Join Nate Matherson as he sits down with Bennet Johnson for the sixtieth episode of the Optimize podcast. Bennet is the Director of Growth Marketing at Talkiatry, where he drives new patient growth via organic and paid channels. With prior roles at Twitter and The Wall Street Journal, Bennet brings a wealth of experience in growth marketing. Over the past year, Bennet and his team have grown Talkiatry's organic search traffic by over six times, from 30,000 to over 200,000 monthly visitors.
In our episode today, Nate and Bennet explore topics like growth marketing strategies, the importance of content quality, and programmatic SEO. Bennet shares insights into scaling content production, highlighting the creation of 200 blog posts and various landing pages within a year. He also discusses the critical role of internal reviews and medical oversight in ensuring content accuracy and quality. Listen to hear why Bennet emphasizes the value of user-centric content and how Talkiatry leverages both editorial and programmatic approaches to enhance its SEO efforts.
In this week’s deep dive, Bennet explains the strategic use of data from paid marketing to inform organic search strategies, optimizing for high-intent searches like “psychiatrists near me.” Rounding out the episode, Bennet and Nate cover topics like integrating quizzes for engagement, the interplay between paid and organic marketing channels, and the significance of internal linking. Closing the episode is our popular lightning round of questions!
Can you give our listeners a sense of the growth that you've experienced over the last year?
Yeah, it's, it's been exciting for sure. We've grown from 30, 000 total clicks per month about a year ago to now over 200, 000 per month. And SEO overall has gone from being like less than 10 percent of our referral traffic to now being our biggest referral source.
So it's certainly been a bright spot for us. And we really had a little focus on it prior to 2023. At that point, we had a handful of blogs, our homepage would get some traffic, but there were definitely some elements like title tags and meta descriptions being ignored. But it was really at the beginning of 2023, we started to work with an agency to start to test the opportunity around SEO and start creating content and investing in the channel. And really, I think their, their quality just wasn't up to our standards, which I mentioned a little bit earlier. They just didn't really know our audience, which is a little more niche, but yeah, making the pitch internally to kind of take over that strategy, kind of work with our internal team a little bit to start to build that out.
We wrote 50 blogs last year when previously we only had a handful. This year we're on pace to write over 200 in addition to various landing pages. So we're definitely investing more into it.
Hi, and welcome to the optimized podcast. My name is Nate Matherson and I am your host on this weekly podcast. We sit down with some of the smartest minds in content, marketing, and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving the needle in organic search. Today. I'm thrilled to sit down with Bennet Johnson.
Bennet is the director of growth marketing at. He's responsible for driving new patient growth via organic and paid channels. He's also worked in growth marketing roles at Twitter and the wall street journal. Over the last year, Bennet and team have grown organic search traffic by over six X from 30, 000 monthly visitors to now over 200, 000 on this week's episode.
I'm excited to learn more about the strategy. And some of the key learnings that Bennet has had since taking over the reins.
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the optimized podcast. It's brought to you by positional. If you don't know by now, my name's Nate, and I'm one of the co founders of positional and we've built what I think is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketing and SEO teams. We've got tools for keyword research, internal linking, content optimization, and even a couple of tools for analytics.
We'd love for you to check it out at positional. com. Bennet, thank you so much for coming on this week's episode of the Optimize podcast.
Yeah. Thanks, Nate. Excited to be here.
So the first question I ask all of our guests is how did you get into the world of content marketing and SEO?
Yeah, I'm new to SEO, so it's really a beginning last year.
And my background, like you mentioned, is primarily in growth and acquisition marketing. And like many, I never really planned to get into SEO. It's really a culmination of steps. I always had an appreciation for content. And I think that kind of stems back to college. I was an English major and the editor of our college newspaper.
But professionally got into more growth marketing roles at The Wall Street Journal, then Twitter, and currently at Takayetri. Um, which my focus is kind of a little bit more broad across organic and paid, but I joined the company about a year and a half ago and was focused specifically on conversion rate optimization and all we can do to test and improve our website and essentially raise my hand to take on SEO.
Um, we were working with an agency and their just content quality wasn't really up to our standards and I kind of had a broad view of the business and, you know, let me take this on. And over the past year, I've started to prove it out a bit, which has been exciting.
Well, I definitely want to talk about content quality, and we might even talk about paid a little bit too on this episode, because I know you do more than just SEO, uh, and maybe we'll even talk about CRO a little bit too.
Uh, this is going to be a fun episode, but you know, I've been looking forward to this episode all week, uh, because I love to chat with folks at in house teams, people like you, uh, nothing against agency folks, but when you're in the reins and driving the momentum forward internally, it's, uh, it's. It's often a little bit different, maybe a little bit more exciting.
I would argue by my account. It looks like talk. I tree has grown pretty significantly, uh, over this last year. Um, despite what has been a pretty challenging year, uh, in SEO, um, can you give our listeners a sense of the growth that you've experienced over the last year?
Yeah, it's, it's been exciting for sure.
We've grown from 30, 000 total clicks per month about a year ago to now over 200, 000 per month now. And SEO overall has gone from, um, being like less than 10 percent of our referral traffic to now being our biggest referral source. So it's certainly been a bright spot for us and we really had a little focus on it prior to 2023.
At that point, we. Had a handful of blogs, our homepage would get some traffic, but there were definitely some elements like title tags and meta descriptions being ignored. Um, but it was really at the beginning of 2023, we started to work. With an agency to start to test the opportunity around SEO and start creating content and investing in the channel.
