The “Challenger Brand” is a concept that sounds exciting on the surface and evokes David vs Goliath imagery. But at Relevance, we don’t see the challenger model as a “little guy overcoming the odds” approach to business. It’s a posture, not a budget, that determines whether a brand wins.

A real challenger finds their own path to success without relying on a large budget to get there. For me, this has never been about scale of spend. It’s about how strategically you use what you have. The brands I’ve watched win are the ones that get strategic with their tactics and dig into the research and information until their strategy is genuinely well-informed, not just well-funded. And when Relevance takes on a brand, we treat their budget like it’s my own money coming out of our own pocket. That’s the mindset that changes everything: when every dollar has to earn its place, you stop asking how to spend more and start asking how to spend smarter.

What Is a Challenger Brand?

A challenger brand doesn’t outspend the competition. They don’t overcome by using the same industry tactics or messaging better. Challengers win based on their unique identity and brand value, not their budget. 

Being a Challenger Brand Is About Posture, Not Budget Size

The thing that separates a challenger brand from simply being a smaller competitor with less money is its posture. Challengers aren’t stuck in the mold of brands that came before them. They break out of those predictable tactics and forge their own paths to success.

At Relevance, here are a few of the key factors that we look for that take smaller brands from competitors to a true “challenger posture.” You can use them as a quick diagnostic self-assessment framework. 

• Is there a clear competitor or market leader you’ve defined as your top competition?
• Are you changing industry “rules” or copying another company’s playbook?
• Are you playing it safe with business decisions or taking targeted and focused risks?
• Are you trying to be louder than the competition or earn attention through substance?

The way you answer these is important. It reveals if your brand is a challenger or is operating as an underfunded incumbent mimicking the more successful operations that have come before you.

Remember, challenger brands don’t win simply because they’re smaller and need to fight harder. They win by understanding the competition — and then competing on different terms.

Why “Spend More” Stops Working for Challenger Brands

Often, smaller brands make outspending their opponent in key areas, like a specific search term, a core marketing objective. The problem is that, limited budgets aside, the “spend more” approach has diminishing returns after a certain point. 

The Diminishing Returns of Chasing a Competitor’s Media Weight

Outspending successful competitors is always tough. Cost per acquisition (CAC) has already skyrocketed by over 200% in the past decade, according to SimplicityDX. This makes simply trying to match or outspend a bigger company’s ad spend a challenge. 

Rather than push inflating ad spend upward as a winning tactic, a challenger brand strategy puts what we call a Spend Ceiling in place: the point past which additional ad dollars stop producing proportional returns. Their marketing teams understand that there is a point at which ad spend flattens or even produces negative returns. 

This natural reaction makes it imperative for a challenger to find an alternative way to compete. That’s where substance comes into the picture.

What Substance Actually Means: The Positioning / Proof / Presence Framework

Rather than overspend, a true challenger brand looks for ways to create substance. But what does that mean? A budget is grounded in dollars. What does it mean to focus on “substance” as an alternative? At Relevance, we break this down into three areas, called the Three “P” Challenger Framework.

Positioning: Name What You’re Actually Against

Real challenger brand marketing starts with clarity. You can’t base your strategy on vague concepts about your industry or general market research. Begin by naming your top competitors. Then work to understand what it is they offer and the USPs (unique selling propositions) that you are genuinely competing against.

Proof: Use Expertise and Evidence to Beat Polish

Challengers confront incumbent brands in a variety of different ways. One thing all challenger brand archetypes have in common, though, is that they lean on expertise and evidence. They don’t try to outshine their opponents. They use real, substantial claims and counterpoints to inform their content strategies and other marketing efforts.

Presence: Earn Attention Where Budget Can’t Buy It

Finally, challenger brands find other ways to earn attention outside of paid ad spend. They optimize owned media (targeting human and AI search visibility). They also craft digital PR initiatives that earn unique third-party mentions through their differentiating USPs.

How Challenger Brands Win Attention Without Outspending Anyone

The Three “P” Challenger Framework helps challenger brands posture themselves in the right direction. But what are some of the tools that help put it into motion?

Earned and Compounding Channels Over Rented Reach

When Relevance works as a challenger brand agency, we focus on key areas where substance beats spend. 

The first of these is SEO. Search engine optimization has shifted in the AI era, but it’s still very much alive. Optimization has simply adjusted to accommodate AI generative visibility as well as direct blue-link human search queries.

I also already mentioned earned media. This key part of the PESO model feels a lot like paid ad marketing in the sense that it focuses on external channels. The difference is that earned media isn’t a pay-to-play approach. Instead, it focuses on gaining the validation of third-party sources not by paying more but through — you guessed it — substance. 

Focus a full guide to growth marketing strategy on these areas and you skip the paid-ads trap. A bigger competitor can always outspend your ad budget. They can’t buy the kind of substance you’re building here. That’s what actually compounds long after any single campaign would’ve stopped paying off.

Should a Challenger Brand Invest in Paid Media at All?

One natural question that comes from the challenger brand strategy is whether paid media is worth it at all. I’m not saying paid is bad. It’s still an important part of the marketing toolbox. It’s just not the main piece, and too many marketers focus on it as the end-all, be-all of a marketing plan. 

It’s easy to use paid to get results, but again, renting attention is temporary. The real question isn’t whether to use paid media, it’s when. That answer changes depending on where you are in the funnel and where your brand is in its growth. Here’s how we map it:

Notice the diagonal. The further right you move, the more paid earns a permanent seat at every stage of the funnel, not because substance stops working, but because a mature challenger is defending ground instead of just building it. Early-stage brands can mostly skip paid altogether and lean on Positioning and PR. Mature ones can’t, but even then, paid is playing a supporting role at each stage, not carrying the whole strategy the way it would for a company with no unique position to protect in the first place.

That’s the nuance most “paid vs. organic” debates miss. It was never a yes or no question. It’s a question of proportion, and that proportion shifts as your brand grows.

Why AI Search Changes the Rules for Challenger Brands

Challenger brands have been around for a while, but AI search is changing the game. Now, challengers need to think about AI visibility and generative engine optimization (GEO) alongside things like SEO and earned media.

AI Engines Can’t Be Bought

One of the biggest differences (so far) is that you can’t buy your way into an AI citation the same way you can pay for a slot on a SERP. This means anyone who takes the “pay to play” approach to marketing is at a disadvantage if they want to show up in AI results. This is already a big deal: Pew Research found that when Google shows an AI-generated summary, people click through to a traditional result in only 8% of searches, compared to 15% of searches without one. That gap is exactly why buying your way to the top of a SERP matters less than it used to. 

Why Substance Compounds Faster in an AI-Mediated Market

Generative engine optimization is changing the focus. It’s also making it easier for challengers to have their messages heard, even in saturated markets.

Current research shows LLM-based search engines don’t simply favor the sites with the highest traffic. An arXiv study analyzing tens of thousands of queries across six AI search engines found that these systems favor sources with structured, hierarchical HTML and outbound links to reputable references. So if your content is built with that kind of structure and backed by real expertise, it’s more likely to show up in AI citations. Another way to put it? AI rewards substance. GEO is fuelled by brands that are willing to use substance to build better content, not just pay their way to the top.

Real Challenger Brand Examples

Names like Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, and Tony’s Chocolonely probably come to mind first, and for good reason, they built real challenger positions. But they’re not the only ones, and they’re not even the most instructive place to look anymore. More brands are putting the Three “P” Challenger Framework into practice right now.

