July 12, 2024

The State of Health and Wellness SEO in 2024

Whether you’re a supplements brand or run a chain of gyms, you know firsthand how important it is to stand out from the health and wellness competition online. You also know it’s easier said than done in this competitive industry.

The industry is far different today than it was even five years ago, and digital marketing strategies have evolved to keep up. 

Here’s a look at the state of health and wellness SEO in 2024, along with the best practices your team should implement to achieve this year’s KPIs.

What Are the Top Health and Wellness Trends in 2024?

Aside from fashion and skincare, no industry is more prone to trends than health and wellness. Consumers are always looking for the next best supplement or workout routine, and it’s up to brands to deliver. 

The industry has accelerated since 2020, and it’s currently valued at $1.8 trillion globally and $480 billion in the U.S. alone. This is due in part to a rising interest in personal health and wellness, along with more innovative products from the tech side of the industry. 

How can your brand keep up? The industry moves quickly, but we’ve noticed a few significant health and wellness marketing trends that show no sign of slowing down.

Shoppers Value Function Over Form

Audiences aren’t interested in overspending on flashy packaging or products that don’t deliver results. Now more than ever, consumers want science-backed solutions that target their individual concerns. 

Brands focusing on clean ingredients should take note, as some research shows consumers increasingly prefer clinically proven products over clean, pure, or organic formulations. When forced to choose between function and form, people often choose function—they want results, not flashy labels.

Of course, this sentiment indicates a massive opportunity for brands that can deliver on both fronts, thereby eliminating the need for consumers to choose one or the other.

There’s no denying the existence of a market for clean, pure, or organic products, and this market will continue to expand. But it’s clear that the most desirable business growth opportunities follow product efficacy above all else.

How effectively you demonstrate that efficacy depends on several factors, starting with your brand voice and the extent to which that voice incorporates E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Consumers Increasingly Seek Trustworthy Brands

From the “snake oil” trope originating in the American Old West to the contemporary healthwashing perpetrated by unscrupulous influencers, consumers have good reason to be skeptical when shopping for health and wellness products. 

Ultimately, we’re all looking for a trustworthy voice to provide the products and services we need to lead healthier lives.

Hopefully, this is where your brand comes in. However, it’s not enough to let your products speak for themselves. Your brand needs to speak, and leveraging helpful content that demonstrates E-E-A-T is the best place to start. 

Let’s break down the core concepts behind E-E-A-T. 

Experience

Too many brands make the mistake of relegating experience-related information to the often-overlooked “About Us” page. 

Yes, you should create, optimize, and regularly update your brand’s “About Us” page, but don’t let that be the only place you tell your story or demonstrate your team’s experience. This content should be included on your homepage, collections/services pages, and product or location pages. 

If you’ve crafted high-quality title tags and meta descriptions, site visitors will already know what you provide, so don’t place too much emphasis on your products or services in your on-page content. 

Instead, introduce your brand and tell your story. When and why was your brand created? Who do you intend to serve, and which specific needs is your business designed to meet? Start building a connection with your most valuable customers right off the bat.

Expertise

Recall the form vs. function discussion from above. While your products might be the most effective on the market, consumers are typically hesitant to trust these claims at face value, especially if it’s their first interaction with your brand.

Think of them as eighth-grade algebra teachers—they want you to show your work, not just provide an answer. That’s why demonstrating your expertise is crucial. 

Many brands make the mistake of publishing thin content, or content that doesn’t add anything new to the conversation or go beyond surface-level claims. Remember, you need to show your work and back up your claims so you can eliminate any doubts. This is also good for organic search visibility too, since Google cares about expertise as well—these days, what’s good for the user is good for Google and vice versa. 

Authoritativeness

Just like your brand looks for results from marketing campaigns, consumers are looking for tangible ROI from your products. Regardless of their budget, they want to put that money toward a health and wellness product or service they can count on. 

In short, they want to purchase from an industry leader.

There are several ways to establish yourself at the top of the heap. Here are a few examples:

• Publish high-quality, discussion-worthy content written by an industry expert or team of experts.
• Leverage that content to build a strong social media presence.
• Encourage satisfied customers to write reviews. Address negative reviews by responding transparently and with a genuine offer to make things right.
• Strategically select influencers to review your products or services. 
• Create expert-level thought leadership content and submit it to renowned industry publications.

Demonstrating each element of E-E-A-T isn’t only beneficial for SEO—it’s also good business. It will further strengthen your brand’s connection with key audiences and build the loyalty your business needs to scale.

