Medium SEO vs beehiiv SEO: Insights from a Medium Writer

Explore SEO Features, Limitations & Best Practices. 

Are you a content creator wondering if Medium SEO is still worth your time? 

Or maybe you’re trying to figure out which platform is best for content SEO. 

Either way, you’re in the right place! In this article, I’ll share my experience doing SEO on Medium—insights you won’t find anywhere else. Plus, I’ll show you how to implement newsletter SEO and article optimization using beehiiv. 

Why listen to me? 

I’m a Medium writer and SEO expert who’s grown a Medium audience of over 20,000 followers. Many of my articles rank on Google, pulling in thousands of views monthly.

One of my top Medium posts has generated over 89,000 views, averaging about 1,854 organic views each month. 

I didn’t do much to optimize or promote this article. But it has been attracting readers from organic search for four years!

So, is Medium good for SEO?

In my opinion, it has its ups and downs, and you should know both before diving in.

I have also spent time in 2024 building my online presence on beehiiv. So, I’m happy to share my first-hand experience on both platforms and help you make an informed decision. 

Let’s jump in!

Table of Contents

• Medium SEO vs beehiiv SEO: Overview of Both Platforms

• Medium’s SEO Approach for Article Writers

• beehiiv’s SEO Advantages for Newsletter Creators

  • How SEO Optimization Differs on Both Platforms

• Medium SEO: Features, Limitations, and Best Practices

  • How Medium Optimizes Content for Search Engines

  • The Main Drawbacks of Medium for SEO

• beehiiv SEO: Why It’s Superior for Newsletters

  • beehiiv’s Built-In SEO Features

  • SEO Flexibility and Customization in beehiiv

  • How beehiiv Simplifies SEO for Newsletter Creators

• Medium vs beehiiv SEO: Which Platform Should You Choose?

Medium SEO vs. beehiiv SEO: Overview of Both Platforms

In case you are new to beehiiv and Medium, I’ve put together a quick intro to both platforms before we dive into the SEO side of things.

Medium is an online publishing platform that’s been around since August 2012. It was created by one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams.

Medium has its own system to recommend high-quality posts to readers. But it relies on SEO and external traffic to grow.

Medium’s organic traffic looks like a rollercoaster ride. After Google’s August 2024 Core Update, its organic traffic dropped from 32 million monthly views to about 19 million between August and November 2024, according to Ahrefs.

Yep, that’s a massive 40.63% drop!

Even with a strong domain authority of 94/100, Medium isn’t immune to Google’s updates. Neither is the content you publish there. 

Now, let’s see what beehiiv brings to the table.

beehiiv is a newsletter growth platform. It’s designed to help creators and businesses build high-performance newsletters with ease.

But beehiiv isn’t just about sending newsletters—it’s so much more than that!

beehiiv provides you with all the functionality you’d need to build a solid online presence for your brand, publish optimized newsletters and articles, and track your performance — all without a need to touch a code! Plus, you can try it out with a 30-day free trial. 

Now, let’s take a closer look at beehiiv and Medium SEO.

Medium’s SEO Approach for Article Writers

Medium’s mission, first of all, is to be “a place where anyone can have a voice.” While it wasn’t built with SEO in mind, it has a few features to support basic optimization.

For instance, you can adjust the meta title and description that show up in search results. There’s an option to set a canonical tag if your content was originally published elsewhere. 

But honestly, that’s about it.

In my opinion, your SEO Medium success will highly depend on your ability to discover low-competition keywords. It’s also essential to use on-page SEO strategies to optimize your articles for rankings. 

Since Medium is an article-centric platform, you won’t have much else to do. 

This approach can work, but it does come with some risks and drawbacks, which I’ll dive into below.

Compared to beehiiv, Medium falls short when it comes to SEO and audience growth tools. 

Medium allows you to build an email list. But it sends out automated newsletters to your subscribers only after you publish a new article.

Unlike beehiiv, Medium doesn’t let you customize the newsletters, publish them on the web, and optimize them for rankings. 

I think beehiiv really shines in newsletter SEO. It helps you connect with your existing audience. You can also turn your newsletters into optimized posts that can rank in search results and bring in new readers.

Let me explain this in more detail. 

beehiiv’s SEO Advantages for Newsletter Creators

Unlike many content platforms, beehiiv sets your newsletter up with its own website, where you can make all your previously sent newsletter editions publicly available. 

It also handles the backend SEO stuff, like sitemaps and robots.txt files. So you don’t have to stress over the technical details. I’ll dive into beehiiv SEO features in detail later. 

If you enable your beehiiv publication for indexing, your content will become searchable. 

Now, imagine if someone’s searching for a topic you’ve written about and stumbling upon your newsletter. Hello, organic traffic and new subscribers!

That’s one of the strategies Future Tools implements to reach a wider audience. 

Every new newsletter edition they send is also available on the web and searchable on Google.

Ahrefs reports they now get a steady stream of 2,000+ readers directly from search results.

That’s some solid progress! It likely wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t started optimizing their newsletters.  

How SEO Optimization Differs on Both Platforms

Medium and beehiiv both support SEO, but they work very differently.

To make things easier, I’ve put together a quick comparison table to show how their SEO features compare. Spoiler alert: beehiiv stands out with more customization options and better tools for newsletter SEO.

Medium SEO: Features, Limitations, and Best Practices

Earlier, I promised to show you how Medium SEO features work and share the pros and cons of doing SEO.

So, let’s dive deep. 

How Medium Optimizes Content for Search Engines

Before starting any SEO activity on Medium, you should be aware of the following: 

Medium has made it clear they don't index everything published on their platform.