For instance, Oatly disrupted the plant-based milk market by positioning itself not as a “healthy alternative” but as a “better option” against boring traditional dairy, a clear Position, and one it backed up with Proof: blunt, evidence-driven copy instead of polish. Patagonia is another company that built a name through challenger positioning. The clothing brand built a mission-minded operation in a category known for waste, earning its Presence through real accountability rather than an ad campaign. 

The lesson doesn’t apply specifically to food and consumer goods, either. Let’s flip over to a completely different area of the economy. Monzo is one of a number of challenger-positioned online banking apps that staked its claim in its market through transparency, using that same transparency as its Proof point. This allowed these platforms to compete against the opaque legacy banking model without having to take their gigantic coffers head-on in a paid ad shoot-out earning Presence through word of mouth instead.

In all of these cases, and hundreds of others, the challenger brands in question found ways to avoid excessive spend and focus on high-quality substance. They found unique Positions, backed them up with Proof, and then carved out a Presence based on their USPs.

How to Apply Substance Over Spend on a Constrained Budget

If you’re working with a marketing budget for small business operations, I get it. Marketing budgets overall have been shrinking. Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey found the average budget slid to 7.7% of company revenue, only ticking back up slightly since. It’s tighter still for smaller teams. Companies under $10 million in revenue are putting a much bigger share of their budget toward marketing than larger companies do, closer to 15.6% on average, just to stay visible in a crowded market. There’s less room for waste, and a bigger reason to make substance-led channels count.

A 90-Day Starting Checklist for Under-Resourced Marketing Teams

1. Start by clarifying your challenger posture in a written positioning statement. How are you different?
2. Audit your existing content for clarity in messaging. Is your differentiation present? Where is your proof of expertise?
3. Identify one or two channels where substance can compound over time. SEO content? Newsletters?
4. Aim to publish two or three authority-building pieces. Things like deep guides, case studies, and answers to topical queries all work. What is your audience looking for? (Pro tip: Make sure to structure key pages for GEO, too, including headings, keywords, and FAQs.)
5. Start to look for places where you can earn mentions via digital PR or expert contributions. Try to get at least one in the next 90 days.
6. As you build momentum, start scaling paid to amplify your strongest expertise and substance-based assets.
7. Implement simple reporting. Identify metrics and set KPIs to track things like leads, CAC, and earned versus paid results.

The game may have shifted with AI, but it hasn’t ended. It’s true that smaller companies face larger hurdles when they compete directly. When they take the time to position themselves as a challenger brand, though, they open the door to gain momentum and grow with confidence. 

If your team struggles with slipping into a pay-to-play mindset, it can be helpful to work with an outside agency. Our team at Relevance has helped many brands build effective organic and earned media strategies around challenger brand positioning. If you see the need for professional support to reposition your brand for success, book a strategy assessment, and we can build your future together.

FAQ

What is a challenger brand?

A brand that seeks to build a unique identity through differentiating brand value, features, and offerings.

What is challenger brand strategy?

Don’t just outspend your opponents. Look for ways to out-position them.

How do challenger brands compete with bigger budgets?

By building expert content with substance and then looking for organic and earned channels where it can compound.

What are some challenger brand examples?

Companies like Oatly, Monzo, Patagonia, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, and Tony’s Chocolonely are all great examples of the challenger brand concept in action.

What is the Three “P” Challenger Framework?

Position your brand with detailed intention. Create Proof with expertise and evidence-backed content. Build Presence through organic and earned channels. 

Do challenger brands need a big marketing budget to compete?

No. While spending on things like content or the support of a growth marketing agency comes with some predictable expenses, removing the need for the perpetual, competition-dictated expense of paid advertising significantly reduces challenger brand marketing costs. It refocuses everything on using substance to earn profitable attention in an AI world.

The post Substance Over Spend: Our Manifesto for the Challenger Brand appeared first on Relevance.

We do keyword research every week at Relevance — for clients across B2B SaaS, healthcare, ecommerce, and professional services. After years of refining our process, we’ve distilled it into a practical workflow that anyone can follow, whether you’re a founder doing this for the first time or a marketing team looking to sharpen your approach.

Here’s how to do keyword research the way we actually do it, with the reasoning behind each step.

Start with what you already know (not with a tool)

The biggest mistake in keyword research is opening Ahrefs or SEMrush before you’ve done any thinking. Tools are powerful, but they can’t tell you what matters to your business. That’s your job.

Before we touch a tool for a new client, we answer three questions:

What does this business actually sell, and to whom? This sounds obvious, but the answer shapes everything. A company selling enterprise software to CIOs will target completely different keywords than one selling self-serve tools to freelancers, even if they’re in the same product category.

What topics should this brand be the definitive authority on? Not “what keywords have volume” — what subjects does this company have genuine expertise in? The best keyword strategies are anchored in real knowledge, not opportunistic traffic chasing.

What does a valuable visitor actually do? Sign up for a demo? Book an appointment? Buy a product? Understanding the conversion event helps us prioritize keywords that drive business outcomes, not just pageviews.

We capture this thinking in a simple brief that guides the entire research process. It takes 20 minutes and saves hours of unfocused tool exploration.

Mine your existing data first

If you have a website with any traffic at all, your most valuable keyword data is already sitting in Google Search Console. We start every keyword research engagement here.

What to look for in GSC:

Queries where you’re getting impressions but few clicks (positions 8-20). These are keywords Google already associates with your site but where your content isn’t strong enough to earn the click. They represent your most actionable opportunities because you don’t need to build topical association from scratch — you need to create better content for topics Google already thinks you’re relevant for.

Queries you didn’t intentionally target. GSC often reveals that you’re appearing for keywords you never planned for. These accidental rankings point to content gaps — topics where creating dedicated, optimized content could capture significant traffic.

Your highest-CTR queries. These tell you what your audience actually clicks on, which reveals what messaging and angles resonate. This informs not just keyword selection but how you write title tags and content.

If you’re starting from zero (no existing site traffic), skip to the next step. But for established sites, GSC analysis usually surfaces more actionable opportunities than any third-party tool.

Analyze what competitors own (and what they miss)

Competitor keyword analysis isn’t about copying what others are doing. It’s about understanding the landscape and finding gaps.

We run this analysis for every client using Ahrefs’ competitive analysis features. Here’s the specific process:

Identify your true SEO competitors. These aren’t necessarily your business competitors. Your SEO competitors are the sites that rank for the keywords you want. A B2B software company might find that their SEO competitors include publications like HubSpot’s blog, not just rival software companies. Understanding who you’re actually competing against in the SERPs shapes your realistic targeting.

Find the content gap. Which keywords do multiple competitors rank for that you don’t? The intersection of 2-3 competitors’ keyword profiles reveals the core topics in your space. Any keyword that all your competitors rank for and you don’t is a gap worth evaluating.

Look for underserved intent. Sometimes competitors rank for a keyword but serve the wrong intent. If the top results for a commercial query are all informational blog posts, there’s an opportunity to create a page that better matches what searchers want. We’ve won quick ranking gains for clients by simply matching intent better than incumbent content.

Expand your keyword universe with tools

Now it’s time to use the tools. We primarily use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, supplemented by Google Ads Keyword Planner for volume estimates and Google’s own autocomplete and PAA (People Also Ask) features for question-based keywords.

For each seed term from your earlier steps, explore:

Phrase match and having same terms: These show you the full range of how people search around your topic. “Marketing automation” as a seed might reveal “marketing automation for small business,” “marketing automation vs CRM,” and “best marketing automation software” — each requiring different content.

Questions: Question keywords (how, what, why, when, can) are gold for content planning. They reveal specific information needs and tend to have clearer intent than broad terms. They’re also increasingly important for AI search visibility, since AI models tend to answer question-format queries by citing content that directly addresses them.