And really, I think their, their quality just wasn't up to our standards, which I had mentioned a little bit earlier. They just didn't really know our audience, which is a little more niche. Um, but yeah, making the pitch internally to kind of take over that strategy, kind of work with our internal team a little bit to start to build that out.
We wrote 50 blogs last year when previously we only had a handful. This year we're on pace to write over 200 in addition to various landing pages. So we're definitely investing more into it.
Do I have it right that Talkiatry is like an online platform for psychiatry? Is it a place where, you know, if I'm looking for a psychiatrist, I can find one.
You then match me with one. Could you just tell our listeners what is Talkiatry and what makes you guys unique?
Yeah, Talkiatry provides. It's in network psychiatry. We see patients virtually and treat conditions including anxiety, depression, bipolar, ADHD, and some others. The company launched in 2020 and was co founded actually by a patient and a psychiatrist.
And we really aim to solve problems facing both of those groups in getting care. Even before COVID, demand for mental health services was skyrocketing. Now I think the stat is 60 percent of adults in the U. S. with a mental illness will just go untreated each year because care is inaccessible. And nearly half of clinicians are out of network with insurance just because the rates are low and paperwork is awful.
So for psychiatry, we have over 300 full time psychiatrists available in 43 states. provide virtual care so it's easy to show up for your appointment and you have flexible scheduling and then also have that technology in place to give you high quality mental health care and you also partner with insurance really to make it affordable.
But I think in terms of us, like we are a little bit more niche in terms of how we differ versus other mental health companies in general. Psychiatrists are MDs and can prescribe medication if needed. So there are some key differences between psychiatrists versus therapists and some other mental health professionals.
But all of our psychiatrists are full time W2 employees. They range in their specialties so they can provide better care. And access to patients, um, and really employing those psychiatrists full time versus 10 99s gives them better control over that quality of care.
You've given me a lot of keywords already.
I'm sure there's a lot we could write about about these like different medical conditions or possibly even medications or, um, types of treatment for these different conditions. Uh, so I imagine there's a lot of content that we could create. You're also. In a space, uh, you know, uh, as a lot of folks like to call it like a, your money, your life part of the internet.
Um, and that's where I spent like the first seven years of my career. I was in the consumer finances space. You're in the health space. Like you kind of fall into a part of the internet where, um, I don't want to say there's more scrutiny in terms of the quality of the content you create, but, um, Yeah, I think there is more scrutiny in terms of the quality of the content you create, you know, straying from the outline already.
You mentioned that like you've started to scale up content creation and content production. Is that being done internally? Are you guys using like freelance writers to help you create a lot of this content?
Yes, we are. It's a little bit of both. Beginning this year, we brought on an SEO managing editor who's currently a contractor.
Uh, but that person has been hugely helpful to me in terms of coordinating with a team of freelancers that we work with on a regular basis to produce the drafts, the outlines, and then that will go through a robust internal review where a key component of that is we have a psychiatrist and our medical reviews team look at each piece of content we would publish.
And to your point, I think just for us being in the medical space. Want to make sure the content's high quality, especially if you're writing about things like medication, for example. So that's really the key piece there.
Yeah. I saw that you guys were doing that. I saw that like, um, at least a few of the blog posts that I read before we started recording were actually reviewed by.
Licensed physicians, um, for, you know, quality and accuracy. Um, but you know, I talked to a lot of startups and they always ask me like, Nate, like, what is a high quality blog post? Um, you know, at this point you've probably looked at enough blog posts to like, just have a, like a quick feeling for it or not.
Um, but if you had to answer that question, what makes for like a great. piece of content, a high quality piece of content that that would exist on your site.
Yeah, I think for us, it really fills the user intent and just answers the query gets to the what they're searching for. So I think part of that is yes, having it be well written, well researched and unique.
For us too, especially within the medical space, it's providing like the full holistic story and being careful to not to suggest certain things or say like, oh, this is a diagnosis when you would really need to speak with a doctor to understand your unique needs. So I think all of those components come into play that are a little unique for us, but overall it's, it's about that high quality and kind of really providing something unique there.
Yeah. And how much content are you, you creating on like a monthly basis these days?
Our goal for this year was 200 blog posts specifically, which was well up from 50 last year. And so we've kind of spaced that out and it varies a little bit by month outside of blog posts too. We're looking to create new different landing pages for certain conditions, for example, um, or insurance that we take.
And then also kind of dipping our toe into some different programmatic strategies to do that. I've started to work. I think there's more room to run there, but I also say some different tools and like quizzes, for example, or other things that we can introduce as well.
Okay. All right. I want to talk about all of this.
Like blog posts are cool and all, but you know, SEO often is more than just a blog posts on landing pages specifically. Like What does that involve? Like it's when would you create a landing page, for example, versus a blog post?
Yeah, I think both landing pages and blogs do play an important role for us.
And in general, too, like we see certain landing pages have conversion rates of 10%. Whereas our blogs, we know very low direct conversion rates, often below 1%. Uh, it really varies on like the search we're optimizing for. I think overall just what our audience needs. So we have more holistic landing pages around the different conditions we treat.
Like for example, we have dedicated landing pages for anxieties, uh, depression, bipolar disorder, and then the blogs get into more specific aspects to those. And Kind of look across the funnel there, but we'll definitely tailor the page to the type of search and the intent there. So if it is more bottom funnel, that's where a landing page might come in, where we explain a little bit more about psychiatry and our treatment process.