Trustworthiness

Finally, Trustworthiness is the sum of the previous three features of E-E-A-T, and it’s what can make or break customer loyalty in the long run. 

Whether users ultimately choose to trust you and perform the desired conversion event will depend on how well you convey your experience in the field and your presence as an established authority within the industry. We all want to shop with brands we can trust, and once we’ve found a product that works, it’s easy to make repeat purchases.

Personalized Experiences Aren’t Just Desired, They’re Expected

Across the board, consumers value personalized experiences more than ever. However, they’re also more privacy-conscious than ever before. For years, third-party cookies have been the driver for analyzing user data and delivering better experiences, but that’s all set to change. 

Chrome will stop supporting third-party cookies in 2025, so savvy digital marketers are pivoting to first-party and zero-party data collection to analyze user behavior. 

No industry is better positioned to benefit from personalized recommendations than the health and wellness industry. After all, personal trainers and fitness instructors have been providing personalized recommendations for decades, but modern technology is taking this a step further. 

For example, some wearable fitness devices already use AI to create custom workouts for users based on their fitness data and goals. Brands can even leverage on-site tools like nutrition quizzes and fitness evaluation forms to collect zero-party data, which can drive up AOV by delivering the most engaging product discovery experience in your niche. 

If your health and wellness brand hasn’t started developing a means of providing personalized recommendations, make it action item number one because your competitors are already taking this approach.

What Are the Top Health and Wellness SEO Best Practices for 2024?

Want to get a leg up on the competition? Use this list of proven health and wellness marketing tactics and create action items you can share with the appropriate teams. 

Emphasize Expertise

We discussed the importance of demonstrating expertise as an element of E-E-A-T, but what are some ways you can actually highlight your brand’s expertise online?

Does your organization include board-certified doctors? Create a page listing their names and credentials, as well as a short autobiography (two to three paragraphs) and a photo of each. This will humanize your brand and deepen your connection with shoppers.

Similarly, if you operate brick-and-mortar locations, devote a section of each location page to introducing key leaders and staff members that customers could expect to meet.

Do you sell products that feature a unique combination of ingredients to achieve unprecedented results? Using layman’s terms, give an overview of each ingredient, explaining how it has been typically used and how it contributes to superior outcomes thanks to your unique formulation. 

Each of these examples is an effective way to demonstrate your expertise, but they certainly aren’t the only things you can do. Use these tactics as a jumping-off point and come up with even more ways to highlight your brand’s expertise based on your niche, business model, and most valuable audiences.

Enhance Every Stage of the Buyer Journey with Original, Helpful Content

Publishing and sharing best-of-web content is foundational to leveraging E-E-A-T, growing your social media presence, and addressing your customers’ individual needs. 

In 2024, we’re well into the age of AI-generated content. Many are experimenting with AI writing tools because there’s plenty of upside. It’s cheaper, faster, and allows anyone to create web content in seconds. 

But as with the rest of digital marketing, sometimes the cheaper option doesn’t deliver the best return. Especially when evaluating content, the most important part of cost-effectiveness is the word “effective,” which means you need to be looking at real ROI as your north star.

After all, if your content isn’t of sufficient quality, you’ll struggle to outrank competitors for valuable search queries, drive conversions, and establish your business as an industry leader. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve managed to drive down production costs because your return will still be zero.

AI has its place in most marketing teams, but so do human experts, and they should be the engine behind your digital content, whether it’s written content, YouTube videos, podcasts, or—ideally—a blend of all three. 

Running an e-commerce business? Don’t treat your Shopify setup like a worksheet by simply filling in the blanks for the sake of getting it done. 

Craft every product description with care. Enhance collections pages with buying guides and an FAQ section. Devote the bandwidth necessary to make your blog a one-stop shop for anyone who might be interested in your niche. This way, you can speak to users at every stage of the buying process, from discovery to purchase. 

Focus on Brand Authenticity

What we’ve already covered regarding E-E-A-T would make up the lion’s share of any discussion about cultivating brand authenticity. However, it’s worth noting that brand authenticity doesn’t begin and end with your website. 

Authentic engagement must be the cornerstone of your entire presence. That authenticity must be omnichannel and unwavering, from your homepage to your site’s chat widget to responding to negative reviews and engaging on every social platform. 

Authenticity is also hugely important for enhancing your blog content. Readers want to know where an article came from so they can judge its veracity, and Google wants to reward pages that transparently list the author and make their bona fides accessible to users. This much was clear from the recent Google algorithm leak. 

