What if a single piece of content could transform your website's traffic almost overnight?

For Northeast Medical Group, a health network in the Northeast United States, one article was all it took to skyrocket their visibility in Google Ssearch.

The results?

A remarkable 893% increase in organic traffic year-over-year (YoY).

This SEO case study explores how Northeast Medical Group achieved this impressive growth. I'll also share some drawbacks of relying on a single piece of content as the cornerstone of your digital strategy.

By the end, you'll have a complete understanding of:

• Northeast Medical Group's SEO strategies
• How to apply these strategies to your own website
• Some critical considerations for long-term sustainable growth

Let’s get started.

The Catalyst: How Northeast Medical Group Reached 410.3K Monthly Visits

1. Dominating SERPs With Long-Tail Keywords

Northeast Medical Group understands that in healthcare, people search for specific answers to their health concerns. Rather than focusing solely on broad medical topics, they created in-depth content addressing questions patients commonly ask.

Their most successful example is an article titled “What Is the Normal Range for Blood Sugar?“. 

Published in July 2024, this single piece now generates over a quarter-million visits per month.

That’s equivalent to a staggering 84.4% of all site traffic.

What makes this article so successful?

It targets long-tail keywords—specific, longer search phrases that have lower search volume but higher conversion potential. 

Website owners often overlook these keywords, preferring the “flashiness” of high-volume keywords and the traffic dreams they inspire. However, this isn’t always the best approach.

Short-tail keywords (keywords with 1–2 words) have extremely high competition, making them nearly impossible to rank for.

So, Northeast Medical Group, took another approach. They targeted the long-tail counterparts of popular health queries.

For example, instead of just targeting “blood sugar,” Northeast Medical Group's article targets specific queries like:

• “what is normal blood sugar” 
• “high blood sugar level”
• “normal blood sugar levels.” 

These specific queries match exactly what users are searching for, resulting in higher clickthrough rates and better engagement metrics.

Overall, this strategy to keyword targeting has paid off immensely.

This article alone ranks for an impressive 34.9K keywords, most of which are long-tail variations.

Now, here's the thing about long-tail keywords: While each individual long-tail keyword may have relatively low search volume, collectively they can drive massive traffic. 

Plus, they often have less competition, making them easier to rank for.

Ultimately, long-tail keywords are one of the most overlooked heroes in SEO. But for Northeast Medical Group, they got it right.

Why This Matters:

Long-tail keyword targeting offers significant advantages in competitive industries like healthcare, including:

• Higher Conversion Potential: Users searching with long-tail keywords typically have more specific intent and are further along in their journey, making them more likely to convert.
• Less Competition: Long-tail keywords are often less competitive than short, broad terms, making them easier to rank for.
• Better User Experience: Content that answers specific questions provides more value to users, improving engagement metrics.
• Collective Traffic Power: While individual long-tail keywords may have low search volume, ranking for thousands of them creates substantial cumulative traffic.
• Voice Search Optimization: Long-tail keywords often match natural language patterns used in voice searches, positioning your content for this growing search segment.

How to Implement a Long-Tail Keyword Strategy:

Want to replicate Northeast Medical Group's success with long-tail keywords? 

Here's a simplified approach:

1. Start with keyword research. Use tools like Answer the Public, People Also Ask boxes, or forums where your audience gathers to identify specific questions they're asking. 
2. Group related questions. Organize similar questions into topic clusters that can be addressed in a single comprehensive article.
3. Create in-depth content. Develop thorough, authoritative content that fully answers these questions, incorporating expert insights and data.
4. Use natural language. Write in a conversational tone that matches how people actually ask questions.
5. Structure content for scannability. Use clear headings, bullet points, and tables to make information easy to find and digest. This will improve the readability of your article, boosting engagement.

Long-Tail Keyword Research Tools:

Did you know that you can do keyword research in WordPress?

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) makes this possible by connecting to your Semrush account.

After setting a focus keyword for your post or page, click on the “Get Additional Keyphrases” button.

AIOSEO will extract related keywords from Semrush and present its findings directly in the WordPress editor. More often than not, these results will be long-tail. 