Related terms: Semantically connected keywords that broaden your view of the topic. These help you build comprehensive content that covers a subject from multiple angles rather than narrowly targeting a single phrase.

Dump everything into a spreadsheet. Don’t filter yet — you want the full picture before making decisions.

Evaluate each keyword against four criteria

This is the step that separates strategic keyword research from mechanical data pulling. For every keyword worth considering, we evaluate:

Intent alignment: Does the search intent match content we can (and should) create? A keyword with 10,000 monthly searches is worthless if the SERP shows results we can’t compete with (e.g., news articles when we’re a software company). We manually check the SERP for our top keyword candidates to understand what Google thinks the intent is.

Business relevance: Does ranking for this keyword move a business metric? We score every keyword on a simple scale — core (directly describes what the client offers), adjacent (related to the client’s expertise), or peripheral (tangentially connected). Core keywords get priority regardless of difficulty.

Competitive feasibility: Can we realistically rank for this within 6-12 months? We compare keyword difficulty against the client’s current domain authority, existing topical authority on the subject, and the quality of what’s currently ranking. If the SERP is dominated by sites with 10x our authority and excellent content, it’s a long-term target, not an immediate priority.

Content opportunity: Can we create something meaningfully better than what currently ranks? If the top results are comprehensive, well-written, and from authoritative domains, the effort required may not justify the potential return. But if the top results are thin, outdated, or generic, there’s a clear opening.

The keywords that score well across all four criteria become your priority targets.

Group keywords into clusters and map to content

Individual keywords don’t become strategy until they’re organized into clusters and mapped to specific content assets.

A keyword cluster groups a primary target keyword with its related terms, long-tail variations, and associated questions. One cluster = one piece of content. Trying to target unrelated keywords on a single page dilutes your focus and confuses Google about what the page is about.

We organize clusters around our clients’ SEO strategy pillars:

Pillar pages target the broadest, highest-volume keyword in a cluster. These are comprehensive guides (2,000-4,000 words) that cover a topic thoroughly. Our content marketing strategy guide is an example — it targets a competitive head term and serves as the hub for related content.

Supporting articles target specific subtopics, long-tail variations, and questions within the cluster. Each one links back to the pillar page, building a topical authority structure that Google rewards.

Conversion pages target keywords with transactional or commercial intent. These are service pages, product pages, or comparison pages where the searcher is closer to a decision.

This cluster structure ensures every piece of content you create strengthens your authority on the topic, rather than creating isolated articles that don’t connect to anything.

Set priorities based on where you’ll win first

With clusters defined, the final step is sequencing — deciding what to create first.

Our priority framework:

Optimize existing content first. If you already have pages ranking in positions 5-20, updating and optimizing them is almost always faster than creating something new. Refresh outdated information, improve the title tag, add internal links, strengthen the intro, and make sure the content fully addresses the search intent. We’ve seen clients gain 30-50% more organic traffic purely from content optimization without publishing anything new.

Fill obvious gaps second. Keywords where competitors rank and you have nothing are missed opportunities. Prioritize gaps where you have genuine expertise and where the competitive landscape is manageable.

Build authority clusters third. Create pillar pages and supporting content around your highest-priority topics. This builds the topical depth that Google increasingly rewards over isolated high-authority pages.

Target competitive terms last. High-volume, high-difficulty keywords are long-term investments. They require established topical authority, strong backlink profiles, and exceptional content to compete. Tackle them after you’ve built momentum with quicker wins.

Keep the research alive

Keyword research isn’t something you do once and file away. We revisit keyword strategies at least quarterly for every client, checking for new opportunities in GSC, monitoring how targeted keywords are performing, identifying shifts in competitive rankings, and flagging keywords that aren’t delivering the expected business value.

The best keyword strategies evolve continuously, informed by real performance data rather than initial assumptions. That feedback loop is what turns keyword research from a planning exercise into a growth engine.

Want to see which tools make this process more efficient? Read our guide to the keyword research tools we use daily. Or if you’re ready for help building a keyword strategy that connects to real business growth, explore how we’ve done it for other companies.

The post How to Do Keyword Research: A Practical Walkthrough From Our SEO Team appeared first on Relevance.

The data makes the case clear: 77% of patients use search engines before booking appointments, organic search converts at 5.6% in healthcare, and SEO leads close at a 14.6% rate — nearly 8× higher than outbound marketing (Growtha). For hospitals, clinics, and telehealth brands, medical SEO is the highest-ROI patient acquisition channel available.

But SEO for healthcare is uniquely challenging. You’re competing against institutions like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and the CDC — .org and .gov domains with massive authority and decades of trust signals. Google treats health content as YMYL (Your Money, Your Life), applying stricter quality standards than virtually any other category. Success requires deep E-E-A-T credibility, specialized execution, and a long-term commitment that generic SEO playbooks miss entirely.

This guide is our complete healthcare SEO strategy playbook for 2026. It covers content standards, entity and authority signals, local and multi-location optimization, technical foundations, measurement frameworks, and expert insights. Whether you’re a hospital system, specialty practice, or digital health company, you’ll find actionable frameworks backed by real campaign results.

And, our team has LIVED EXPERIENCES & CASE STUDIES with this difficult challenge.

Our hope is by the end of this article, you will have a better idea of what it will take to pull of a healthcare SEO / GEO campaign.

Healthcare-first content standards

If you’ve ever published a “What is X?” condition page and watched it get outranked by Mayo/CDC/WebMD anyway, this is usually why: the page reads like a generic explainer, not a piece of medical content written by a real organization with real clinicians and real care pathways.

If your content looks like it could’ve been written for any clinic in any city, Google will treat it that way — and AI engines will, too. 

Every core page should prove three things quickly: (1) you’re qualified to talk about this, (2) you actually provide this care, and (3) the patient can take a next step without friction.

Start with architecture. For most healthcare orgs, the cleanest structure is:

• Service Line Hub (the “authority page” for the specialty)

• Condition + Symptom pages (diagnosis and decision-making content)

• Treatment pages (procedures, therapies, medications, programs)

• Provider pages (credibility + conversion)

• Location pages (local intent + conversion)

From there, we enforce page-level standards that prevent “thin medical content traps”:

Service line hubs should read like a front door, not a blog post. Lead with who it’s for, what you treat, what you offer, and how to get care. Then layer in decision-support content (common symptoms, treatment options, when to seek care, insurance notes). If you’re a multi-location org, the hub should route cleanly into locations and provider teams.

Condition content has to be more than definitions. Patients don’t search “what is sciatica” because they’re curious; they search because they’re worried. Your condition pages should include symptoms, causes/risk factors, when it’s urgent, how diagnosis works, what treatment looks like at your organization, and what to expect next.

Provider pages are not optional “bio pages.” They’re credibility assets. Every provider page should connect credentials → specialties → conditions treated → locations → appointment path. If a provider treats a condition, make that relationship explicit (and link both ways). This is one of the fastest ways we improve both E-E-A-T signals and conversions.

One practical rule we use: if a page can’t answer “Why you?” and “What now?” it isn’t done.

A few non-negotiables we push:

• Put “who wrote/reviewed this” above the fold, not buried in the footer. Credentials, role, and last reviewed date.

• Don’t publish condition content unless you can connect it to next steps: treatments you offer, related services, and clear CTAs (book, call, find a location).

• Avoid “thin” traps by adding what big publishers can’t: your care approach, wait times, insurance notes, patient prep, what to expect at the visit, and outcomes proof.

That’s the difference between “informational content” and content that actually earns trust signals.

