Author: Rob Peck
SEO discussions as of late have centered around large-scale programmatic AI plays, less-than-helpful search results, and publisher horror stories of traffic loss.
However, not everything is in flux. In this case study, I’ll show you how a small health and wellness coaching practice has made consistent gains in Google Search traffic via building a solid base online, writing about what they know, and small-scale, natural link-building efforts.
Table of contents:
Meet the client: The Whole Health Practice
From a home office in Singapore, the husband-and-wife duo (Alastair Hunt and Felicia Koh) behind The Whole Health Practice (WHP) have offered health, wellness, and nutrition coaching to both individual and corporate clients throughout the world since 2021.
By bringing the same holistic approach to their website as they do their business, The Whole Health Practice is succeeding online and supporting clients who are starting (or already on) their health and wellness journeys with lifestyle and nutrition consultations, health programs, and more.
Their Wix-powered site has enjoyed increasing traffic and rankings throughout tumultuous Google algorithm updates. As their for-barter SEO consultant, I’m happy to play a part in their success. Let’s dive in and find out what’s working.
Starting from scratch: SEO consulting for health coaches
With no web development, marketing team, or ‘domain authority,’ I knew I had to get nimble and focus on techniques offering the most bang for the buck.
Additionally, staying in Google’s good graces is much more important when working on smaller sites: Issues on larger sites can be mitigated by resources and a strong backlink profile, whereas errors, issues, or penalties on small sites can be exponentially harder to recover from. I knew we had to get things right from the outset with a solid foundation of best practices and then gradually grow from there.
When I first met Alastair, co-founder of WHP, he was concerned about a lack of online visibility for his business. Personally, I was concerned about pre-diabetes and hypertension while hauling around an extra 20 kilograms. So, we decided to trade services and started working together. Alastair provides health and wellness coaching while I offer up SEO consulting.
We began with goal setting. On the SEO side, we targeted page one rankings for core [{service} in Singapore] and [{type of} coach in Singapore] terms, genuine referral traffic by creating relationships (and thus links) from complementary businesses within the wider Singapore healthcare space, and we began generating inbound health assessment requests from organic search. Later, we realized the need for additional soft-conversion goals, including visitors joining the WhatsApp group and signing up for the newsletter.
Background & ethos: Setting the stage for WHP’s SEO success
“We needed a web platform that would allow us to create content and promote our services with, ideally, little time commitment.” — Alastair Hunt, NBC-HWC, Co-Founder at The Whole Health Practice
The Whole Health Practice initially operated online via a rudimentary site created with a free website builder offered by their webhost. Part of SEO for SMBs is working with what you have, so instead of immediately suggesting a CMS change, I explored the admin panel.
While some SEO basics (e.g., tags, titles, alt text) could be optimized, several dealbreakers emerged:
Google Tag Manager wasn’t supported, which (alongside no ability to create custom ‘thank you’ pages) blocked effective measurement and conversion optimization.
Structured data was not customizable, which is particularly important for the client’s website as it features a mix of page and post types.
There was no integrated newsletter option to automatically send posts to subscribers.
For those reasons and many more, it was time for a change. We shortlisted the usual suspects—Wix and WordPress, ultimately opting for Wix due to a low barrier to entry, a reputation for better support, and not having to worry about hosting.
From the initial site build on Wix to today, a few key strategies have led the way:
Content shouldn’t be ‘written for Google’; instead it must be written for (current and potential) customers. This also means all information, exercises, and recipes consider the demographics of Singapore, where most of WHP’s clientele is located. In addition, a key content pillar focuses around synthesizing Western content for Singapore’s unique diet, landscape, and culture.
Establishing credibility is non-negotiable. Without starting a debate over ‘Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?’, it’s a concept that we certainly consider for WHP’s website since health is a YMYL topic. Alastair’s (NBC-HWC) and Felicia’s (MA Human Nutrition) education and certifications are front and center on their bio and author pages, medical claims in articles cite genuine research studies and lab reports, and key memberships are displayed on the site.
Content strategy: Writing authoritative articles for clients and for Google
To build the client’s content strategy, we took stock of the pillars of wellness (physical, emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual) alongside relevant content types (recipes, exercises, inspiration, etc). With broad ideas in mind, we further organized our content approach using a mix of methods:
Subject matter knowledge led the way. Ultimately, the business owners knew what their clients needed to help them follow through on their wellness journey.