Yeah. I think you've hit it on the head in that, like, we have to give Google the right type of page for the keyword we're targeting. Uh, and that's a big step. I think a lot of startups make like, you know, they want to rank a landing page for a keyword that needs to be served by like a piece of editorial content, uh, or vice versa.
What are you guys thinking through on the programmatic side of things? That sounds really interesting.
Yeah. We, again, I think kind of just started to scratch the surface on it, but we've been testing some pages that optimize for the search psychiatrist near me. Where we've seen good volume around that very bottom funnel, high intense search, and we also had a lot of signals from the paid side of the business where paid marketing is very big for us.
And especially within Google search, we have a ton of non brand keyword data on the paid side that we've leveraged for organic, which has been a great way to. Kind of share learnings cross team there. Um, but it's seen especially a lot of search demand and volume around psychiatrists near me. So we had started to create some different pages that optimize to that on the local level, mainly by state.
So for us, we have 300 plus psychiatrists who. Treat a range of specialties and are available in 43 states across the country. And we were able to pull in a feed of those doctors by state to kind of tailor and personalize each page and explaining more about our care process. So there's a ton of competition now.
I think for that search specifically, we've seen a little bit of traction. I'm hoping to make them a little bit more niche and find ways that we can be a little bit more personalized here, I think, in the future.
Yeah, almost like a ZocDoc strategy. So like, psychiatrists near me, but knowing that, you know, I'm in Charleston, South Carolina, like Google smart enough these days to like surface a page of psychiatrists in Charleston, South Carolina to me when I make that near me search.
That's really interesting. And yeah, it's definitely a competitive space. Like you've got. Zocdoc and like eight other Zocdocs that all kind of compete in that, that programmatic SEO, uh, landing page style set of keywords, I guess, to call it that.
Totally. Yeah. It's the Zocdocs psychology today is there's so many big guns in the space and all of them to have been publishing content for years at very high domain ratings.
So I think we're trying to find ways to kind of explore more within our niche and really show differentiated pieces there.
I'm going to go on a little bit of a rant here. Like I talked to a lot of startups and you know, a lot of companies want to start with programmatic SEO. Cause like, it doesn't require them to go and write 200 blog posts.
Like you guys are going to do this year. And like, It just doesn't end up working. Like I talked to a company the other day. They published like SEO pages overnight. Before that, they had like two pages on their domain. And like the end result was like, Google just like put their hands in the air and said, like, we're not going to index any of this content.
But I really like that you've executed on like the editorial side of things first, and now you're rolling into the programmatic side of things. I think that's just going to make your life so much easier on like the programmatic side of things. So makes complete sense how you guys are approaching this from my perspective as far as, uh, You know, the content like production process goes, uh, would love to learn like a little bit more about that.
Do you do like the keyword research yourself and then you hand it off to a freelance writer? Like what are the steps look like, uh, to actually go from keyword to piece of content on the site?
Yeah, currently I will do a lot of the topical and keyword research on my end and closely collaborate with our SEO managing writer.
We'll kind of get together. Form a plan and then go from there on a list of specific keywords that we will pass off to a team of freelancers who will help generate the outlines. We'll review the outlines, go from there in terms of the various editing stages, and then pass that off in terms of a internal review with our team of psychiatrists, bring it back to the team and ultimately publish that on our site.
So it goes through a few different revisions with a medical review component being a huge part of that. But certainly, like, myself and my other counterpart on the content side have been a key role in it.
I apologize for jumping around a little bit. I'm getting a little distracted. But you've, you've given me a lot of questions.
You mentioned quizzes, too. Would that be like a, you know, a quiz to find out if I have, like, ADHD or something like that that I could take online? Is that what you're thinking through there?
17:24
You got it. Yeah, that's what we're going for. It's in general, like I think just this past year I'm trying to like test out a bunch of different content methods.
And so that's one in particular of different sort of unique tools or things that we could introduce and give away for free in the sense. So we created some of these different quizzes for the different conditions we treat that would optimize to a search. Like, do I have ADHD? Do I have an anxiety disorder?
And the key for that is that. I think there's definitely a good amount of search volume and relatively low competition for some of these. We want to bring a little bit more of our unique spin on it because With a lot of these tools, the key aspect is you're not going to get a diagnosis from a tool. You actually need to speak to a professional, like a psychiatrist.
So these tools, and we were careful internally to call them tools and not tests or assessments, in the sense that they can help you better understand your symptoms. And it's almost more of a legion tool for us. But at the end that we would encourage you to speak with a professional, like a psychiatrist.
So that's been one way that we've started to test some of these different types of pages like them.
Yeah. I see that you've got the depression test, uh, on the menu element, uh, that I'm on right now. I'm, I know it's early, but I would guess that. The traffic, even if there's less of it that lands on one of these tests or quizzes is probably like better from a conversion standpoint.
Like if someone's willing to like go through a test and get some sort of a result back, I know it's not a full assessment. I think like there'd probably be a pretty high likelihood for them to want to take that next step and actually engage with tolkien tree from a conversion standpoint versus. What might be a very evergreen blog post, I'm just guessing here, but does that sound right?
Yeah. You got it. Yeah. We see pretty strong conversion rates from someone who would take that assessment and then go on to our actual intake where you would enter a bunch of questions and then get matched with a doctor and book an appointment.