Once you’ve found a keyword you’d like to target, just click “Add Keyphrase” and make your optimizations.

The TruSEO tool will check your on-page SEO for your new keyword and provide real-time feedback.

Now, let’s look at the second strategy Northeast Medical Group used to increase its visibility in Google.

2. Building Credibility as a YMYL Website

Northeast Medical Group operates in the healthcare sector, which falls under Google's “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) category. 

For these topics, Google holds content to higher standards because inaccurate information could potentially impact readers' health, financial stability, or safety.

Understanding this challenge, Northeast Medical Group prioritizes establishing strong E-E-A-T signals throughout their content.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google Search Quality Raters use this framework to assess content quality.

Their approach includes using real quotes from practicing physicians and featuring in-depth biography pages for each expert cited. 

Here, we see how a quote from one of the Northeast Medical Group’s endocrinologists:

And if a user clicks the doctor’s name, they’ll arrive to a page like this:

These biography pages include comprehensive information about the physician's background, specialties, education, training, and residency information.

This level of detail helps establish the contributor as a credible source for medical information, which in turn strengthens the credibility of any content that cites him or her.

By consistently implementing these credibility signals across their site, Northeast Medical Group has built trust with both users and search engines, contributing significantly to their organic traffic.

Why This Matters:

Strong E-E-A-T signals are crucial for healthcare websites and other YMYL topics for the following reasons:

• Higher Rankings: Google's algorithms prioritize content with strong E-E-A-T signals, especially for YMYL topics.
• User Trust: Visitors are more likely to trust and engage with content that clearly demonstrates expertise and credibility.
• Reduced Vulnerability to Algorithm Updates: Sites with strong E-E-A-T tend to be more resilient against Google's core algorithm updates.
• Competitive Advantage: Many websites fail to properly establish E-E-A-T, creating an opportunity for those who do it well.
• Lower Bounce Rates: Users are more likely to stay on your site when they perceive your content as trustworthy and authoritative.

How to Establish Google E-E-A-T:

Here's how to build credibility signals into your content:

1. Feature real experts. Include quotes, insights, and contributions from genuine experts in your field.
2. Create detailed author bios. Develop comprehensive biography pages for content authors and cited experts that highlight their credentials and expertise.
3. Cite authoritative sources. Reference and link to respected organizations, academic institutions, and peer-reviewed research.
4. Keep content updated. Regularly review and update your content to ensure information remains accurate and current.
5. Showcase credentials prominently. Make it easy for users to verify the expertise behind your content by displaying relevant credentials.

For an in-depth explanation of each step, check out this Google E-E-A-T optimization tutorial. 

Author Credibility Tools:

AIOSEO's Author SEO feature helps you establish and showcase author expertise directly within WordPress. You can easily create detailed author bios with credentials, expertise areas, and social profiles. 

You also get complete control over where to display author information. You can choose small snippets on posts or create dedicated biography pages that go into greater detail. 

Or, if you’re like us at AIOSEO, we use both!

3. Capturing Position Zero With AI Overviews

Northeast Medical Group has successfully positioned their content to appear in Google's AI Overviews—a relatively new SERP feature that provides AI-generated summaries at the top of search results.

Despite being generated by AI, Google cites sources used to create these summaries, meaning you can still get traffic from users.

And, for Northeast Medical Group, they’re getting 8.3K visits per month from this SERP feature alone.

Today, their blood sugar article ranks for all 2.5K AI Overview results. This positioning gives them tremendous visibility above traditional organic listings.

This success stems from several key factors:

1. Their content provides clear, direct answers to specific questions.
2. Information is structured in a logical, easy-to-follow format.
3. Content is backed by credible sources and expert quotes.
4. Key data points are presented in scannable formats like tables and lists.

By optimizing for AI Overviews, Northeast Medical Group has effectively secured “position zero” for thousands of queries, significantly increasing their visibility and clickthrough rates.