Entity and authority signals for AI answers

AI engines don’t “feel” your brand. They infer your identity from consistency. If your clinician credentials are formatted six different ways across bios, directories, and listings, the model will treat your data as fuzzy, which is how you end up with wrong specialties, wrong locations, and zero attribution.

This section of the playbook is about turning your org into a clean, machine-readable set of entities:

Brand entity: One canonical name, one canonical description, one set of services/specialties you’re known for. This needs to be consistent on-site, in your GBPs, in directories, and in PR mentions.

Clinician entity: Provider name, credentials, specialty taxonomy, locations, education, certifications, and “what they treat.” Then lock it. The most common failure we see is providers drifting over time (“Interventional Pain” in one place, “Pain Management” in another, “Spine Specialist” somewhere else). Pick your taxonomy and keep it consistent.

Location entity: Name + address + phone + hours + categories + services available at that location. A hospital system can’t treat “locations” as interchangeable. Models and map algorithms absolutely don’t.

Operationally, the playbook approach is: create a single source of truth (spreadsheet or CMS fields) that powers bios, location pages, schema, and directory submissions. Then implement reinforcement loops: internal linking, structured data, and off-site citations that all reflect the same relationships (provider specialty conditions location).

If you do nothing else in this section, do this: make it impossible for the internet to be confused about who you are.

Local + multi-location systems

Local SEO in healthcare isn’t “optimize one Google Business Profile and call it a day.” It’s a systems problem. If you have 10, 30, 200 locations, the enemy is inconsistency—different phone numbers, mismatched names, duplicate listings, outdated hours, random categories, and location pages that are basically templated shells.

The orgs that win have a system for keeping 10–500 locations accurate, unique, and conversion-ready — and they treat every drift as a revenue leak.

We see local as three layers:

Layer 1: Listings integrity (baseline control).
You can’t scale rankings if you can’t scale accuracy. This means eliminating duplicates, standardizing naming conventions, fixing category chaos, aligning hours, and cleaning up NAP across the ecosystem. Most multi-location healthcare brands have more listing issues than they think, and those issues are silent killers in the Map Pack.

Layer 2: Location pages that earn relevance.
Templated pages are the fastest way to get ignored. A location page should prove what’s true for that facility: the providers there, the services available there, the insurance realities, parking/directions, and the appointment path. If the patient has to hunt for “how to get seen,” you’ve already lost them.

Layer 3: Reputation as a ranking and conversion lever.
Reviews aren’t just “nice.” In healthcare, they’re often the deciding factor. The playbook doesn’t just say “get more reviews.” It spells out a compliant workflow: when you ask, who asks, how you respond, and how you route patterns back into on-site content and service messaging.

A simple principle we use: your best local SEO is a location that feels unquestionably real. Algorithms reward that. Patients do too.

The exact operating model we use to scale without losing control:

• Standardize NAP and taxonomy first (names, specialties, services, categories)

• Build location pages that are actually unique (providers at that location, services, directions/parking, insurance notes, appointment flows)

• Use review generation and review response as a ranking lever and a conversion lever (especially for urgent care, dental, med spa, PT)

One of the most common wins we see: cleaning up duplicates and standardizing categories across GBPs will move Map Pack visibility faster than “writing more blogs” ever will. Not glamorous, but it prints.

Technical foundations that actually move the needle

Healthcare sites tend to accumulate technical debt like it’s their job—multiple service lines, multiple stakeholders, lots of compliance layers, and usually at least one legacy CMS decision everyone regrets.

So we look at the technical work that actually changes outcomes, not a 200-item audit checklist no one will finish.

The priorities we push:

• Crawlability + indexation control: making sure the pages you want indexed are getting crawled frequently, and the junk (filters, thin variants, internal search results) is not wasting crawl budget.

• Internal linking that mirrors care journeys: service line → condition → treatment → provider → location. That pathway isn’t just good UX—it’s how you distribute authority to the pages that convert.

• Structured data where it matters: medical org/local business basics, provider pages, FAQs when appropriate, and anything that reinforces who you are + where you operate + what you treat.

• Speed on mobile: because in healthcare, a huge chunk of visits are high-intent, high-stress, and happening on phones.

If your site “looks fine” but performance is flat, it’s usually because these fundamentals aren’t aligned.

7 Healthcare SEO Tips Every Medical Practice Needs

With so little wiggle room, healthcare companies have to excel at medical SEO to boost their brand in the digital landscape. Here are seven tips to help you do just that.

1. Get a thorough understanding of your goals

SEO takes time. You often won’t see results for months. The last thing you want to do is get those results and find that all this time they didn’t align with your mission or current marketing initiatives.

What are your goals at the moment, especially as they relate to SEO? Do you need more visibility online? Are you trying to drive more traffic to your site? Do you need to increase conversions? Does your brand need greater credibility in the eyes of consumers?

 “Today, it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.”

– Adam Audette,

Clarify your mission and objectives first. Then use that information to guide each step you take as you create and execute a healthcare SEO strategy.

2. Invest in E-E-A-T Content

Winning the SEO battle is never easy. In the healthcare industry, it is especially difficult. Why? Because you’re talking about YMYL (your money, your life) content, which Google is extra careful to analyze when ranking. 

As a healthcare provider, you want to clearly demonstrate your credibility through E-E-A-T content. The acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. If you have a medical concern or question, you want to go to a company that you can trust, right? By creating helpful, educational content, you establish your company as that trusted brand.

In the case of healthcare, you should go even further by backing each piece with accredited professionals. Optimally, you would have them author the piece, infusing their first-hand clinical experiences (there’s your first “E”) into the narrative. Each piece they byline should link to their bio on the site listing their credentials and explaining why they are a trusted expert (there’s your second “E”) on the subject.  

If you can’t find a provider willing to write a piece of content, don’t fret—there are alternative options that can still help build your authority. For example, a telehealth client I worked with didn’t have providers that would byline content, but a medical professional would review each piece for factual and clinical accuracy. However, this review process wasn’t noted on their site. I asked them to include a tag that said “medically reviewed by [provider name]” and the date it was most recently reviewed to help support E-E-A-T efforts. Doing so helped build trust with their audience and contributed to ranking improvements.

3. Hone in on your topical authority

There are many aspects and nuances to every field, including healthcare. Where do you have unique health information and insights that you can offer?

As you create your SEO-optimized content marketing strategy, make sure you stay focused on the areas and healthcare services that you want to be known for. Don’t stray too far from the formula.

“My rule of thumb is to build a site for a user, not a spider.”
– Dave Naylor

Google’s SEO document leak in early 2024 shows that sitewide topical relevance matters. If you use generic messaging, your brand will never stand out. Stay focused on what you’re good at. 

With that same telehealth client, I even saw that ranking in the SERPs was easier in other health-related topical authority areas once we owned one healthcare-specific area. You should be able to rank quicker in other related areas if you dedicate the time and resources to building topical authority in one core area first.

4. Gather multiple perspectives

Healthcare content marketing is more than a professional sharing advice with patients. You want to hear from multiple perspectives. (That’s why we have the classic “let me get a second opinion” line in so many medical situations, right?)

In the case of medical SEO, you can seek out multiple professional opinions, but in many cases, some of the best content can come directly from your patients.

Look for stories that reinforce your company’s success and what you’re able to offer your clientele or patients. Use things like reviews to build trust, make your brand more relatable, and turn your site into a trusted source in the online healthcare community.

5. User experience matters with SEO

Good website optimization goes beyond well-crafted content. Healthcare content needs to be practical. It is the last place you want to bury a lede or drag things down with sluggish load speed or complex navigation. It also includes things like interactions, mobile friendliness, and site architecture.

