Fresh Take on Content Prompts 200x Traffic Increase

Challenge

With age comes great wisdom.

It’s true of people, but also true of companies like Griswold Home Care – an industry expert in aging -- founded three decades ago to connect elderly people with non-medical caregivers, and an industry expert in aging. Of course, what they realized to be true all along was the need to adapt with age.

Enter, their digital strategy.

The task at hand, upon partnering with Seer in June 2013, was to showcase their well of knowledge in the field of aging through a thorough and thoughtful content strategy. While Griswold had built a solid reputation with 30+ years in the elder care industry and over 130 locations throughout the U.S., they needed their online presence to reflect that -- especially when they were going head-to-head with competitors with celebrity spokespeople and TV ad budgets.

Griswold had already done the heavy lifting of establishing themselves as a leader in their field; our job, then, was to convey that in the digital landscape by sorting out which topics resonated most with their online audience.

Approach

First, we needed a lay of the land.

We began by conducting extensive long-tail keyword research into subjects related to aging. Rather than focusing on keywords with lots of search volume -- and lots of competition in the digital landscape, these long-tail terms targeted niche topics. Using that research as our springboard, we collaborated with the Griswold team to start conversations using their blog to communicate areas of interest with their audience – everything from guest posts crafted by industry experts to resource guides that address signs and symptoms of common age-related disorders like dementia.

The big idea: Offer reliable information at a steady pace via Griswold’s blog to their target “Sandwich Generation” audience. That is, a group of adults who care for their aging parents, pack lunch for their kids, and still need to hightail it into the office by 9 a.m. (Think: “Sandwiched” between multiple identities.)

Create a trustworthy space for those people, we thought, and Griswold could not only give an online face to its solid reputation, but grow it along the way.

Execution

We started by introducing a content strategy heavy on articles devoted to specific age-related ailments and concerns. These articles were delivered at a consistent frequency of eight posts per month (eventually 12), yielding a 96% increase in organic traffic.

But there was still more to do— and an even more diverse group of “sandwich” folks to reach.

With a firm foundation of blog content to build on, our next step was to look to Google Analytics. Upon closer inspection, Google Analytics demonstrated Griswold users were most drawn to resource guides that armed them with information—signs and symptoms, for example— and solutions-oriented insights. Accordingly, we not only doubled down on those handy guides, but refined existing ones and created a resource hub page that now ranks in the Top 10 on Google for keywords pertaining to homecare.

By 2015, we’d expanded our audience-first efforts by developing more nuanced topics based on what data told us was trending during that moment in time. In doing that, we filled holes in content left by competitors, taking on fresh subjects like LGBT aging, and bringing in more subject matter experts to apply their personal experiences. These buzzworthy posts continue to put Griswold in front of new audiences, and the proof is in the numbers: Six months after upping the blog’s post frequency and introducing trending-topic content, organic traffic increased by an additional 49 percent.

Results

Our partnership with Griswold is still going strong, but in the three years since Seer and Griswold partnered, the home-care company has enormously grown its online influence, boasting 2,020% organic growth since June 2013. And that growth shows no signs of slowing down: Griswold raked in 218,000 more organic page views in 2016 than it did in 2015.

Better yet, while a steady stream of new content each month keeps Griswold top-of-mind with relevant insights, articles written years ago continue to reel in new visitors, driving value for their audience and organic traffic for the site. It just goes to show that, like people of a certain age, some content just gets better with time.