@ethanhays@lilyraynyc Before joining Healthline, I ran SEO for small businesses, and I learned a good amount about local SEO from following you Andrew.
@ethanhays@lilyraynyc It took about 1.5 years to rebuild the site from the ground up, and we started to see uplift in June 2013 with a Panda update. From there, we focused on quality. A disciplined focus on constantly improving the content and UX drove our growth over the next 10 years.
@ethanhays@lilyraynyc Once we knew the path forward, the team worked to identify creative ways to accelerate success. For example, a partner on the B2B side bought Healthline original content (no-indexed / behind firewall) and that helped fund our investment further. We owned the rights to the library
@ethanhays@lilyraynyc We built out SEO tests with original content and showed the uplift in traffic. From there we began to slowly replace the licensed content with original content, monitor results and scale.
@ethanhays@lilyraynyc It wasn’t an easy journey to prove to leadership the value of original content, but with the right test data, we gained buy in. We killed doc search almost immediately as the content was thin, basically just a phone directory for doctors.