📈 The content strategy that made a startup healthcare brand more visible to its own market
About the business
- Innovative orthotics manufacturer
- Sold via a B2B network, but requiring B2C awareness
Nature of the work
The challenge
My client was a manufacturer that 3D printed orthotics. Its custom process made the product significantly (up to 10% of the cost of) more affordable compared to others on the market. The product was strong, an existing distribution network of healthcare professionals was already in place, but the business had no digital presence. Ahead of a physical launch event, they were in the process of creating a new brand, along with a website.
The site had a challenge of needing to serve two fundamentally different audiences. Both healthcare professionals that distribute the product, and the end users who would actually use it. Both have very different requirements. Not a unique challenge, but still a difficult one to communicate effectively. The business wasn’t fully aligned on how to address this split and as a medical product, every piece of content required sign-off from multiple stakeholders.
Once the site launched, they then also needed a robust content strategy to continue to drive traffic long after the last balloon had deflated from the launch event.
The approach
Given a fixed deadline, the priority was getting the website content written, approved, and live for launch. That meant working within the stakeholder approval process rather than around it, building in time for multiple reviews.
To inform this, I conducted keyword research to understand how both audiences — clinicians and consumers — were actually searching for these products. This surfaced a critical finding early on. Healthcare professionals are known for industry language, and they referred to the product as a “bespoke orthotic for the foot”. The data showed that customers actually searched for “custom insoles”, a term which no-one in the business really used. It did however, have significantly more search volume, i.e. was how customers actually refer to the product.
The client’s own terminology was effectively making the product invisible to the people looking for it — not an uncommon problem within healthcare where internal and external messaging can be muddled.
I proposed segmenting the site into Patient and Clinician sections, with unique content that spoke to both audiences. For the most pertinent of pages, also changing the core product terminology from “bespoke” to “custom”.
The work
Website launch under deadline. The content was developed, reviewed across multiple stakeholders, and signed off in time for the physical launch event. For a site where every word carried clinical and commercial weight, delivering to a fixed deadline across several rounds of approval was the first significant win. In practice, managing content sign-off for a medical product with multiple stakeholders who each have views on messaging requires careful project management, alongside the actual writing itself.
The successful delivery of the website content on time and to the client’s satisfaction led to further retained work. The secondary task was to build on the site launch with a content plan and ongoing organic search activity.
The terminology shift. With the site live, I pushed to test the “custom insole” terminology against the client’s preferred “bespoke” on selected pages. This was met with fair resistance — the product had been designed around this terminology, but the search data was crystal clear: “custom insole” was how consumers actually searched for the product and luckily, the team valued a data-informed approach. The change was tested on a handful of pages, and almost immediately those pages saw a visible uplift in rankings and traffic compared to pages still using the original terminology.
Expert-led blog content. With limited proactive information coming from the client, content would be designed to be search-first. Answering common questions that customers have is not an innovative approach, and many competitor sites had this content — albeit mostly very thin ‘FAQ’ style. I interviewed healthcare professionals within the business directly, who could speak with genuine authority about the product and the conditions it treated. This would also satisfy Google’s EEAT framework.
“Should a custom insole hurt your feet?” is something most customers in the funnel ask — but our version featured genuine insights and quotes from podiatrists. It ranked number one almost immediately and held that position for several years, also capturing the AI overview for the query. For a site with no prior organic authority, this proved the approach.
Understanding the audience split. After the site launch and data collection from GA, a pattern emerged in how the two audiences used the site. The commercial ‘core’ pages were visited by clinicians wanting trade data about the product, while the blog looked to be end users researching their options. It’s as expected, but having this data validated the decision to restructure the site with distinct content paths for each audience.
Achievements
- First blog content ranked #1 for its target keyword and held the AI overview for multiple years
- Website content delivered to an fixed launch deadline with multi-stakeholder signoffs
- Immediate ranking and traffic improvement from matching business terminology with customer language
- Content strategy validated the dual-audience site architecture with data
Key takeaways
- The language a business uses internally is often not the language its customers use to search. Keyword research isn’t just an SEO exercise — it can (and often should) change how a business refers to its own products.
- Layering in expertise and experience from within your own team is often the biggest competitive advantage you have. Use the masses of insight that exists within your team!
- Moving the needle on search can take a long time – but proving the concept with a single blog post is more than achievable.
- Speaking to two audiences from one site is possible, if less than ideal. Designing content journeys to handle both can make a significant impact.