I know you work on the, the conversion rate optimization side of things.
And, um, You know, at my first company, we, we would match, uh, consumers for loan products. And so we would have, uh, you know, all of these consumers go through an application flow where we would ask them like eight to 12 questions. It would kind of culminate in us asking for their social security number, which was.
This was always a difficult one, um, from a conversion standpoint, uh, have you had any key insights in terms of like the best way to structure like a quiz or an onboarding to get that user to actually go through and complete it?
You know, there's a lot we're just starting to test on our end for our intake flow, where we have 10 to 20 questions where we ask for things, you know, personal information and then match you with a doctor.
So we're just beginning to test there and learn more what works for our audience. We have run a number of different tests on the main website, looking at different pages and how we can learn more about our audience. Not as many though about like quiz order and tools. I think there's a lot of ways you could go about it in terms of like ordering the questions from easy to hard, for example, or just other ways to try to find the best flow, but it can definitely vary.
And back to the blog, I apologize for jumping around. Um, on this podcast, we like to joke that traffic doesn't always equal dollars, but from your view, would you say that traffic Broadly is positively correlated to dollars or conversions.
Yeah, I think it is in our case. I mean, really we set expectations internally that like step one was more around keyword impression and traffic growth, and then converting that traffic is step two. So last month, like our traffic's up six X compared to last year, conversions were double. What we saw last year.
So we are seeing growth there via that one way we're measuring it. And I think overall, we know this content is playing a valuable role in the funnel of bringing new audiences in is serving as a valuable assist type channel. And I think there's more we can do around attribution to, to really understand the value, but we definitely like blogs have a low direct conversion rate, but it are definitely bringing people in the funnel in this case.
Yeah, attribution is always so tricky. It sounds like you use this content in other ways too. Do you also use the content to like remarket or like re engage, you know, people who have previously started down the funnel, but maybe not have converted yet, or maybe just to keep your existing customer base engaged.
Do you use this content in other ways beyond just new traffic acquisition?
Yeah, we're starting to do it more, but in general, it's all very new for us. So we've started to use it within email campaigns and more so to build awareness, show more of what Takayatri offers. And then also for our current patients on more of the engagement side of the business, it's ideal if one of our providers could actually send a piece of content from us versus linking out elsewhere.
So that's where we want to get to as well to help support them in that side of the business.
Yeah, I talked with a guy named Mike Haney on the podcast last year. Mike runs like the content SEO strategy for a company called Levels Health, which they're not competitive with you. They're in like the metabolic health space.
And he had mentioned to me that like, uh, their email newsletter became so Important, maybe more important than like the traffic they were driving from organic search. Um, as you think about like conversions that happen from blog pages, have you tried like experimenting trying to put people into an email newsletter versus trying to push someone directly into the sales funnel?
I guess my question here is, have you thought at all about like what type of CTA to display across these pages or, or do you use like the same CTAs across all of them?
Yeah, we're just starting to test new types of CTAs. In the past, we had typically stuck like one single CTA button in the article. And we had tried to personalize it a little bit to the content.
So if it was on anxiety content, we might say, see if talkiatry is right for you for anxiety treatment, or probably something shorter than that. But you get the idea where it's somewhat personalized. Or if the article is on insurance, we might have a CTA button that says, Hey, we're in network with all major insurance plans, like here, check your insurance.
But now we're starting to experiment with things like yes, an email capture module or other different types of CTAs that point to different destinations. I think kind of what you had mentioned, it's, it's a lot to ask someone maybe who's just looking to read a blog to immediately jump and sign up for your product or service in this case.
And so trying to meet them where they're at and find ways to essentially warm them up, I think in this type of case will certainly benefit us with those converged rates long term.
Yeah. And previously you mentioned that. Like you've got this incredible data set from all of the work you've done on the paid side of things in terms of like the non branded keywords that like will work or have worked for you.
Would you say that like the learnings you have on the paid side of things is, is really what drives like the concepts or ideating that you do on like the organic side of things?
I would say it's extremely helpful. I don't think it necessarily drives organic strategy, but for us starting out last year and really kind of forming a strategy from scratch, we had a huge amount of paid data from the past few years that we could leverage to indicate more about what our audience is searching for.
Just learning more about our audience and their needs. So that was a really good starting point for us to look at performance for different keywords and kind of understand more of our niche a little bit more within online psychiatry and how that fits within mental health. So that was just really a phenomenal starting point.
I think a good example of like between paid and organic, some ways you can kind of cross share learnings there.
Yeah, does it ever go in reverse where like you see a keywords working really well from the organic side of things and you're like, Hey, maybe we, we should pay attention to it from a paid side of things as well.
We've started to a little bit, I think, as our traffic's grown, like get early indicators on types of content that performs well, like there's some things around medication that are doing really well for SEO that. Um, maybe on the paid SEM side, like we could look into a little bit more and just have to be a little careful on that given our medical niche.
But yeah, I think there, there's sometimes certain learnings and I think more testing we can do there in terms of potentially bidding back on brand spend, but overall like paid marketing as a whole for us is just such a huge part of our acquisition engine. It really drives the majority of our signups and we've been doing it for three years.
I think there's a lot we can take from there as we're starting to build out more of our organic strategy here.
