503.260.0198

CASE STUDY

How a blog-centric content strategy drives user engagement and search authority

With a limited budget and big goals, how can a startup healthcare business earn authority with search engines and organic traffic from patient prospects? Consistent, informative, user-first content.

Results

201,014%

increase in organic session growth*

110%

increase in the site’s clickthrough rate**

3 blogs

garner more traffic than the home page*

99%

of top organic traffic driven pages are blogs*

85%

of all organic traffic to the site are from blogs*

50%

improvement of average site position
Natalie Nygren, the Director of Content, laughing and chatting with the team

Background

A local healthcare startup was struggling to gain traction in their market. They needed to leverage their website’s organic traffic in order to gain more patient opportunities, and ultimately, increase their product sales.

As a multi-location practice operating in a highly competitive area of the country, they required a strategy that differentiated them from their competitors without weighing too heavily on paid media tactics.

They understood that content was one way to achieve this goal, but didn’t have the in-house resources to accomplish it on their own.

Formada provided them the structure, strategy, and execution needed in order to win.

Natalie Nygren, Director of Content, laughing and talking to team around a table

Goals

Balance their marketing strategy across paid and owned tactics

Increase organic traffic to their website

Differentiate themselves in their local market

Establish themselves as a go-to resource for health information

Goals

After working with the practice’s team in order to clearly understand their goals, we recommended they publish at least two blogs per month. Why blogging? In short:

They provide in-depth answers to searchers’ general and highly specific questions

They pull traffic back to your site, helping you build brand and domain authority

And when they contain relevant and useful information, blogs are positively rated by search engines, pointing traffic towards those sites as good answers to their search queries

We prioritized answering questions that real users might have about their healthcare needs in order to best showcase the business’s real-life experience in providing care to their community.

While we were sure to balance this user-first approach with SEO best practices like targeting keyword volume and sprinkling questions & answers into H2s and body copy, our approach catered more to users than search engines.

This approach allows us to go deeper into more niche subjects, giving the brand greater opportunity to showcase its expertise while also capturing users who are searching for highly specific subject matter.

Through a consistent approach in publishing content that was relevant, useful, and actionable, the practice’s organic traffic increased, and even earned them a Featured Snippet on Google.

Summary

Content is an essential part of any marketing strategy — Regardless of your budget, regularly publishing content, like blogging, can help increase organic traffic to your site, establish professional expertise, and build positive brand perception.

Consistency is key — Having a consistent schedule for publishing your content gives users a reason to come back to your site while also providing search engines something to regularly analyze and rate, ultimately improving your visibility in search.

Longtail queries have real value — We prioritized content that answered user questions and tackled topics that were fairly uncrowded in search engine results pages so we had a better chance of ranking and capturing that search volume.

Make your blogs informative and actionable — All blogs also had a call to action at the bottom that drove folks to the contact form to schedule an appointment with the practice, so those who made it to the end of the post had somewhere else to go on the site.

Practice patience when publishing blogs — Blog content can have an incredibly positive impact on your organic traffic and your brand perception, but it won’t happen overnight. It’s a very different tactic than paid search or social media ads, and expectations should be set accordingly.

Use blogging insights to improve your business strategy — After blogging from six months to a year, you will have invaluable insights that will help you prioritize your ongoing site strategy for adding services pages, paid campaigns, social posts, and more.

Internal links create a useful, coherent site journey — As the blog was built out, we prioritized interlinking opportunities, as well, which was meant to increase engagement with users who landed on the site or who were researching CEC.

<p>*Since June of 2021, organic blog sessions have grown from 7 sessions in all of June 2021 to 14,078 in July 2023 — a 201,014% increase</p> <p>Over that same time period, blogs drove over 88,000 organic sessions to the site and account for 85% of all organic traffic to the site</p> <p>Blog pages are 9/10 of top organic traffic-driving pages since June 2021 with 3 blogs having driven more organic traffic than the home page</p> <p>**Since April of 2022, the average position for the site has improved by 50%</p> <p>The site’s click-through rate also saw a 110% increase over this same time period</p>

Download the print version of this case study

Name(Required)