There are many reasons why metabolic health provider Levels are worth looking at from a content perspective. Their launch strategy for getting their founder on 100 podcasts was a masterclass, and they churn out content consistently as they build their company in a very public way.

On a recent podcast focused on SEO, Editorial Director Mike Haney and Head of Growth Ben Grynol grilled SEO guru Nick Jordan for the secrets of search that saw him catapult numerous companies to the top of search rankings. Search Engine Optimisation is often seen as something of a dark technical art, where you’re juggling technical schema and framework with criteria for keywords, URL structures and other under-the-hood aspects. But many of the factors don’t require engineering know-how, and in fact go to basic content quality.

Jordan breaks success down in a non-technical way, honing in on a few key, replicable factors that anyone can begin to apply, even before you’re ready to create content at scale.

Keywords are Key, Better Content is Better

For Levels, their focus is metabolic health, so as you’ll see below, their site is chock-full of content and headlines leading with keywords on the topic around which they want to attract users. ‘Metabolic health’ appears a lot, as does ‘glucose’ and ‘glucose monitoring’. And while that’s important, because Google will crawl keywords to establish the topic matter, it’s not decisive on how well a site will rank.

What’s more important is how comprehensive and useful that content is to the user. Google, because of the scale of their browser market share, tracks engagement with content and time spent on pages, as well as crawling the content. Content that better serves a user’s need will typically result in users spending more time with it than less useful content. More users spending more time is a big signal to Google that a page is valuable and worth ranking. Says Jordan:

“I ended up outranking Instagram for Instagram Support, … and I ended up outranking Shopify for Shopify Safe. What I realized is that, it’s not about technical hacks. It’s not about backlinks, because I didn’t know any of those. I didn’t build any backlinks. What I saw is that, the content that I created was better than Instagram’s Support page, and the content I created was better than Shopify’s page on whether it’s safe or not. And so really, I learned two things, that it’s all about creating higher quality content, and then the second is, being more relevant to the search that the person’s making.

THE TAKEAWAY:

Your best play is quality content around the topic you can add the most value on. High engagement drives better ranking. Be useful to the user.

Structure is Important

While your content has to be high quality, you do need to consider some basic factors of page structure. Your URLs should contain your keywords, ideally, but be structured in a readable way, and should avoid using random characters, and should avoid using /blog/ or /category/ within them. Avoid hosting content on subdomains like subdomain.getnoan.com - host content on your main domain. Link to relevant internal content to drive more time on your site.
Pages should also be kept clutter-free so that they perform well when viewed on mobile devices - as mobile page speed is a factor considered by the search engines.

Jordan refers to a case study in the podcast which is linked to here - it lists out many of the technical factors that saw him drive huge growth through SEO.

THE TAKEAWAY: Keep structures clean and lean, know the basics of structure for search, and don’t overburden your website with bells and whistles that may not work on mobile. Keep it simple

Do The Work

When it comes to SEO, it would be nice to say ‘Less is More’, but that’s not the case. You have to create a decent volume of content, especially in an age where content creation is, comparatively, easier than ever.

More content is a signal in a number of ways. It’s likely to be more comprehensive. But it also demonstrates to Google that you most likely have some authority on the topic. Jordan again, from the podcast:

John Mueller, the head of Google Search, at least public facing, he has said, “It’s hard to call a 30-page website authoritative.” And, when you think about it, in 2022, literally, anyone can create a 30-page website. And so, if Google gave that glucose monitoring keyword to anyone who wrote 30 pages about glucose monitoring, it’d do two things. The first is, there’d be so much fluctuation that the next day someone else would beat you, because you beat the guys before you. And the second is, there’d be a bunch of scammers publishing glucose monitoring content that really don’t deserve to be there. They don’t have the business model to support that keyword. They don’t have the knowledge that you guys have.

You grind out wins in SEO over time by establishing yourself or your brand as an authority on a topic - don’t expect to pepper a few longish posts with keywords and rise to the top slot in search results. Creating a consistent body of work over time is more likely to build your authority on a topic, and also ensure that you give users and search engines multiple ways to approach keywords and key topics.

THE TAKEAWAY: Don’t expect quick wins, especially in competitive topics. SEO is a long-range strategy and requires consistency of approach.

GO DEEPER:

• Listen to the entire Levels podcast with Nick Jordan here.

• Want a second opinion? This interview with Ethan Smith of Graphite is great, we particularly like his take on focusing on ‘topics vs keywords’ at around the 31-minute mark.