Yeah, I know that Paid isn't just like, Google Ads. When I think of Paid, I always go to Google Ads. But like, Paid can be other channels too. Like, uh, you know, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Are there any like, uh, ad channels outside of Google ads that have you really excited right now?
I don't know about excited. I think for us, we've been very more like mid bottom funnel focused. So Google makes up the majority of our spend in terms of Google ads. Um, meta plays an important role as well, but for psychiatry, like we've only been around a few years and we don't have a huge brand and there's a lot more we can do to build our brand, grow awareness.
And ideally move away from just optimizing towards the bottom and mid funnel to really moving towards more upper funnel, which I think SEO is playing a good, good role in that of bringing people in. But on the page, there's more types of channels we can test that would help build brand awareness there.
It feels like you're doing that from an SEO standpoint. When I looked before at some of the keywords that, that it seems like you're ranking pretty well for, you know, with SEO, like we're always trying to get conversions, but it feels like that. If you are trying to build a new brand in a category, uh, then some of those very evergreen keywords where it might be unlikely that we'll be able to attribute a conversion to that page today might still be pretty helpful from like a brand building exercise to at least get more folks aware of tychiatry.
Is that an acceptable argument? What do you think?
Yeah, I think so. Absolutely.
Okay. As far as getting buy in goes, cause I know you mentioned some of these like quizzes. It feels like those would take engineering resources to actually build and implement also getting buy in in terms of budget from a content standpoint.
I know when you kind of started into this organic search role like a year, a year and a half ago, uh, it was very new in the very beginning. Was it hard to get buy in for like. Building out this SEO motion. And then, uh, has that changed at all over the last year?
Yeah, I think at the beginning it was important for us to really demonstrate the need for SEO and a little bit within our unique use case where you just have been very reliant on paid acquisition to drive growth and over time, SEO long term could be a really good bet for us to become less reliant on paid and lower our acquisition costs. So already like framing it around that and kind of a key company priority was important to get buy in. And at the end of the day too, tying it to revenue is I think the key piece, but there was a lot of internal education around the benefits of SEO where I had to explain more around how like it is high intent.
As an audience, it's low cost relative to other channels and does tend to compound over time and there's clear benefits of us, you know, starting to invest here and mainly to setting expectations that this is a long term bet, but we need to start investing in it now. I think a lot of that came to like looking at what our competitors were doing, look at what the markets, you know, what's getting attention and framing the business case properly.
But I think all of those things in terms of aligning around your business goals. Clearly demonstrating the need for it helps get that buy in up front. And over time, if you're able to demonstrate some early wins, I think that makes it much easier to say yes as it goes along.
Yeah, attributing like a dollar spent on a piece of content to a conversion or to revenue is, is often very hard for a single piece of content.
But you've done the work. And so if you and the team were to spend like no more time on SEO or content for the rest of this year, like odds are your blog would still get like over 200, 000 visitors a month from organic search. So like you've spent the money, but now you've got this asset. That's going to probably for a long time, continue to drive traffic to the site, which makes like, I think ROI, like more challenging to calculate and communicate. Is that something you've experienced internally?
Yeah, I think that's true over time. And that can be more difficult for us. It's been much more around. Just since we are so new, like setting those expectations that we expect to see the traffic growth first, then the conversion piece and that translate into revenue.
Now we've seen the traffic growth. We've really pivoted now to the second piece of how we can increase the conversion rate on that content. So we've started to implement a number of these levers to help boost that. But overall, like I think we've stressed that we need to keep. SEO resource, especially knowing how much SEO is constantly changing with everything going on in the space and staying on top of it's important, but long term, yeah, I think clearly understanding the ROI is important and making sure that the team is on board with that.
You've done a lot, right. On the content creation side of things in terms of the helpfulness and quality of content you've created. And I think you've built like a real asset to the business and that should continue to. Deliver over, I think a very long period of time given that the topics you're writing about are, they're going to be around in like four years from now.
Like, I don't think ADHD is going anywhere. It's probably getting worse. If anything, as far as like, Thinking about the value of an organic search channel, is there any value in like being able to retarget to this traffic on other platforms after they've been to the site before? So say, for example, we drive someone to the site to what is a very evergreen piece of content.
They see our brand for the first time. Does it ever make sense to then like retarget to that person with on other platforms like Instagram something like that?
It absolutely would. The difficulty is just the industry we're in. We have all sorts of HIPAA restrictions around retargeting. So we have to be very careful about that, especially with paid platforms where we can't necessarily do that use case.
But finding other ways to get first party data and have consent to be able to market to them is important.
Ah, HIPAA. I don't care. I wish I could ask you some good questions about HIPAA, but I could ask you what it stands for. What does it stand for?
That is a great question. Let me quick Google the acronym here.
Uh, it's more around privacy within healthcare. It technically stands for the health insurance portability and accountability act. Look at that. Wow. Mainly in terms of the key piece of protecting That PII and personal identifiable information and making sure like for us as a healthcare provider. That if someone gives us any PII insensitive data, like we protect that and wouldn't leak it to the paid platforms, for example, or any other sources, and we're very careful with that information you would give us.
Totally. Yeah. It looks like it was a bipartisan effort. I love that. Was signed into law into 1996. So it's been around a while. I need to do some more research. I want to ask a little bit more about the SEO strategy, technical SEO. I know there's a lot of different parts of a technical SEO audit or strategy.
Is that something you've really worried about at all over the last year or not so much?