“Good SEO is paying attention to all the details that most bloggers ignore.”

– Ryan Biddulph, 

If you want your healthcare website to attract organic traffic, you need to maintain a quality user experience (UX). This starts with technical SEO elements like page speed, load times, and image sizes. 

Good calls to action (CTAs) are also important for engagement. Provide intuitive navigation, easy-to-find information, and accessible-friendly options so that everyone who finds your content through the SERPs has a positive and insightful experience.

6. Optimize local SEO

Many healthcare operations are local. Hospitals serve geographic regions. So do doctor’s offices, dental practices, and urgent care clinics.

If you have a local aspect to your healthcare organization, you want to make sure it’s optimized to help potential patients closest to you find you. An urgent care center in Oakland, California won’t be able to help much if it’s the top result for someone with a medical emergency searching for local support in Miami. 

You can improve your local SEO by including geographic information (like an address) across your website. You can also use Google Map Pack to ensure you show up in the local listings by geographic location, too. Claim your Google My Business listing, as well, and then fill in your information to encourage the search giant to target local search results to your site.

7. Invest in quality backlinks

As you build your healthcare website’s SEO through educational, high-quality on-site content, you also want to consider backlinks. These happen when a third-party site links to a piece of your content.

Good backlinks are best when they are on important keywords (called anchor text) and link to content that closely matches search intent. For instance, you could link to a CPR instruction page on the words “CPR manual” or something similar. “Sadly, much of the content being published is simply not worth linking to. 75% of it is getting zero inbound links. So forget the ‘more is better’ approach to content if you want links. Go with quality instead. Your content will generate links only if it is truly remarkable, as Seth Godin would say.”
– Brian Sutter

For the healthcare client I mentioned above, backlinks were a way for us to support the visibility goals for some important keywords. However, we weren’t just expecting backlinks alone to move the needle—we were most successful and saw the most significant increases in ranking overall when we executed a comprehensive onsite content strategy in tandem.

Once you have great content, look for digital PR opportunities to get your business mentioned and linked to on quality industry websites and publications. Getting backlinks from respectable healthcare websites boosts your credibility and can make sure you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts.

What top experts are saying on top healthcare SEO techniques in 2026

Blake Davis

Blake Davis calls out out a major shift in healthcare SEO: if your content isn’t clear, structured, and trustworthy enough for AI systems to confidently reference, you’re already falling behind. For mental health clinics especially, authority and clarity now matter as much as rankings themselves.

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Because results often take months, SEO works best when it’s aligned with clear business goals like visibility, traffic growth, conversions, or credibility.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Why is healthcare SEO so challenging compared to other industries?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Healthcare is highly competitive and often competes against established, industry-leading publishers and institutions, including major .org and .gov sites. It’s also YMYL (your money, your life) content, which search engines evaluate with extra care. With limited room to “win” broad queries, healthcare brands typically need sharper focus, stronger credibility signals, and consistent execution across content, technical performance, and local presence.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is E-E-A-T content, and why does it matter for healthcare?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In healthcare, demonstrating credibility is essential because the topic can impact someone’s health decisions. Helpful, educational content builds trust, and credibility increases when information is clearly supported by qualified professionals. The goal is to make it easy for readers (and search systems) to see that the content is accurate, responsible, and backed by real clinical knowledge.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How can a healthcare brand strengthen E-E-A-T if clinicians won’t write content?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “If providers won’t byline content, a practical alternative is having a medical professional review each piece for factual and clinical accuracy. To reinforce trust, add a visible note such as “medically reviewed by [provider name]” along with the most recent review date. This approach keeps the content educational and credible while still showing that qualified experts are involved in validating information.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What does “topical authority” mean for medical SEO?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Topical authority means consistently covering the healthcare services and subject areas your organization wants to be known for, without drifting into generic messaging. Staying focused builds sitewide topical relevance and helps your brand stand out. Once a core area is established strongly, it can become easier to rank for other related health topics, especially when the content strategy is organized around a clear specialty or primary service line.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How can multiple perspectives improve healthcare content marketing?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Strong healthcare content isn’t limited to a single professional viewpoint. Incorporating multiple perspectives can make content more relatable and trustworthy, including insights and stories from patients. Reviews and patient experiences can reinforce credibility, demonstrate outcomes, and help prospective patients see what the organization does well. This kind of trust-building content can support SEO by improving how users engage with the site and how the brand is perceived.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What user experience factors matter most for healthcare SEO?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “User experience supports SEO because healthcare content needs to be practical and easy to use. Key areas include fast load speed, mobile friendliness, clean site architecture, intuitive navigation, and easy-to-find information. Technical SEO elements like page speed, load times, and optimized image sizes help performance. Clear calls to action (CTAs) also improve engagement by guiding users toward the next step without friction.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What are proven strategies for improving Google Business Profile rankings for healthcare practices?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “For local healthcare operations, local SEO is essential. Add consistent geographic information (such as your address) across your website and aim to appear in the Google Map Pack for nearby searches. Claim your Google My Business (Google Business Profile) listing and fully complete the information so search engines can confidently match your organization to local intent. This helps ensure the right patients in the right area find your practice.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Why do backlinks matter for healthcare SEO, and how should they be approached?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Backlinks are links from third-party websites pointing to your content, and they can strengthen credibility and visibility—especially when the anchor text aligns with relevant keywords and the linked page matches search intent. Backlinks are most effective when paired with a comprehensive onsite content strategy rather than treated as a standalone tactic. After building strong educational content, pursue digital PR opportunities to earn mentions and links from reputable healthcare websites and publications. The right link building tools can streamline this outreach considerably.” } } ] }

Build Your Healthcare SEO Strategy for Long-Term Growth

Healthcare SEO is one of the most competitive and highest-stakes disciplines in digital marketing. With patients increasingly relying on search engines and AI platforms to make care decisions, the organizations that invest in medical SEO now will capture patient demand for years to come.

The healthcare organizations winning in 2026 share a common approach: they combine deep clinical credibility with technical SEO discipline, local optimization at scale, and a measurement framework that ties every ranking to real patient outcomes. That combination is what separates sustainable growth from short-term tactics.

If you aren’t sure what that funnel looks like, or you need help crafting an SEO strategy in the first place, feel free to reach out for a free strategy session.

If you need some more insights on what pricing looks like for SEO, check out our new SEO investment report. 

Our team of growth marketing experts can help you manage the pitfalls of this high-stakes YMYL field, craft elite E-E-A-T content, and ultimately crush your healthcare marketing goals.

The post Healthcare SEO: The Complete Guide to Medical SEO Strategy (2026) appeared first on Relevance.

At Relevance, content optimization is where we spend a disproportionate amount of our time — and it’s consistently where we see the fastest ROI for clients. Rewriting a title tag, restructuring an article’s headers, or adding internal links to a page that’s already indexed will almost always move the needle faster than publishing something brand new.

These are the content optimization tips we use across every client engagement. They’re organized by category: technical foundations, keyword strategy, and the editorial and structural elements that tie everything together.

Technical optimization: the infrastructure that makes content discoverable

Before we touch a word of copy, we check the technical layer. An article can be brilliantly written and still invisible if the technical signals are working against it.

1. Audit your URL structure

Short, descriptive URLs consistently outperform long, parameter-heavy ones. When we audit client sites, we frequently find URLs with dates, category prefixes, or unnecessary words that dilute the topical signal.

Our standard: the URL should contain the target keyword and nothing else that isn’t essential. For an article about content marketing strategy, the URL should be /content-marketing-strategy/, not /blog/2024/06/13/the-ultimate-guide-to-content-marketing-strategy-for-beginners/.