Why This Matters:

Appearing in AI Overviews offers several significant advantages:

• Maximum Visibility: AI Overviews appear at the very top of search results, above all other listings.
• Perceived Authority: Being featured in AI Overviews signals to users that Google considers your content authoritative and trustworthy.
• Future-Proofing: As AI continues to play a larger role in search, optimizing for AI features positions your site for long-term success.
• Competitive Edge: Many websites haven't yet optimized for AI Overviews, creating an opportunity for early adopters.

How to Optimize for AI Overviews:

Follow these steps to increase your chances of appearing in AI Overviews:

1. Create comprehensive content. Cover topics thoroughly, addressing all related questions and subtopics.
2. Structure content clearly. Use descriptive headings, subheadings, and a logical content hierarchy.
3. Provide direct answers. Start sections with clear, concise answers to specific questions before elaborating.
4. Use structured data. Implement appropriate schema markup to help AI systems understand your content.
5. Establish credibility signals. Include author expertise information, citations, and references to authoritative sources.

Content Optimization Tools:

AIOSEO's Schema Generator makes it easy to implement structured data that helps AI systems better understand your content. 

With support for various schema types including FAQ, HowTo, and Article, you can provide the semantic context that helps Google's AI accurately interpret and feature your content.

It’s literally as simple as clicking the “+” button next to your schema type of choice.

If additional elements are required, the plugin will prompt you to fill in some user-friendly fields. It’s quick and easy.

Another feature that can help you rank in AI Overviews is the new AI Content Generator.

This tool creates different types of content (FAQs, social media posts, emails, etc.) that improves your SEO. And it does it automatically for you.

AI Content uses credits, allowing you to pick exactly where you want to focus your content creation efforts.

For example, in the screenshot below, I asked it to come up with FAQs for a blog post I was working on. The plugin gave me a list of relevant questions and answers that I could add to my post with the click of a button.

I also like the Key Points feature, which allows you to create TL;DR summaries. These snippets perform particularly well in AI Overview and featured snippets.

Standout SEO Wins

Beyond their core content strategy, Northeast Medical Group also excels in another critical area for healthcare providers:

Local SEO: Optimizing for Multiple Locations

Northeast Medical Group operates more than 130 practices across multiple states, making local SEO a crucial component of their digital strategy.

They've implemented a sophisticated multi-location approach that ensures patients can easily find the nearest practice location.

Once a user has found the location nearest to them, they can visit a dedicated landing page for that specific medical center.

 Each location has unique content, including:

• Specific services offered at that location
• Local phone numbers and contact details
• Embedded Google Map with detailed directions
• Parking information

This approach has helped them rank in local search results across their service area, driving significant traffic from patients searching for nearby healthcare providers.

Tool: AIOSEO's Local SEO feature is designed to help you business stand out in local search results. It has multi-location capabilities, allowing you to optimize the SEO settings of each location.

All you have to do is toggle the setting for “Multiple Locations” to “Yes.”

From here, AIOSEO will open the available local SEO settings for each location. It’s intuitive and can drastically improve your business’s visibility in local search.

The Risks of a Single-Content Strategy

While Northeast Medical Group's success with their blood sugar article is impressive, it's important to acknowledge the potential risks of having a single piece of content drive the majority of your traffic.

Vulnerability to Algorithm Updates

When the lion’s share of your traffic comes from a single web page, you're extremely vulnerable to algorithm updates. If Google changes how it evaluates content in your niche, or if the competitive landscape shifts, you could lose a significant portion of your traffic overnight.

Northeast Medical Group would benefit from diversifying their content portfolio to create multiple traffic drivers across different topics and keyword clusters. This approach creates a more stable traffic foundation that can withstand changes to any single ranking factor.

Seasonal or Trending Fluctuations

Topics like blood sugar have relatively consistent search volume, but many topics experience seasonal fluctuations or trend-based changes in search interest. Relying on a single topic makes your traffic more susceptible to these natural variations.

A diversified content strategy helps smooth out these fluctuations by ensuring that when some topics experience lower search volume, others can compensate.