I've worried about it, but not much overall. I think it should be more of a focus now as we've started to really scale and produce more content. But everything like I've learned, um, about SEO, just being new to it is that, you know, as your site starting out with a smaller size, technical SEO tends to be less important.
It's more of a focus on content and backlinks and the focus on technical SEO will grow over time. So I know there's elements that can be improved on our website. We just internally don't have a resource right now to help with that. I'm curious your point of view on that, too. Like how important from your standpoint is technical SEO?
I think it depends. Like a little part of me dies like every time I talk to like an early stage startup that's got like Six pages on their website. And they're worried about technical SEO or like even worse. Like they've hired a consultant to do like a technical SEO audit for them, and they've got six pages.
There are a lot of SEO auditing tools out there where like, you'll, you'll go in, you'll put your website in and they'll give you like a really low score, you know, a 25 out of 100, I've talked to some friends and. Other people on in house, uh, SEO teams. And they'll say to me, like, Nate, I only need to worry about technical SEO because when someone from like leadership goes into the SEO tool and they see that our site health score is a 25 out of 100, they like ask me like what I'm doing wrong, I tend to fall into the camp of like.
Technical SEO really doesn't matter unless like you've already done the first two parts, right? Like, you know, you've picked the right keywords. You've created awesome content. Uh, like you said, maybe you've built some backlinks. I do think with a site like yours, you've now reached that stage where. You know, like micro optimizations on title tags or meta descriptions, things like that can actually be pretty impactful, um, from like a click through rate standpoint.
Um, so I, I think that's worth spending time on as far as like core web vitals go, like I, I really don't care, uh, unless. Like they're extremely bad. Like, I don't think it makes sense to do like micro optimizations on like LCP, for example, also like all the agencies out there, like they just oversell technical SEO when they really just can't arguably maybe do the hard work, which is, uh, to actually create awesome content a lot of the time.
Anyways, I ran over, you mentioned backlinks, uh, how important are backlinks these days? Broad, like broadly in SEO. I'm not talking about Tokai trees specifically.
Yeah, they're important. I think, especially if you're a site starting out from scratch, you definitely need those links and they matter. What's interesting is they just haven't, like, I'm going to talk about our personal case.
We just haven't had much of a focus on it this past year. I think we've been able to demonstrate that we can create really high quality content, have it rank well without. a ton of link building efforts and our domain rating is much lower than a lot of sites that we can outrank. So for us now, I want to make it more of a focus to produce really like data driven pieces that can collect links and find other ways to explore that.
But we've been able to accumulate links via kind of other methods outside of SEO just over the past year. It says talk, high tree has grown as a company. Really?
I know Google has downplayed the importance of backlinks. Like over the last year, I still think they're very important. I mean, if we look at like all of the algorithm updates that have happened over the last year, like it seems like the websites with like the highest authority generally have performed better than sites that.
That haven't had as high of an authority, um, whatever metric you might be using there. It makes sense to spend time building backlinks. Um, but like you said, we want to do it in like a scalable way, like, you know, the one off guest blog or, you know, the one off like, you know, broken link outbound email you did, like to build a single link probably isn't going to move the needle.
Uh, but like you said, like creating data driven research or digital PR these days or link bait, um, you know, those are, That definitely the more scalable ways to build backlinks. For example, like if you haven't already on the teleki, teleki tree site, you could create like an ADHD statistics page or a depression statistics page or, uh, you know, insert treatment or like.
Uh, condition that your customer has statistics page earlier on this podcast, we talked with Jeffrey troll, um, who had built a student loan statistics page. Uh, and over the course of a few years, he acquired like 2000 referring domains to that page as people were trying to like source student loan statistics.
So if that isn't something you've already done, I definitely would explore it. It's pretty low hanging fruit too.
Yeah. You've given me some great ideas here. Well, we're definitely going to do that now.
Yeah. And also on like the data driven side of things, I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, interesting insights that you might have in your own user base that maybe you could tell stories around, uh, and, and pitch those to journalists.
Um, that could be pretty interesting too.
Yeah, absolutely. We've done a little bit of that. I think there's certainly more we can tap into for sure.
How much time do you spend thinking about internal linking? I noticed that you do a lot of it. Is internal linking pretty important?
Yeah, I think it's absolutely important and we've seen that benefit us in terms of, um, I think some of the CRO aspects and just overall visibility.
So everything I've learned within the SEO space the past year has indicated, yes, internal linking is important and we've tried to make efforts and strides to promote more internal links. So in our case, like, yeah, I don't know if there's a sweet spot to the number of internal links for a given piece or anything, but yeah, It's definitely playing a role.
Ethan Smith, uh, from Graphite was on the podcast maybe like seven months ago. And he said the magic number was like seven, like seven internal links to a page was what you needed, like, but five was pretty good too, just not as good as seven, but like. Five was twice as good as three. I don't think there's like a magic number like I tend to fall into the camp of like doing it when it's natural for the reader and helpful.
I don't I don't try to overthink it myself, but But I agree with you. I think internal linking is often one of like the least appreciated Jobs to do in SEO.
Yeah, and you brought up Ethan Smith. I got to give him a shout out He when I was first learning about SEO about a year ago I just tried to listen and start talking to people and spend a couple months on it I listened to his interview with I think I'm Lenny's podcast It's like the first intro into SEO and checked out some of their material on reforge That's been super helpful along with some stuff from like Eli Schwartz his book on product Let SEO is another great resource Kevin Indig Even your pot here, obviously, in terms of gaining insights from other folks, but I would recommend that for anyone in similar shoes to me.
