Changes in SEO User Behavior — Ryan Purtill // Healthline

Quotes

• “I am the VP of SEO for Healthline media. We have three pretty big properties, Healthline, Medical News Today, and Greatist, altogether will be about 450 million visits this month. There are drastic changes we are seeing pretty quickly. Healthline is at a scale where you can really get a pulse of the nation and partly the world.” -Ryan

• “In March we saw a total disruption in what we normally see. It turned into just a straight diagonal line, every day it was more and more search than the day before as the world becomes obsessed with the pandemic and trying to understand their own personal risks.” -Ryan

• “Its interesting to me that Monday and Tuesday are the days that people are consuming the most health media and then you mentioned that there is a diagonal line which infers that people are just searching for health-related content more on a consistent basis so search volume looks like up.” -Ben

• “One interesting that we saw, and internally we are calling it the COVID mindset was, even in places where there is an evergreen, reliable search traffic, conditions like cholesterol or how to lose weight, things that might have a little seasonality but not much actually lost a lot of traffic. People lost interest in that and they became more focused on COVID-related queries.” -Ryan

• “Its almost like the triage model. In March everyone was in triage, what is this condition, how do I protect myself against it, how serious is it? And then over time, these queries have started to change. Now its, can I get COVID twice? Whats the best face mask? It came from what is the condition to living with the condition. When that opened up, we started seeing a return to evergreen contents.” -Ryan

• “Your strategy should not be so static and like set it and forget it in the SEO world. Whether you are in health or non-health, the living arrangements of the world has changed.” -Ryan

• “I do know well enough that some of our articles that were built on the query part of it exploded on social all around COVID. So, there is still a high-demand for COVID content. Now personally, I think there might be some fatigue there at this point.” -Ryan

• “There was a great social article that Greatist did, “I Quarantined With My Boyfriend, and for me, I was like, does anyone still want to read about the COVID symptoms? No. People want to know about the new reality.” -Ryan

• “There are going to be a whole set of searches that are coming out and Google is going to take more and more real estate for these searches or point them to the CDC or WHO. So you need to think about how does that affect your strategy.” -Ryan

• “User behavior is coming back to a new normal. There are fundamental changes to the way people live and theway people interact that will change the search stream from now on. But we are seeing the return of the predictable day-to-day traffic trajectory.” -Ryan