Changing URLs on existing content requires 301 redirects, so we’re selective about when it’s worth the effort. But for new content, we enforce clean URL conventions from day one.

2. Structure your headers as a content outline

Headers aren’t formatting — they’re semantic signals. Google uses your H1, H2, and H3 hierarchy to understand what your content covers and how ideas relate to each other.

We treat header structure like an outline that should make sense on its own. If someone read only your headers, they should understand the article’s argument and scope. Every H2 should represent a major section, every H3 a supporting point within that section.

The most common mistake we see: articles with 15 H2s and no H3s, creating a flat structure with no topical hierarchy. That’s a missed signal to Google about which concepts are primary and which are supporting.

We also incorporate target and semantically related keywords into headers wherever they fit naturally. A header like “How to research keywords effectively” is better than “Step 3” — both for readers scanning the page and for search engines parsing the content.

3. Optimize images beyond alt text

Alt text matters, but image optimization goes further than most teams realize. We optimize three things for every image: the file name (descriptive and keyword-relevant, not IMG_4392.jpg), the alt text (concise description that includes the keyword when appropriate), and the file size (compressed to WebP format, typically under 100KB for blog images).

Image optimization is one of the most commonly neglected areas we find in content audits. Large, uncompressed images silently drag down page speed, which directly impacts both rankings and user experience. For one client, compressing and converting images across their top 30 blog posts improved average LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) by 1.4 seconds.

4. Write meta descriptions that earn clicks

Meta descriptions don’t directly influence rankings, but they heavily influence click-through rate — which does. A compelling meta description can mean the difference between a 2% CTR and a 5% CTR on the same ranking position.

Our formula: lead with the value proposition or a specific insight from the article, include the target keyword naturally, and end with a reason to click through (a specific number, a unique angle, or a question that creates curiosity). Keep it under 155 characters so it doesn’t get truncated.

We review meta descriptions quarterly across client sites and rewrite any that are auto-generated or generic. This is one of the lowest-effort, highest-impact optimization moves available.

Keyword optimization: connecting content to what people actually search

Keyword optimization is where many teams either under-invest (writing content with no keyword strategy) or over-invest in the wrong direction (stuffing keywords at the expense of readability). The right approach lives in the middle.

5. Assign one primary keyword per page

Every page on your site should target one primary keyword. Not two, not five. One. This doesn’t mean you can only mention one topic — it means the page’s core purpose, title tag, H1, URL, and opening paragraph should all align around a single search intent.

When we audit content that’s underperforming, keyword cannibalization is one of the most common issues. Multiple pages targeting the same keyword split Google’s attention and prevent any single page from building enough authority to rank. Our content audits always include a cannibalization check, and consolidating competing pages into a single, stronger piece is often the fastest path to ranking improvement.

Supporting keywords (semantically related terms, long-tail variations) should be woven naturally throughout the body content. Tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console help identify which related terms your page is already appearing for, so you can reinforce those signals.

6. Use headers as keyword placement opportunities

This bears repeating because it’s so consistently underutilized. Headers are prime real estate for keyword placement because they carry more weight in Google’s content evaluation than body text.

We aim to include the primary keyword or a close variation in at least one H2, and semantically related keywords in H3s throughout the piece. The key is naturalness — a header should read like something a human would write, not a keyword string.

One technique we use: pull questions directly from Google’s “People Also Ask” section for your target keyword and use them as H2s or H3s. This aligns your content structure with actual search behavior and increases your chances of earning featured snippets and PAA placement.

7. Mine Google Search Console for optimization gold

Paid keyword tools are useful for research, but Google Search Console is the most underutilized optimization resource most companies already have access to. GSC shows you the exact queries your pages are appearing for, their average position, and click-through rates.

Our optimization workflow starts here. We look for pages ranking in positions 5-20 (the “striking distance” zone) and analyze what queries they’re appearing for. Often, a page is ranking for keywords it barely mentions in the content. Adding those terms to headers, body copy, and meta descriptions can push the page up several positions with minimal effort.

For one B2B client, this striking-distance optimization approach moved 23 pages from page two to page one within 90 days, resulting in a 47% increase in organic traffic — without publishing a single new article.

Editorial and structural optimization: the elements that tie it all together

Technical and keyword optimization get your content in front of search engines. The editorial layer is what makes it perform once humans arrive.

8. Build a strategic internal linking architecture

Internal linking is one of the most powerful and most neglected optimization levers. Every internal link passes authority from one page to another and helps Google understand how your content relates.

Our standard approach: every long-form article should contain 10-15 contextual internal links. These should point to pillar pages (reinforcing their authority), related supporting content (building topical clusters), and conversion pages (service pages, case studies, contact pages) where appropriate.

The anchor text matters too. “Click here” passes no topical signal. “Our content marketing strategy guide” tells Google exactly what the linked page is about.

We also run reverse internal link audits — identifying high-value pages that have few internal links pointing to them. Adding links to these pages from existing content is one of the fastest ways to boost their rankings.

9. Don’t neglect external linking

Linking out to authoritative external sources signals to Google that your content is well-researched and connected to the broader conversation. We typically include 2-3 external links per 1,000 words, pointing to authoritative sources (.gov, .edu, major industry publications, original research).

Placement matters. We position external links in the body of the article where they add genuine reference value, not in the opening paragraphs where they might draw readers away before they’ve engaged with your content. The goal is to show Google you’re part of a trustworthy information ecosystem.

10. Optimize for readability and user engagement

Google measures user engagement signals — time on page, scroll depth, bounce rate. Content that’s hard to read or visually overwhelming will underperform regardless of its keyword optimization.

Our readability standards: short paragraphs (3-4 sentences max), subheadings every 200-300 words, strategic use of bold text for key takeaways, and visual breaks (images, callout boxes, or bullet points for genuinely list-based information) to prevent wall-of-text fatigue.

We also match reading level to audience. Technical content for developers can use industry jargon. Content for small business owners should aim for an 8th-grade reading level. Mismatching your language to your audience is a subtle but real engagement killer.

11. Write from genuine expertise, not aggregated advice

This is the optimization tip that matters most in 2026. Google’s Helpful Content system and E-E-A-T framework are explicitly designed to reward content written by people with real experience and expertise. Content that reads like it was assembled from the top 10 Google results — no original insights, no specific examples, no practitioner perspective — is exactly what Google is now penalizing.

At Relevance, every piece we publish is grounded in what we’ve actually tested and measured across client engagements. When we say a specific SEO technique works, it’s because we’ve run it. When we recommend a strategy approach, it’s because we’ve seen the results.

This isn’t just about quality — it’s about survival. Sites that relied on generic, expertise-free content have seen dramatic traffic declines over the past year. The sites that are growing are the ones where real practitioners are sharing real experience.

Building an optimization workflow that scales

The most effective content optimization isn’t a one-time project — it’s a recurring process. Here’s the quarterly workflow we run for every client:

Week 1: GSC analysis. Identify striking-distance pages, review CTR trends, and flag any indexation issues.

Week 2: Content audit. Assess the top 20-30 pages by traffic potential. Check for keyword cannibalization, outdated information, and missing optimization elements.

Week 3-4: Optimization execution. Update title tags, meta descriptions, headers, internal links, and body content based on the audit findings.

Ongoing: Performance monitoring. Track position changes, CTR shifts, and traffic trends for optimized pages. Document what moved and what didn’t to refine the process.