If you're starting out in terms of SEO, like looking at those resources is a phenomenal starting point.
Yeah. We've had all three of those folks on the optimized podcast. Uh, they were kind enough to come on. Um, but you mentioned like, you know, it's been a year, year and a half since you really started thinking about SEO.
Practicing it, is there like a big learning that you've had, uh, or like is something maybe you could share with our audience that you weren't quite expecting when you first started building the strategy?
Yeah, I think really focusing on the right things is important for us. We have a small team. Limited resources.
We chose to strategically focus on content that we thought our audience cared about based on some of the data and what it indicated. So writing about the conditions we treat as a prime example and hitting the different stages of the funnel made sense as a starting point. I think with an SEO, there's so many different avenues you can go, whether it's looking at specific keywords and trying to optimize for that, but really taking a step back to ask, what is your audience?
What are their needs and how you can actually help with that from the SEO side is what's most important. So that would be one in terms of focus. I think two, just really investing in high quality content. I think that is a big differentiator for us. I think especially in the world of AI content now, being able to have a high quality piece will set you apart and you'll be rewarded for it.
And the third, more around communication internally. Especially if you're at a startup and folks have no idea what SEO is or what it stands for, you have to do a lot of communication one to get buy in, but two in terms of progress and how things are going to keep people excited about it.
I haven't asked this question in a while.
Uh, but what do you, what do you think about AI generated content? Is there a place for it on the talk? I tree site?
You know, we really haven't used any, I've leveraged some of the AI tools in terms of research outlines, et cetera. Um, for us though, I, We haven't wanted to get into it, just given our standards and sensitivity.
I do see the value of using it to produce drafts, but making sure there's a human at the end of it, I think, is what's important.
How important is fact checking for you guys in the content creation process? Because, you know, AIs will often get a lot of things wrong, uh, or kind of accurate. Uh, when you're creating your content, is, is like fact checking a big part of that editorial process?
Yeah, it certainly is. It's, it's a key part, especially with our medical reviews and with, um, the writing process. So, especially for us, just if we're saying something about depression, for example, we need to make sure it's fact checked and well written. I think, to your point, uh, especially with some of the AI tools, that can be a big downside.
And so, having a human at the end of it all and making sure you're checking that is, is important.
Well, Bennet, this has been so much fun. If it's okay with you, I've got like a few pressing lightning round questions that I'd like to ask you. Does that sound good?
Yeah, let's do it.
Okay. And I asked this question because I literally am writing a blog post for the keyword.
How long should a blog post be for SEO and I'd like to quote you in it and I'm gonna ask you the question. How long should a blog post to be for SEO?
Oh god. I want to say the classic it depends, but I Baseline probably over 800 words. You got to think a blog Tends to be more in depth and a longer form piece of content versus a landing page or something else For us like we have leveraged clear scope and other tools to try to zero in on the type of or the length of content So I'd struggle to give a specific number
totally as far as like keywords go What's your number one keyword?
Like if you could wake up tomorrow and like rank First for that keyword, just like no questions asked, like which keyword would it be?
Psychiatry. We went from last year, number 31 for online psychiatrist is what we were ranking for about a year ago. And we're, we're now number one for that specific search in terms of online psychiatrist.
I think taking a step back just since we do provide virtual care, like psychiatry as a whole, if we were to be ranking number one for that, that that'd be pretty awesome.
Yeah, it's a tough keyword. You've got psychiatry.org number one. I don't know that you'll I
dream big, man.
I don't know. That's a tough one.
Uh, AI overviews. Are you concerned about them? Is it, uh, is it something you're getting asked about internally from leadership?
Slightly concerned, yet also optimistic. I have gotten a lot of questions about it and we have done some plans to try to prepare for it launching in terms of focusing more mid funnel, bottom funnel content as well.
But I, I don't know. I think it's an exciting time to be new to SEO and learning about this as things are constantly changing. It also is a big opportunity to like, if you can. Steal traffic away from your competitors. AI overviews could be great in that sense, but it's a wait and see.
Yeah. Google said they might actually send us more traffic, but, uh, you know, we've seen anecdotally from folks like Kevin and dig that that's likely not the case.
Uh, but it's, uh, like you said, you know, maybe that middle section of the funnel, the bottom section of the funnel. Um, just becomes more important, more of a focus if that, that very top of the funnel is, uh, is maybe being served by an AI overview. Uh, and this last one, I'm really just curious. Cause you have an interesting role where you you're dealing with paid.
You're also dealing with organic. Uh, I don't know if y'all use like, okay. Ours had talk high tree, but when, uh, assuming you are like, if you've got your like number one, Is it acquisition broadly or, or is it really two parts? Do you split your objectives between paid and organic? And they're very clearly two different objectives that we need to hit.
Yeah, I'd say each within paid and organic ladder up in terms of reducing our paid or overall acquisition costs. So SEO is a great. Tool for that long term as we drive more conversions and are able to become less reliant on paid marketing and for all the benefits of SEO, like we mentioned earlier, but we have specific OKRs and goals and for organic growth and for paid growth.
But what's great is both ladder up to that overall focus on being more efficient and reducing our costs.
