How Health & Wellness Brands Can Dominate Organic Search

Consumers have never been more interested in their health and wellness. More and more people are joining gyms, investing in apparel, and exploring different supplements.

As a health and wellness brand, you want your products or services to become an integral part of people’s daily routines. But before you can become a part of their workout and recovery routines, they need to know about your brand.

That’s why Organic Search optimization is so critical.

Not only does high Organic Search visibility offer a competitive advantage and enduring, long-term results, but it also delivers a stunning ROI.

However, these benefits also mean that Organic Search is a crowded space, and that’s before even considering how Search results pages have changed in recent years.

So, how can your health and wellness brand compete to drive the traffic, conversions, and revenue necessary to scale your business?

Here’s what health and wellness digital marketing teams need to know to help their brands dominate organic search.

You spent years refining your products, ensuring they would meet your customers’ expectations. The same is true for any Organic Search campaign.

Even the most well-informed, expertly executed tactics will be wasted if implemented aimlessly, kind of like lifting weights without proper form. All of your marketing efforts must fit into a carefully crafted digital strategy designed to achieve specific results.

When it comes to Organic Search, your strategy should be founded upon thorough keyword research. Targeting the right keywords is crucial to hitting your KPIs and maximizing ROI.

In most cases, you’re looking for Goldilocks keywords.

Your keywords should:

That usually means long-tail keywords are the way to go. These aren’t single words but short phrases made up of multiple words.

Long-tail keywords are typically less competitive, meaning they can offer enhanced Organic Search visibility in a shorter timeframe with the right strategy and optimizations.

Plus, because long-tail keywords are more specific, there’s typically specific user intent behind them, so these keywords come with improved conversion rates if your content delivers on the searcher’s intent.

The keywords you choose will inform the next crucial piece of your Organic Search optimization: your content.

Content is the key driver of topical authority and user trust, so it’s not an area to cut corners.

From meal-prep recipes to supplement guides to workout how-tos, the health and wellness industry is practically built on content in all forms.

Investing in the processes necessary to create world-class, people-first, helpful content will pay dividends for years to come.

To maximize visibility and enhance your funnels, your content needs to be:

Written by genuine experts in your industry/niche. AI is often viewed as a cost-effective means of creating content at scale, but AI writing tools aren’t capable of demonstrating the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T) that users and search engine ranking systems want to see.

Designed to provide genuine value to users. Your content should answer a specific question, share new perspectives, or provide new knowledge. Optimizing your content with these factors in mind can also help you appear in Google’s AI Overviews, answer boxes, and other prominent SERP features.

Focused on relevant keywords. These keywords are critical to your overall Organic Search strategy, ensuring your content appears in results for your target audience.

Created for real people, not search engines. You can optimize your content to be discovered and understood by search engines, but if the content isn’t user-oriented, it will never rank highly, meaning it will have no benefit to your brand’s online visibility.

Written content is a reliable driver of results in any Organic Search campaign, but it’s often worthwhile to expand into other forms of content, including video and podcasts.

These formats lend themselves especially well to health and wellness content, as people are always searching for new workout routines, reviews of supplements, or just general insight from experts in the field. Plus, they’re easily sharable, helping you expand your brand’s organic footprint.

This type of content would fall under the on-page SEO category, but off-page SEO has its place in your Organic Search strategy as well.

Off-page SEO consists of building a favorable perception of your brand elsewhere on the web, beyond your own site or social pages. Google uses trust and authority signals from throughout the web ecosystem in deciding where your brand deserves to appear on SERPs.

Link building is the process of getting other sites to link back to yours. For example, if a news site or industry blog links back to your content as a source for a claim, it shows Google that other sites trust your brand as an authority on the topic.

Link building is not the same as digital PR.

Instead of focusing primarily on influencing user perception of your brand, link building and content syndication are about attaining links that send the right signals to Google and other search engines, increasing your chances of appearing high up in search results for your targeted keywords and related queries.

As you might imagine, link building is all but impossible without best-of-web content.

As you strategize around content creation, ask yourself:

These questions will help you build the type of content that other sites will want to link to. Yes, you should always allocate bandwidth for outreach when it comes to link building, but this task is always much easier when your team is creating content with intrinsic value.

Just like supplements and workout gear, not all links are created equal. Some will come from spammy or toxic sites, and these links won’t do your site any good in the eyes of search engines.

Some digital marketers are quick to disavow these links to keep their backlink profile pristine. However, disavowal should be a last resort, used only in dire circumstances such as a sudden, drastic drop in traffic or rankings.

Virtually every website has some toxic backlinks. A degree of toxicity in your backlink profile is normal and is typically nothing to worry about, despite what your third-party SEO tools may be telling you (remember, such platforms have a financial incentive to demonstrate value so you’ll continue paying for the subscription).

Your goal is to have a natural, holistic backlink profile full of links from various sites with varying domain authorities.

These days, Organic Search rankings are about far more than just relevance.

Google has come a long way, and the search engine’s mission isn’t just to match web pages with keywords; the goal is to deliver the most valuable results for every query. Relevance isn’t the only measure of value.

The user experience of a page is also a top consideration for Google’s ranking systems, and how a page performs, from initial load to input response and more, is a vital factor Search systems use in determining rankings.

Like content, this is certainly not a place to skimp. Here are a few technical SEO aspects worth prioritizing for aspiring health and wellness brands.

“Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page,” according to Google.

In other words, Core Web Vitals scores help you understand how your pages perform and where you can improve user experience.

Access your Core Web Vitals scores in Google Search Console or on Google’s PageSpeed Insights report for a particular URL.

Over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so if your site isn’t built with responsive design to deliver an optimal UX to mobile users, your brand’s visibility will suffer.

For example, if your font is too small, it could be unreadable for mobile users. Uncompressed images come with huge file sizes, which significantly slow download speed. Pop-ups can be particularly annoying for mobile users, contributing to a higher bounce rate.

Keep in mind that Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means Search prioritizes the mobile version of websites and pages. That should be reason enough to ensure your brand offers a seamless mobile experience.

Your site architecture is the way your pages are linked together via your header/footer navigation menus, textual links, buttons, and more.

This internal linking structure impacts how easily users can find what they need and how well your pages rank in Search results.

First and foremost, your internal linking structure should be designed to enhance your funnels and help users complete conversion actions, whether that’s completing a purchase or submitting a form.

Minimize friction by anticipating users’ needs and placing your most important links above the fold, where they’re most visible.

Minimizing click depth, the number of clicks required to navigate from your home page to a given page on your site, is also key. The goal is to keep click depth at three clicks or fewer for all of your pages, especially revenue-driving pages.

A well-thought-out internal linking structure will also help search engines better understand what your individual pages and site as a whole are about, which is foundational to driving organic visibility.

Capturing revenue in the multi-trillion-dollar health and wellness industry is no easy feat. The competition is capable and motivated, and you have to manage your marketing spend wisely. That’s why brands looking to shorten their path to success partner with VELOX.

As an ROI-focused digital marketing agency, we’ll work with you to implement a fully customized strategy that drives the revenue you need to scale. Our specialists help build more profitable businesses, conservatively targeting 400-800% ROI and consistently exceeding client expectations. That’s why we’re recognized as a Google Partner, ranking among the top 3% of agencies globally.

See what sustained search dominance can do for your health and wellness brand. Contact VELOX today for your free marketing plan.