Here’s a quote from their official statement:

What this essentially means is that content published from a new account might not become searchable for a while (or maybe not at all).

That’s a big no-no, in my opinion, because you can’t control, track, and influence indexing. 

But if you want to give it a try, Medium for blogging and SEO breaks down into several simple strategies: 

• Inserting your target and related keywords into the content 

• Optimizing the H1 title tag

• Customizing the URL slug

• Optimizing the meta title and description

Let me show you how I applied these strategies using SEO tools on Medium.

For example, I published an article about positive daily affirmations. This has resulted in over 37,000 views over the past several years, where 98% of these views were external.

As an SEO writer, I believe picking the right keywords is half the battle. They should ideally have decent monthly traffic and low competition. So, I conducted keyword research to analyze my topic and find related keywords.

Target keyword: Positive daily affirmations

Related keywords: 

• Self-affirmations

• Powerful daily affirmations

• How to make affirmations work

I included these keywords naturally in the H1, H2s, introduction, and body—without overdoing it.  Aim to use each keyword 1–3 times in your content to keep it reader-friendly.

I also optimized the meta title and description with the target and related keywords.

I’ve also added an optimized alt text to every image. This helps Google and other search engines better understand the context of my article. 

You can only customize the URL slug before you publish your article. If you skip this step, Medium will automatically create a URL based on your article’s title.

All these SEO efforts brought in steady organic traffic to the article from its publication in October 2020 until early 2024.

The Main Drawbacks of Medium for SEO

Even though my examples might seem like a green light to do SEO on Medium, I see quite a few drawbacks.

Compared to beehiiv’s SEO-friendly platform, Medium’s features are limited. 

You can’t control whether your content appears in search results. Plus, you can’t track your organic traffic, keyword rankings, or website performance. 

And last but not least, Medium is a third-party platform with its own content rules. If they believe you violated their policies (even if not), they can remove your entire profile with all content in a minute. All your SEO efforts will be gone! 

If I were to pick the best platform for content SEO today, I’d go for one that’s flexible, creator-friendly, and packed with SEO features – like beehiiv. 

Let me tell you why I think beehiiv stands out when it comes to newsletter SEO and more!

beehiiv SEO: Why It’s Superior for Newsletters

When I first started with beehiiv, I was mainly focused on newsletter growth and monetization. I didn’t expect beehiiv to have such robust SEO features for creating websites, optimizing newsletters, and driving traffic from search results. That’s something you don’t see on other platforms.

Let’s dive into beehiiv’s SEO toolkit.

beehiiv’s Built-In SEO Features

Here’s what you can do and achieve with beehiiv’s intuitive SEO features: 

• Create optimized custom pages and newsletters.

• Control search visibility by turning indexing on or off for each custom page and newsletter.

• Enable breadcrumbs site-wide. 

• Optimize the URL for each custom page and newsletter.

• Optimize the metadata for each custom page and newsletter.

• Verify publication ownership in Google Search Console to track organic performance.

• Customize the robots.txt and sitemap for your publication.

In my experience, these features are all you need to optimize and manage a website, much like WordPress. But beehiiv makes it a lot easier.

beehiiv handles all the technical stuff, like speeding up your site and compressing images. So, you can focus on what matters most — getting your newsletter discovered organically worldwide!

Here’s a quick video on getting started with SEO on beehiiv. If you’re new to the platform, it covers all the SEO features beehiiv offers. 

SEO Flexibility and Customization in beehiiv

Compared to Medium’s limited SEO features and absence of customization opportunities, beehiiv is much more flexible. 

With beehiiv’s “Newsletter Builder,” you can easily customize every detail of your newsletter— from colors and fonts to embed elements, header, and footer styles. 

You can send a newsletter to your audience or publish an optimized version on the web. If you are into SEO, I’d recommend doing both. Your optimized newsletter can help you attract new readers from search results.

What’s also great about beehiiv, is that optimization is part of the newsletter scheduling process. There’s no need to navigate elsewhere. SEO newsletter features, like meta title and description, and URL slug, are there for you to customize. 

If you host your beehiiv newsletter content elsewhere and don’t want Google to rank your beehiiv publication, you can control it. 

To remove your beehiiv content from indexing, navigate to “Website Builder,” then click “Settings,” and hit “SEO.”

Here, enable “Remove Indexing.”

How beehiiv Simplifies SEO for Newsletter Creators

Unlike Medium, SEO on beehiiv is built right into the newsletter creation process. This saves your time and lets you do SEO for your newsletters on the go. 

You don’t need extra plugins or coding skills—everything’s set up and ready for you!

Here’s a great insight from a Reddit user about doing SEO on beehiiv that I thought would be great to share.

What does this mean for you as a content creator?

More time creating and less time stressing over search rankings.

Medium vs beehiiv SEO: Which Platform Should You Choose?

Medium and beehiiv might seem to have similarities. Yet, they have very different capabilities when it comes to SEO.

Medium can be a great option for beginners. It gives you a taste of optimizing content for rankings and taking advantage of Medium’s established authority. 

Do Medium articles rank on Google? Yes—But you don’t get much control over SEO on Medium. This includes vital things such as indexing and performance tracking. What’s even more, you’re tied to Medium’s content publication policies, a violation of which can lead to your content removal from the web. 

beehiiv, on the other hand, is designed with newsletter creators in mind who also want to leverage SEO to build an online presence.

It’s ideal for creators who want to own their audience and focus on long-term sustainable growth rather than relying on someone else’s platform for visibility.

Ready to take control of your content and grow your audience? Try beehiiv for free for 30 days and see the difference for yourself!