Recommendations for Long-Term Sustainability

For Northeast Medical Group and others looking to build on a single-content success, consider these approaches for long-term sustainability:

1. Build content clusters. Use your successful article as the pillar for a broader content cluster, creating related articles that link back to the main piece.
2. Replicate successful content. Analyze what made your content work, then apply those same principles to other topics relevant to your audience.
3. Audit content regularly. Schedule quarterly content performance reviews to identify opportunities for updating existing content and creating new pieces.
4. Diversify conversion paths. Ensure you have multiple paths for visitors to convert, not just through your top-performing content.
5. Diversify traffic sources. Complement your organic search strategy with other channels like email, social media, and partnerships to reduce dependence on search algorithms.

Takeaways

At this stage, we've discovered the key strategies that contributed to Northeast Medical Group's success.

Now, it's time to transform these strategies into actionable to-dos for your website.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Target long-tail keywords with comprehensive content. Don't just chase high-volume keywords; create in-depth content that addresses specific questions your audience is asking. This approach can drive substantial cumulative traffic while facing less competition. Focus on creating the definitive resource on topics relevant to your audience, covering all related questions and subtopics.

2. Establish strong E-E-A-T signals, especially for YMYL topics. Showcase real expertise by featuring credentialed experts, creating detailed author bios, and citing authoritative sources. For YMYL topics like health, finance, or safety, these credibility signals are essential for ranking well. Make expertise visible and verifiable to both users and search engines through comprehensive author pages and clear attribution.

3. Optimize content structure for AI Overviews. Format your content to be easily understood by AI systems by using clear headings, providing direct answers to questions, and implementing proper schema markup. Create content that thoroughly covers topics with logical organization and scannable formats like lists and tables. This positions your content for maximum visibility in AI-generated SERP features.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Allowing meta descriptions to exceed character limits. While Northeast Medical Group excels in many areas, some of their meta descriptions exceed Google's display limits, resulting in truncated snippets in search results. This reduces click-through potential and results in incomplete descriptions. To avoid this issue, use a SERP preview tool to ensure your metadata stay within the optimal 150-160 character range.

2. Overlooking indexability issues on key URLs. Some important pages on Northeast Medical Group's site have indexability issues that prevent search engines from properly crawling and ranking them. This creates missed opportunities for valuable content to appear in search results. AIOSEO's SEO Audit Checklist can identify and help fix these issues, ensuring all your important content is accessible to search engines.

3. Underutilizing schema markup. Despite their success, Northeast Medical Group misses opportunities to implement schema markup. Expanded schema implementation would enhance how search engines understand and represent their content. AIOSEO's Rich Snippet Schema makes it easy to implement various schema types without coding knowledge, helping search engines better understand your content's context and purpose.

Steal Our Winning SEO Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Take Your SEO to the Next Level With AIOSEO

Northeast Medical Group's journey showcases that online success often boils down to SEO best practices.

With All in One SEO (AIOSEO), you can take control of your website's SEO and achieve real results. No SEO experience required.

AIOSEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin. With over 3 million active users and thousands of 5-star reviews, you can take on the SERPs with confidence and ease. Some customer-favorite tools include:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Perform keyword research directly in the WordPress editor. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to generate and serve keyword ideas for your content.
• Author SEO: Create powerful author bios that showcase your experience and expertise. This addon aligns your content with Google E-E-A-T guidelines and builds trust with readers.
• Rich Snippets Schema: Win more rich results with AIOSEO’s user-friendly Schema Generator. Just pick the schema type you want, and we’ll format the structured data properly for Google.
• AI Content Generator: Supercharge your content creation workflows with AI-generated snippets. Choose from FAQs, Key Points, social media posts, emails, and more. 
• SEO Audit Checklist: Easily spot critical SEO issues that could be hurting your rankings. You’ll get actionable insights to fix them, right from your WordPress dashboard.
• Local SEO: Boost your visibility in local searches and rank higher in Google Maps with this local SEO tool. It implements local business schema for you—no coding required.
• AI Title & Description Generator: Save time writing SEO titles and meta descriptions with the help of AI. With just a click of a button, you can generate unique metadata for any page on your website.