This cycle — analyze, optimize, measure, repeat — is how we consistently drive organic traffic growth for clients without needing to publish massive volumes of new content. The best-performing content programs aren’t the ones that publish the most — they’re the ones that get the most out of what they’ve already built.

Want to see how this approach translates to real results? Explore our case studies or check out our guide to content optimization tools that can help systematize this process.

The post 11 Content Optimization Tips We Use to Turn Underperforming Pages Into Traffic Drivers appeared first on Relevance.

That’s not how it works in practice. The keyword research process that actually drives traffic and conversions requires strategic thinking at every step — understanding your business model, your competitive landscape, and the way your customers search at different stages of their journey.

This is our complete step-by-step guide to keyword research, based on the exact process we use across client engagements. Whether you’re building a keyword strategy from scratch or refining one that’s stalled, this framework will get you to a prioritized, actionable keyword list.

Before you start: why keyword research matters beyond SEO

Keyword research isn’t just an SEO activity — it’s customer research. The queries people type into Google reveal what they’re worried about, what they’re comparing, what they’re ready to buy, and what language they use to describe their problems.

At Relevance, we use keyword data to inform content strategy, paid media targeting, product messaging, and even sales enablement materials. When you understand the exact phrases your ideal customers use, you can align every channel around that language.

The companies that treat keyword research as a one-time SEO task miss this broader value. The ones that embed it into their marketing rhythm — revisiting and refining quarterly — build compounding advantages over time.

Step 1: Define your topical territories

Before opening any tool, start with strategy. What topics should your brand own in search results?

This isn’t about brainstorming random keywords. It’s about identifying the 3-5 core subject areas where your business has genuine expertise and where ranking would directly impact revenue.

For a B2B SaaS company, those territories might be: the problem their product solves, the category they compete in, the workflow their users care about, and the outcomes they deliver. For a healthcare practice, it might be: the conditions they treat, the procedures they offer, the geographic area they serve, and the patient concerns that drive appointments.

We map these territories before doing any tool-based research because they become the organizing framework for everything that follows. Without this step, you end up with a sprawling keyword list that doesn’t connect to business goals.

Practical tip: Involve people beyond the marketing team in this step. Sales reps hear customer language daily. Product teams understand the competitive landscape. Leadership knows the strategic priorities. A 30-minute cross-functional brainstorm often surfaces keyword angles that pure tool research misses.

Step 2: Build your seed keyword list

With topical territories defined, it’s time to generate seed keywords — the starting terms you’ll expand and refine through research.

We pull seed keywords from multiple sources:

Google Search Console: If you have an existing site, GSC is the most valuable starting point. It shows the exact queries people are already finding you for, including terms you might not have intentionally targeted. Filter by impressions to find queries where Google associates your site with a topic but you’re not yet ranking well — those are often the most actionable opportunities.

Competitor analysis: Using Ahrefs or similar tools, we pull the organic keywords our clients’ competitors rank for. This reveals keyword gaps — terms your competitors capture traffic for that you’re missing entirely. We prioritize gaps where the client has genuine expertise and content potential, not just any keyword a competitor ranks for.

Customer-facing teams: Sales calls, support tickets, and customer reviews contain real language that people use to describe their problems and goals. This language often differs from the industry jargon marketers default to. “How do I stop losing deals to competitors” is a real customer question that maps to keywords like “competitive win rate” or “sales competitive analysis” — terms a tool-first approach might miss.

Google’s own suggestions: Autocomplete, “People Also Ask” boxes, and “Related searches” at the bottom of SERPs are Google telling you what people actually search. We use these systematically to expand our seed lists, particularly for long-tail variations.

Step 3: Expand and enrich with keyword tools

Now we take the seed keywords into research tools to find the full universe of opportunities. Our primary tools are Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and Google Search Console, supplemented by Google Ads Keyword Planner for volume data.

For each seed keyword, we look at:

Matching terms: Keywords containing your seed term, sorted by volume. This reveals the scale of the opportunity and the specific variations people search.

Related terms: Semantically connected keywords that might not contain your seed term. These often surface unexpected angles. For a client targeting “project management,” related terms revealed a large cluster around “team capacity planning” that became a major content theme.

Questions: Question-format keywords (how, what, why, when) that reveal informational intent. These are ideal for blog content and FAQ sections, and they’re increasingly important for AI search optimization.

Also rank for: Keywords that the current top-ranking pages also rank for. This shows you the semantic territory Google associates with your topic, helping you build comprehensive content rather than thin, single-keyword pages.

We export everything into a spreadsheet at this stage. The list will be long and messy — that’s fine. The next step is where it gets refined.

Step 4: Evaluate and prioritize

This is where most keyword research guides fall short. They tell you to look at volume and difficulty and pick the “best” keywords. But prioritization in the real world requires much more nuance.

Here’s the framework we use to evaluate every keyword opportunity:

Search volume: How many people search for this monthly? Important for scale, but not the only factor. A keyword with 200 monthly searches that perfectly matches your ideal customer is often more valuable than one with 10,000 searches and vague intent.

Keyword difficulty: How competitive is the SERP? We look at this not as a pass/fail metric but relative to the client’s current domain authority. A KD of 40 might be achievable for a DR-50 site but unrealistic for a DR-15 site.

Search intent: What does the searcher actually want? We classify every keyword as informational (learning), navigational (finding a specific thing), commercial (evaluating options), or transactional (ready to act). This determines what type of content you need to create — and whether it should be a blog post, a landing page, a comparison page, or something else entirely.

Business value: How directly does this keyword connect to revenue? A keyword might have low volume and moderate difficulty, but if every searcher is a perfect-fit customer, it’s worth prioritizing. We score business value on a 1-3 scale: 1 = tangentially related, 2 = clearly relevant, 3 = directly describes our client’s product or service.

Current position: Are you already ranking for this keyword? Pages in positions 5-20 (the “striking distance” zone) are often the fastest wins because Google already associates your site with the topic. Moving from position 12 to position 5 can increase traffic 5-10x.

We combine these factors into a prioritization matrix. Keywords with high business value, achievable difficulty, and clear intent get prioritized regardless of volume. This approach consistently outperforms the “chase volume” strategy we see from competitors.

Step 5: Organize into clusters and content plans

A keyword list isn’t a content strategy. The final step is organizing your prioritized keywords into topical clusters that map to specific content assets.

A cluster starts with a primary keyword (usually the highest-volume, broadest term) and groups related keywords, long-tail variations, and questions around it. Each cluster typically maps to one piece of content — a pillar page or comprehensive article — that targets the primary keyword while naturally incorporating the supporting terms.

For example, a cluster around “content marketing strategy” might include: content marketing strategy, how to create a content marketing plan, content marketing examples, B2B content marketing, content marketing ROI, and content marketing metrics. All of these would be addressed within a single comprehensive guide (like our content marketing strategy guide) rather than spread across separate thin articles.

We then organize clusters into three tiers:

Tier 1 — Quick wins (1-3 months): Keywords where you’re already in striking distance or where the competition is thin. These deliver early momentum and prove the strategy is working.

Tier 2 — Strategic targets (3-6 months): Core keywords that directly serve business goals but require new content creation and possibly authority building to compete.

Tier 3 — Long-term plays (6-12+ months): Competitive head terms where you need to build topical authority and backlinks before you have a realistic shot. These inform your content roadmap but aren’t where you spend initial effort.

This tiered approach sets realistic expectations and ensures you’re always building on demonstrated wins rather than gambling everything on competitive terms.

Maintaining your keyword strategy over time

Keyword research isn’t a one-time project. Search behavior changes, competitors shift their strategies, and your business priorities evolve.

