Taking Advantage of Search Trends to Rank Content and Drive Sales

Key Takeaways

Tactic — Education & Authority: Alphagreen is attempting to educate consumers and become an authority on health and wellness through their Alphagreen Academy. Alphagreen used this platform to hop on a growing search interest in quercetin which landed their page in the SERP top 10 for “quercetin covid”. 

Overall, the Alphagreen Academy has been helpful in driving traffic to their website with 50% of the top 10 organic search keywords linking to articles. 

Tactic — Expand Written Content to Medium: Alphagreen is using Medium as an external blog where they repost select articles from their Alphagreen Academy. This has resulted in Medium becoming the highest website referrer to alphagreen.io and a Medium following of 91.

Tactic — Long-Form & In-Depth: The average read-time for Alphagreen’s Medium articles is 18 minutes which puts the average length at 3600 - 4500 words. With this length, Alphagreen is aiming to go in-depth on each article to provide value and position themselves as an authority on the subject.

Tactic — In-Text Product Placement: Alphagreen places photos of products related to the current article within the text with links to the corresponding product page on their marketplace. This allows Alphagreen to educate the consumer about a new topic while providing a quick link to their marketplace so they can monetize the attention.

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Alphagreen has seen a steady increase in web traffic in 2020, increasing at an average pace of +48% MoM. 

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Breaking down traffic by channel, Alphagreen derives the majority of their web traffic from the Organic Search, Direct*, and Referrals.

*Direct traffic will not be analyzed in this case study as it can be affected by a variety of offline factors such as print advertising, podcasts, etc. that are not easily quantified. 

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Since February, Organic Search & Referral traffic have increased by +5883% & 2307%, respectively.

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Focusing on Organic Search, the top keywords during this period mainly related to the brand name & quercetin/COVID-19.

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Quercetin first became a trending topic in March with a second spike of search interest in August.

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Alphagreen recognized the increased interest in quercetin and published a detailed blog post in May on the subject. The blog post does not link to any products that Alphagreen carries and is meant to be educational, while promoting Alphagreen as a trustworthy source for health related information, and to help drive traffic to the site.

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Due to their timeliness, Alphagreen’s article on quercetin is now in the top ten results for the search query “quercetin covid.”

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The post on quercetin is part of a larger strategy called the the Alphagreen Academy, which is meant to be a “health and wellness journal” to “educate our audience on the subject of safe and effective use of supplements in health and wellbeing.”

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Overall, the Alphagreen Academy helps to drive a significant amount of their Organic search traffic, with 50% of the top 10 keywords linking to blog posts.

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When looking at Referral traffic, medium.com has been the largest traffic driver over the past several months, accounting for an average of 49% of referral traffic. The percent of traffic driven has been variable at times but has levelled out over the past few months.

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Referral traffic from medium.com comes from Alphagreen’s Medium page where they post CBD related blog content.

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The “Alphagreen Team” runs the blog which is titled as “Alphagreen | CBD Blog | Educate, Empower, Enhance” and has 91 followers on the platform.

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The blog homepage features a nav bar at the top where visitors can learn more about the blog/company or be directed to the Alphagreen marketplace.

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The trending stories are featured underneath the nav with a custom “CBD for anxiety & stress” article highlight with a link to the corresponding section of their marketplace.

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At the bottom of the page, Alphagreen includes a few product photos with copy that highlights the value propositions of “one stop shop” & “handcrafted” which links to their marketplace.

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Alphagreen covers a variety of topics on their vlog, with their most read articles in 2020 focusing on CBD dosing, side effects, and how to navigate higher concentrated oils & tinctures.

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Within their articles, Alphagreen includes photos of products that are related to the article content with links to the corresponding PDP’s on their website.

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Each article also ends with proclamation that it has been “verified by a healthcare professional” along with disclaimers about affiliate links and liability providing social proof.

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Since January, Alphagreen has published six articles a month on average, with April seeing the highest number of articles thus far.

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The articles could be considered short essays as they are typically in-depth & lengthy, with an average read time of 18 minutes. The average adult is able to read 200 - 300 words per minute, this puts the average article between 3600 - 5400 words.