If you’re referring to Medium readers as the internal audience, then yes, short-tail keywords might make some sense because there’s less competition on here. However, even on Medium, I’d say optimizing for long-tail keywords is still your best bet. Two reasons:

1. Medium readership generally comes from your followers, getting recommended based on someone’s interests, and landing on the front page because an article goes “viral”. Search doesn’t play a massive role in all of this. I mean, how often do you search for a new story to read by typing random keywords into Medium’s internal search engine?

2. Medium traffic is limited. Unless your story goes viral, you won’t receive thousands of internal views; most traffic will come from Google. In my nudge-story example, as much as 95% of views are external:

External views are growing, even though this story was published over a year ago: another benefit of playing the “long game” (via long-tail keywords, obviously)

And on Google (and other search platforms), long-tail keywords are the name of the game: more than 70% of internet searches are made up of long-tail keywords! Besides, long-tail keywords have higher conversion rates and less competition from “reputable” publishers like Business Insider or the Huffington Post, who would otherwise outrank you.

In short: If you need to be found for a short-tail keyword, then definitely go for it, but don’t ignore all the extra traffic you can gain from using targeted long-tail keywords.