We revisit keyword strategies quarterly for every client. The review includes checking GSC for new queries you’re appearing for, analyzing whether targeted keywords have moved, identifying new opportunities from competitor shifts, and pruning keywords that aren’t delivering business value.

This ongoing refinement is what separates teams that see sustained organic growth from those whose traffic plateaus after an initial push. The keyword strategy should be a living document that evolves with your business.

Looking for tools to make this process more efficient? Check out our guide to the keyword research tools we use daily, or explore our case studies to see how strategic keyword research translates to measurable organic growth.

The post Our Step-by-Step Guide to Keyword Research That Drives Real Business Results appeared first on Relevance.

Instead, this is a practitioner’s view of what’s actually changing in search — based on what our team at Relevance is seeing across dozens of active client engagements. These are the shifts we’re adjusting our strategies around right now, not theoretical possibilities we read about in someone else’s blog post.

1. AI Overviews have fundamentally changed the click equation

The biggest shift in SEO right now isn’t an algorithm update — it’s the fact that Google is answering more queries directly in the search results through AI Overviews (formerly SGE). Current data suggests that roughly 60% of Google searches now end without a click to any website.

For our clients, this has meant rethinking what we optimize for. Ranking #1 for an informational query doesn’t carry the same traffic value it did two years ago if Google is synthesizing the answer directly in the SERP.

Our adjusted approach:

Prioritize queries with commercial or transactional intent where users still need to click through (product comparisons, service evaluations, detailed how-to guides that can’t be fully answered in a snippet).

Optimize for AI Overview citations. When Google’s AI does generate an overview, it cites sources. We’ve been tracking which content formats and structural elements increase the likelihood of being cited. Content with clear, factual claims supported by data, organized under descriptive headers, and written with authoritative voice tends to get cited more frequently.

Track visibility, not just clicks. We now use AI search visibility measurement tools alongside traditional rank tracking to give clients a complete picture of their organic presence. Being visible in AI Overviews even without the click still builds brand awareness and topical association.

2. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is no longer optional

Beyond Google’s AI Overviews, people are increasingly using standalone AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude — as search alternatives. Our brand tracking across AI platforms shows that these tools are driving real referral traffic and, more importantly, shaping purchase decisions.

We’ve added generative engine optimization as a standard workstream in our SEO programs. This means ensuring client content is structured in ways that AI models can easily parse and cite, building the brand signals (mentions, authority, entity associations) that influence how AI models represent a brand, and monitoring brand mentions across AI-generated responses.

This is still an emerging discipline, and anyone claiming to have it fully figured out is overstating their case. But ignoring it entirely means ceding ground to competitors who are paying attention.

3. The Helpful Content signal is now baked into Google’s core ranking

Google’s Helpful Content system, originally launched as a separate classifier, has been integrated directly into the core ranking algorithm. The practical impact: site-level content quality now affects individual page rankings more than ever.

We’ve watched this play out firsthand. Sites with a large volume of thin, generic, or AI-generated filler content have seen domain-wide ranking declines, even on their best pages. The signal is clear — Google is evaluating your entire content library, not just individual URLs.

At Relevance, this has shifted our content strategy work from “publish more” to “publish better and prune aggressively.” For several clients, we’ve recommended removing or consolidating hundreds of underperforming pages. Counterintuitively, reducing the size of a site’s content library often leads to traffic gains on the remaining pages because you’re concentrating Google’s quality assessment on your strongest content.

4. E-E-A-T isn’t a checklist — it’s a content philosophy

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness have moved from an abstract quality framework to something that demonstrably affects rankings. The sites winning in competitive niches are the ones where real practitioners are writing from real experience.

This is why we made a deliberate shift at Relevance toward writing from our agency’s firsthand practitioner perspective. When we publish about SEO techniques, it’s grounded in what we’ve tested across client engagements. When we recommend a strategy approach, it’s because we’ve measured the results.

The sites getting penalized are the ones that aggregated other people’s advice without adding original insight. If your content could have been written by anyone who Googled the topic for 20 minutes, it’s not going to rank in 2026.

5. Video and multimodal content are ranking advantages, not nice-to-haves

Google’s SERPs are increasingly multimodal. Video carousels, image packs, and rich media results now appear for the majority of commercial queries. Sites that only produce text content are leaving visibility on the table.

We’ve been advising clients to embed relevant video content on key landing pages, create short-form video versions of high-performing articles for YouTube, and optimize image assets with descriptive alt text, structured data, and proper file naming. Structured data markup — particularly VideoObject and HowTo schema — significantly increases the chances of earning rich results.

For one client, adding video content to their top 15 blog posts correlated with a 31% increase in average time on page and improved rankings for 11 of those pages within 60 days. The video didn’t have to be production-quality — screen recordings with voiceover narration performed just as well as polished productions.

6. Topical authority is beating domain authority

We’re seeing a clear shift in how Google evaluates site authority. Historically, high-DR (Domain Rating) sites could rank for almost anything. Now, Google is increasingly rewarding topical depth — sites that demonstrate comprehensive expertise within a defined subject area.

This is great news for focused B2B sites competing against massive generalist publishers. A company that publishes 50 deeply expert articles about marketing automation will often outrank a major publisher with a single surface-level piece on the same topic, even if the publisher has 10x the domain authority.

Our content strategy approach leans heavily into this trend. We build interconnected content clusters around core topics, with pillar pages linking to supporting articles and vice versa. This structure explicitly signals topical depth to Google and creates a user experience that encourages deeper engagement.

7. Technical SEO debt is becoming a ranking emergency

With Google’s increased emphasis on site-level quality signals, technical SEO issues that used to be minor annoyances are now actively hurting rankings. We’re seeing more sites where indexation problems, crawl inefficiencies, and Core Web Vitals failures are the primary barrier to organic growth.

The most common technical issues across our recent audits: pages stuck in “crawled — currently not indexed” status (often due to thin content or duplicate page signals), bloated JavaScript that prevents efficient rendering, redirect chains that waste crawl budget, and missing or conflicting canonical tags.

Our standard recommendation: run a comprehensive technical audit at least quarterly. The sites that maintain clean technical health consistently outperform those that only address technical issues reactively. Tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs site audit, and Screaming Frog are essential parts of our monitoring stack.

8. Local and entity-based SEO are converging

Google’s understanding of entities — people, places, organizations, and concepts — has gotten dramatically more sophisticated. This matters for both local businesses and national brands because Google is increasingly ranking based on entity associations rather than just keyword matching.

For local businesses, this means Google Business Profile optimization, consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data across the web, and building local topical authority are more important than ever. For national brands, it means ensuring your brand entity is well-defined in Google’s Knowledge Graph through structured data, Wikipedia presence, and consistent brand signals across authoritative sources.

We’ve been implementing Organization and LocalBusiness schema as standard practice and helping clients build the entity signals that establish their authority in Google’s knowledge systems. For clients in competitive local markets, this entity-first approach has been a meaningful differentiator.

What this means for your SEO strategy

The thread connecting all of these trends is that SEO in 2026 rewards depth, authenticity, and technical excellence. The era of surface-level content, mechanical keyword optimization, and link quantity over quality is definitively over.

If your organic traffic has declined over the past year, it’s likely because the old playbook stopped working — not because SEO itself stopped working. The opportunity is still enormous for brands willing to invest in genuine expertise, clean technical infrastructure, and strategic authority building.

We help companies navigate exactly these shifts. Explore our case studies to see how we’ve adapted strategies for clients across industries, or reach out to discuss how these trends apply to your specific situation.

The post 8 SEO Trends Reshaping How We Approach Organic Growth in 2026 appeared first on Relevance.