need to invest a lot of time. Since the articles you create on Medium are not guaranteed to bring traffic to your website, you must agree to spend time on this instead of focusing on another platform.
2- THE RISK OF KEYWORD EATING MEAT
The risk of keyword cannibalization which is when different pages on the same website rank for the same word, thus locking and competing for rankings on the SERPs still exists.
The Medium doesn’t have a plugin like Yoast SEO to warn you if you’ve used a certain keyword before (and it certainly can’t tell you if you’ve used or are ranking for that keyword on your WordPress site). ), so you need to be proactive and monitor this condition manually. Or you can use support tools like Monitor Backlinks for easier control with keyword rank tracking.
3- LIMITATIONS IN BUILDING A CUSTOMER EMAIL LIST
Because you can’t insert a lightbox pop-up script into Medium posts, the options for building an email list of potential customers are limited. You can only implement it with in-line forms or call-to-actions at the end of the article.
If SEO and content marketing is one of the levers you use to build your customer list, most new email subscribers convert thanks to pop-ups/lightboxes on your website. The Medium might not be the right choice.
4- UNINTENTIONAL INCIDENTS
You are not the owner of Medium, so you are always in a passive state and very vulnerable if something goes wrong, such as Medium deciding you have violated their terms and deleting all of your content set and your account. Of course, this risk is still possible with Google and SEO activities, but it is an issue that you need to consider nonetheless.
✅See also: SEO Basics: The Best SEO Guide for Beginners and More!
✅See also: On-page SEO Techniques: How to Increase Website Traffic?
✅See also: Off-Page SEO Techniques: How to Rank on Google?
How to Create Backlinks Step by Step from Medium?
In the above content, we discussed whether to look for backlinks from Medium or not. But how to create backlinks step by step from Medium?
First, you need to understand that getting backlinks from Medium will be a different process than traditional.
The reason is because Medium writers are not very interested in SEO. They use Medium because they want to write their stories. At the very least, one of the merits of writing on Medium is that you can get your content in front of your readers without worrying about SEO (or having to use effective advertising).
So if you want to get backlinks from Medium, choose the indirect approach.
How to create backlinks step by step: Direct method to get a backlink from Medium
The direct approach of getting backlinks from Medium is by posting regularly blog posts related to the same niche and adding backlinks to your website inside these blog posts.
How to create backlinks step by step: An indirect method to get a backlink from Medium
At the beginning of the article, we mentioned that one of the biggest benefits of posting content on Medium is that it is easy to appear in front of some big names who spend a lot of time surfing Medium, and they also own its websites.
The strategy here is to build a real relationship with these people who have the power to give you both dofollow links from their websites and nofollow links from high-traffic posts on Medium.
1- Identify Potential Partners
Please use the search function on Medium. Look through the newspapers. Follow people and read posts from them. Click on the commenters’ area and read what they post.
2- Interact With Their Content
Write meaningful and insightful comments to start the conversation. You also need to comment on other people’s comments, paying attention to what they write. If you write roundup articles on Medium (which compiles the best content that has just been released monthly or weekly), recommend and mention them. Overall, do everything you can to continue the conversation between you and the author.
3- Research The Type Of Content They Link To
The most effective way to get backlinks from someone is to create the type of content they are linking to. Think about the question: What types of content does this person prefer – real-life situations, infographics, stories, or short essays?
4- Create That Kind Of Content Both On The Blog And On Medium
This depends on how you use Medium. You can repost content directly to Medium. Or, you can use Medium as an extension of the article you’ve written on your blog and put a link back to the blog page that contains your original post.
5- Bring Out Content Specifically Created For Medium First
Here’s the secret to managing multiple channels: For every channel, everyone wants (feels) that the platform they’re on should be the place to stay up-to-date and contain a lot of value.
Likewise, the people of Medium want the most engaging and complete content to happen on Medium, not your website.
The prep work is done at this step – you’ve created excellent blog content and built relationships with other authors. The rest of the work will be similar to link-building outreach. You will reach that author through means, most commonly email and content suggestions of the same value that gives them to get backlinks on a mutually beneficial basis.
This process can also be applied to regular blog sites. All content writers love to receive meaningful and insightful comments on the content they create.
Summary of Medium Backlinks for SEO: How to Create Backlinks Step by Step
Investing and collecting backlinks from Medium certainly has its own advantages and disadvantages.
On the one hand, there are many benefits to building a presence on Medium, such as:
- You get access to a new audience file and search capabilities built into Medium.
- Easily build relationships with other authors, many of whom also own/post content on their own business websites and may link to you in the future.
- This is an excellent opportunity if you’re new, unknown, and need to get in front of your readers.
If SEO is your ultimate goal, you need to be aware of the time and money required to create quality content by posting original content on Medium. For example, that content could have been posted to your website and provided more direct SEO value.
However, suppose you don’t have a problem with growing slowly step-by-step and maintaining your done activities long-term. In that case, Medium is a valuable platform for developing direct and indirect relationships.