All right. Well, Bennet, this has been so much fun. Thank you for coming on this week's episode of the optimized podcast. And you've built at least one backlink today. We will link over to the talk, high tree site and, uh, and your LinkedIn, uh, from, uh, from the show notes, uh, when they get put up on our website.
But is there anything else you'd like to say to our listeners?
No, thanks for having me, Nate. This has been a ton of fun and hope to do this again sometime.
And that's a wrap. And I just want to thank our sponsor Positional. They've got what is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketers and SEOs. They've even got a couple tools for social media. Uh, we'd love for you to check out Positional and the tool set that we've created, uh, over the last 15 months at positional.com, and you can always reach out to me if you have any questions. My email is Nate at positional.com. Whether you've got questions about our tool set or comments and complaints, uh, or even positive feedback about this podcast, I'd love to hear from you. Um, and don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button, uh, wherever you are listening to this podcast.
Uh, thanks so much for tuning in.
Join hundreds of leading SEO and content marketing teams who trust Positional to enhance their content strategy, provide comprehensive analytics, and highlight data-driven optimizations for their channel.
Start Free TrialPositional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
We used to create outlines for our posts, either by paying a consultant $75+ each, or by spending 1-2 hours researching and creating each one ourselves. With Positional, we can create the best outlines for our target keyword clusters and get alternatives within a couple clicks.
Positional has proven indispensable in our SEO strategy. Its rapid optimization capabilities for our blogs led to noticeable improvements in search rankings within a month. From planning to making our content better, it’s like having a teammate. Our team loves it!
Positional is a must-use tool for any growing startup that cares about SEO. It's simple and easy to use but as powerful as anything out there. Plus their customer support is next level.
Positional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
We used to create outlines for our posts, either by paying a consultant $75+ each, or by spending 1-2 hours researching and creating each one ourselves. With Positional, we can create the best outlines for our target keyword clusters and get alternatives within a couple clicks.
Positional has proven indispensable in our SEO strategy. Its rapid optimization capabilities for our blogs led to noticeable improvements in search rankings within a month. From planning to making our content better, it’s like having a teammate. Our team loves it!
Positional is a must-use tool for any growing startup that cares about SEO. It's simple and easy to use but as powerful as anything out there. Plus their customer support is next level.
Positional has been an amazing addition to our SEO and Content team's workflows, enhancing our overall efficiency. We particularly love using AutoDetect and Internal Linking on a daily basis!
Nate and the positional team are the best of the best in SEO, content marketing, and helping you grow your organic traffic. The combination of their expertise and the SEO and content tool they’ve built has allowed us to build a scalable content engine. Reach out to me anytime for a testimony. They are truly phenomenal.
As an SEO novice, Positional makes it easy. I can quickly go from keyword research, to clustering, to content outlines, then go focus on just making good content. I felt like it helped bridge the gaps between what would’ve taken 3 or more tools in the past.
The first time we used Positional's toolset was to revamp an older but important piece of content. We used Optimize for optimization, and Internals for internal linking suggestions. We went from position #6 to #1 with the changes and increased our organic search traffic to the page by 400%. Today, Positional is an integral part of our blogging strategy, from topic generation to blog renovation.
Positional has been an amazing addition to our SEO and Content team's workflows, enhancing our overall efficiency. We particularly love using AutoDetect and Internal Linking on a daily basis!
Nate and the positional team are the best of the best in SEO, content marketing, and helping you grow your organic traffic. The combination of their expertise and the SEO and content tool they’ve built has allowed us to build a scalable content engine. Reach out to me anytime for a testimony. They are truly phenomenal.
As an SEO novice, Positional makes it easy. I can quickly go from keyword research, to clustering, to content outlines, then go focus on just making good content. I felt like it helped bridge the gaps between what would’ve taken 3 or more tools in the past.
The first time we used Positional's toolset was to revamp an older but important piece of content. We used Optimize for optimization, and Internals for internal linking suggestions. We went from position #6 to #1 with the changes and increased our organic search traffic to the page by 400%. Today, Positional is an integral part of our blogging strategy, from topic generation to blog renovation.
“We’ve been moving up the search rankings. When we first started using Positional, we had about 1,000 visitors from organic search per month, and today, we have over 12,000 visitors from organic search per month. And obviously, Positional has played a large role in our growth.”
Positional takes the guessing game out of our content and SEO strategy. It allows me to do extremely quick keyword research which I can then turn into detailed instructions for our content writers through their Optimize tool. I love the speed new capabilities are being added!
I've been using Positional since its closed beta, and it boosted our SEO results so far! We've published over 80 articles with Positional and it has gained traction very well. The "Optimize" tool is my favorite — it ensures we use the right keywords for better rankings. The "Content Analytics" tool is also great for showing us exactly where we should improve our content.
Positional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
“We’ve been moving up the search rankings. When we first started using Positional, we had about 1,000 visitors from organic search per month, and today, we have over 12,000 visitors from organic search per month. And obviously, Positional has played a large role in our growth.”
Positional takes the guessing game out of our content and SEO strategy. It allows me to do extremely quick keyword research which I can then turn into detailed instructions for our content writers through their Optimize tool. I love the speed new capabilities are being added!
I've been using Positional since its closed beta, and it boosted our SEO results so far! We've published over 80 articles with Positional and it has gained traction very well. The "Optimize" tool is my favorite — it ensures we use the right keywords for better rankings. The "Content Analytics" tool is also great for showing us exactly where we should improve our content.
Positional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