As ubiquitous as online shopping has become, most consumers are still quite cognizant of the fact they’re ultimately giving their money to strangers. Through authentic engagement, you can assure your customers that you’re looking out for their best interests and will treat them with the transparency, respect, and fairness they deserve. Leveraging content and engagement to showcase brand authenticity is key to enhancing the funnels that drive conversions, revenue, and, ultimately, business growth.

Curate Your Backlink Profile

A robust backlink profile is essential to thrive in organic search. There are several ways to do this, but here are a few of the main points to keep in mind. 

Manual link building takes effort, but successful work on this front will pay dividends for years to come. 

It starts with high-quality industry content, including the thought leadership pieces we discussed earlier. Based on your keyword strategy, create content and share it with leading health and wellness industry sites. Depending on the type of site, you could ask them to republish your content and link back to one of your priority URLs, or you could simply ask for the link itself. 

If this sounds like it will consume significant bandwidth, that’s because it certainly can, especially if this is your first foray into link building and content syndication. Even with some of the free or paid SEO tools available online, it can still be quite a task to do it on your own. And how do you know whether a new toxic backlink should be disavowed or ignored? You might spend an entire afternoon searching for an answer to a simple question.

That’s why partnering with an experienced, trusted health and wellness digital marketing agency is such a popular choice, especially for brands seeking a full suite of services beyond link building.

A strong, correctly configured backlink profile tells search engines like Google that you’re an authority in your space and worthy of inclusion in the top search results for meaningful keywords. 

Not only will your rankings improve, but you’ll also be more likely to see your pages appear with rich results, such as featured snippets, which significantly bolster your brand’s visibility and increase click-through rates.

Use Ads to Maximize Search Visibility and Drive Conversions

Organic search is an extremely valuable marketing channel, and using paid ads on Google and other search engines is an excellent way to complement your organic efforts.

For starters, an organic search campaign will take time to gain traction. But while it ramps up, you can use ads to achieve immediate visibility and start capturing impression share. Even once you’re ranking in the top three SERP positions, you can continue using ads to maximize visibility and box out competitors. 

You can also use ads to research and test new strategies and messages. 

For example, Google Ads is a superb proving ground for keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. Through A/B testing, you can identify which assets resonate with your target audience and incorporate them into your organic strategy. 

Using ads as part of your overall SEO approach can amplify your remarketing efforts, giving you the ability to capture conversions and revenue that otherwise would have walked over to one of your competitors’ sites.

These are just a few examples of how paid and organic search work together, and when both campaigns are run by industry experts, the results can be astounding. 

Optimize Website Performance

Your brand must leverage every possible advantage to attain meaningful online visibility, especially in this hypercompetitive industry. Because the ROI of ranking in organic search is so high, optimizing the technical aspects of your website is vital. 

There’s been considerable industry chatter in the last few years about Google’s Helpful Content System and the importance of creating high-quality, people-first content. We’ve already covered this in detail, but bear in mind that best-of-web content—indispensable as it may be—is just one piece of the puzzle.

Serving up sites with an outstanding user experience is a crucial element of Google’s mission to deliver value to every user for every query. 

Your brand could offer industry-leading products backed by expert, cutting-edge research. You could pursue incredibly in-depth keyword research, then develop and implement a truly top-notch digital marketing strategy. 

But if your site performs poorly from a technical standpoint—multiple large layout shifts, dozens of plugins, third-party code blocking main thread work, etc.—the rest of your strategy will be held back, hurting your visibility and kneecapping your revenue capture.

Yes, you’ll likely have to pull in your web developer and find the internal bandwidth to identify and rectify any such issues. But when you invest in providing the uncompromising user experience Google wants to serve on SERPs, you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings, which means higher CTRs, more conversions, and outstanding revenue growth.

Achieve Exponential Digital Growth with VELOX Media

Health and wellness digital marketing is a crowded space, and making your brand stand out can be a challenge. However, the experts at VELOX, a revenue-driven digital marketing agency, have an established track record of success.

We conservatively target 400-800% ROI, and we’re a Google Premier Partner—recognized among the top 3% of agencies globally—because we consistently exceed client expectations.

We start by getting to know your business as well as we know our own and devise a tailored strategy to reach your unique goals. Then, our organic and paid search specialists leverage the latest technology, leading-edge research, and proven techniques to drive the revenue your business needs to scale.

Make 2024 the year you establish your brand as a health and wellness leader. Contact VELOX today to discover the power of sustained search dominance.