How a new health brand increased  organic search traffic 25X (and sustained it)

Technical SEO

Our first step was to clean up remnants of a past website migration from Wordpress (including some hacked URLs!). Content on the website was struggling to get crawled and indexed. After one month of tedious technical clean up, we were able to achieve:

• 100% Google indexation of existing content
• 1 hour web publish to index for new content
• Refresh crawl every three days

Research

Our next step was to conduct competitive, audience, and topic research to understand the language that the healthcare brand's potential customers were using to search for information related to weight loss, blood sugar, and metabolic health.

This involved both qualitative and quantitative research. For qualitative research, we talked to the healthcare brand's team, various doctors and dietitians in the United States, and analyzed thousands of health and weight loss threads and forums at scale to get a better understanding of the challenges the target audience was facing; and the questions they were asking.

We also conducted extensive ongoing quantitative research to understand the search opportunity and potential traffic from keywords and topics, using a variety of tools, including Ahrefs, Semrush, Surfer SEO, Google Trends, and some proprietary forecasting tools.

This research helped us to identify a number of key themes and questions that we could target with our content strategy.

E-E-A-T strategy

In the highly competitive health publishing sector, establishing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is very important. We knew that to compete with giants like Healthline and WebMD, we needed to meticulously execute an E-E-A-T strategy to flank the industry leaders in topic clusters they couldn't dedicate resources to. Here's how we set the stage:

• Robust Author Profiles: By creating detailed author profiles with structured data and entity-based external links, we showcased the credentials of the content creators.
• Rebuilding HTML with Semantic Attributes: This ensured that the content was structured in a way that everyone could read and understand.
• Dynamic Structured Data for Articles: Building robust and dynamic structured data helped in providing clear context to search engines. It even helped us grow an audience in Google News.
• Standardizing Primary Sources and Reference Lists: This step was taken to make sure all information was mapped back to credible, peer-reviewed sources, which is something we like to do to build trustworthiness signals.
• Interactive Table of Contents for Articles: By implementing a dynamic and interactive table of contents, we made the content more user-friendly and more crawler-friendly, since it adds a layer of structure to each article.
• Scalable Internal Linking Logic: This was implemented to create a coherent and logical flow between different pieces of content (new and old) without spending manual hours building internal links everytime an article was published.
• Bylines, Post Dates, and Modified Dates: Including these elements added transparency and accountability to the content.
• Medical/Scientific Reviewer Bylines: By having content written and reviewed by medical and scientific professionals, we added an extra layer of credibility and helpfulness.
• Content Integrity Statement: Creating a content integrity statement was a declaration of our commitment to accuracy and reliability.

Each of these steps was carefully chosen to build E-E-A-T signals for this specific case, not just as a compliance checklist but more as a comprehensive strategy to make the healthcare brand an authoritative voice in the health tech space.

Read more about E-E-A-T here

Content strategy

In a field as dynamic and complex as health tech, the content strategy needed to be both agile and robust. Our approach was twofold:

1. Evergreen Content: We identified key themes and questions through extensive competitive, audience, and topic research. This included talking to the healthcare brand's team, doctors, and dietitians, and analyzing health and weight loss threads. The evergreen content was designed to provide lasting value, targeting fundamental questions and challenges that remain relevant over time.
2. News-Based Content: Alongside the evergreen content, we recognized the importance of staying current. We created news-based content that tapped into ongoing trends, recent research, and emerging technologies in the health tech space. This mix ensured that the content was not only timeless but also timely, resonating with the immediate needs and interests of the target audience.

By using a topic clustering model and publishing daily for 6 months, we built authority and created deliberate user journeys, creating a content strategy that was both scalable and responsive to the healthcare brand's unique challenges and goals.

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Content creation

With the content strategy in place, it was time to start creating content. Our team of credentialed medical, nutrition, and science writers (and reviewers) worked from our highly detailed content briefs to produce a range of high-quality, targeted content that answered the questions the healthcare brand's potential customers were asking and typing into search engines.

In nine months, we created more than 200 net new pieces of A+ content.

To ensure that this content was as helpful and authoritative as possible, we made sure to create unbiased and scientifically-backed informative content—written by subject matter experts—in easy-to-read formats.

On-page optimization

Once the content was created, we optimized it for the web using a combination of on-page SEO techniques. This included optimizing the title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags to ensure that they were both keyword-rich and user-friendly.

We also added internal links to-and-from other relevant pieces of content on the healthcare brand's website, as well as external links (in APA format) to high-quality sources.

Results

The success of our strategy was evident in the numbers: a 80X increase in non-branded organic search impressions (visibility) in 12 months, an 40X increase in non-branded organic search clicks, and recurring monthly 150%+ measurable monthly ROI from the channel.

Beyond the numbers, the real triumph was in the impact on the brand's authority and customer growth. We built tangible success and a lasting relationship with the client

"Tony and Tyler at Momentic are the best SEO agency I've worked with. I've led content teams and owned digital content strategy for many years and I haven't come across SEO guys who get content and its role in the entire ecosystem of brand identity and education, engagement and building trust, then conversion and re-engagement quite like them."

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Off-boarding and update

Our collaboration with the client culminated in late 2022 when they chose to explore new directions with an internal SEO/content team. The transition showed self-sufficiency and the robust foundation we had helped build.

2023 Update: The brand continues to thrive, implementing the SEO roadmap we created together. After a brief period of traffic fluctuation, all previous work continues to perform well in organic search.

2024 Update: The strategy continues to work, though gains have diminishing returns. All previous work continues to perform well in organic search and other channels, too.

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