Context

Ava Women had relied heavily on paid social for growth, but it was getting more expensive for worse results. We needed to invest in organic channels in order to reduce our reliance on costly and underperforming paid advertising.

My Approach

I launched the reproductive health site AvaWorld and grew it through SEO. Our content competitors included behemoth operations like Healthline and WebMD. Despite being a lean operation with just a Head of Content (me) and a few freelance writers, we managed to outrank larger and better resourced sites for keywords in our niche.

Here’s the strategy I used:

1. Deeply understand our audience. I conducted qualitative and quantitative research to identify our audience’s unmet needs. Instead of prioritizing Ava’s key messages, I focused on our audience’s most pressing concerns.

2. Select strategic keywords. Next, I systematically identified every high-volume, low competitiveness keyword that fit our audience’s concerns. These would be the areas Ava would specialize in.

3. Produce “best on the Internet” content. For each target keyword, I wrote or assigned what aimed to be the most comprehensive treatment of the topic available online. Even on reputable sites, online health content is often just the repetition of unfounded information. AvaWorld never made a claim without referencing a primary source.

Results:

AvaWorld grew from 0 to over 3 million monthly unique visitors in under 2 years.

Organic traffic drove $2M in annual revenue.