Semrush’s Topic Research tool further defined the strategy by breaking up broad topic ideas into approachable subtopics and also gave us insights into People AlsoAsk questions to potentially include as subtitles and FAQs.
ChatGPT played a secondary role, speeding up article publication as well supporting the wider content calendar by providing input on related topics and clustering.
“We stayed focused writing and creating content on subjects that matter to our clients and ourselves. Importantly, we learned to have trust in the longer-term process of content and SEO.” — Alastair Hunt, NBC-HWC, Co-Founder at The Whole Health Practice
As the site began publishing, new content angles and topic clusters emerged:
New-to-the-world ideas and concepts
Modernizing classic health concepts with newer views or tactics
Opinion-driven content on current events, trends, and topics within the wellness space
Localizing global topics to the unique nature of food, exercise, and general wellness in Singapore
A balanced diet of the content above serves readers, clients, and Google well. This blend continues as the basis for the content calendar; however, remaining flexible has been key. More recent content includes articles focused on introducing trending wellness ideas to the Singapore market as well as pieces addressing more top-of-funnel concerns and symptoms to help people realize they have a need for health coaching.
And, finally, we are taking a more passive approach to link building. The old adage “If Google didn’t exist, would we still be doing this?” led the way. Where we did engage in link building, it was driven by genuine relationships—membership organizations, partner companies, and even clients all play a key role. Cold outreach is limited to local publications where we truly feel WHP deserves inclusion in related articles and lists.
Optimizing for local clientele
From a local SEO perspective, Singapore is a unique place. The nation is approximately the same area as Memphis, Tennessee, thus, many (if not most) service businesses target the entire country.
When creating WHP’s Google Business Profile listing, we first listed the address and verified it, then we switched the listing over to a service area business when the listing went live (which hides the address and enables the business to target a large area of Singapore, as shown above).
For a strong listing, we carefully selected business categories and built out key service offerings. This is particularly important as many categories overlap with physical gyms and personal trainers (neither of which are relevant). Finally, we capped off the GBP launch with frequent topical Posts as well as soliciting reviews from actual clients.
Adapting to unexpected rankings, change, and progress
SEO is dynamic, so evolving trends, algorithms, and competition require both proactive and reactive techniques.
After the new site was launched and the first round of articles went live, I was a bit surprised by what the client’s site ranked for (nutritional information) and what it didn’t (core business terms).
![The Google search results for [kopi siew dai calories]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a484d4_42bc4a01a70344daa04fd76bfdbd5c96~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_112,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/a484d4_42bc4a01a70344daa04fd76bfdbd5c96~mv2.jpg)
Although the recipe and nutrition traffic was strong, we did not want to risk getting pigeonholed by Google as a recipe site (along with all the concerns that can come with that).
While article publishing initially followed the content calendar, it had to grow more flexible to pivot around changing industry and fitness trends (e.g., the rise of pickleball), health products spiking in popularity (e.g., AG1), and wellness influencers holding events in Singapore.
Even beyond Google, The Whole Health Practice team are coaches and nutritionists, not cooks. Thus, the next series of articles focused on health and wellness outside of food, including guides on:
Working with a health coach
What hormone lab tests to watch
Medical conditions (and how a healthy lifestyle can mitigate them)
Of course, when focusing on medical topics, we made sure to include ample citations from experts and clinical trials.
The standard SEO advice is to ‘build content that people will naturally link to.’ Of course, that is easier said than done, with the concept staying in the abstract SEO realm for most sites. However, this came to life with a positive impact when Singapore was named a ‘Blue Zone’ city (a city with higher life expectancy and lower rates of chronic diseases). As wellness professionals in Singapore, it was a natural topic for The Whole Health Practice to cover.
Two key pieces effectively, and quickly, tackled the topic: The first was a listicle clustering together existing articles specifically about healthy eating and activities in Singapore. The second was a more focused blog post on healthy local foods. The site began to rank for [Singapore Blue Zone]-related search terms, which lead to inbound media and corporate requests without any outreach from our side. Interestingly, a great deal of this happened on social media, not via links. Holistic health meets holistic SEO.
The Helpful Content Update: Readiness or survivorship bias?
The client’s organic rankings increased during some very turbulent times for SEOs (as shown in the traffic chart above). This includes high-impact core updates, the final(?) product review update and, of course, the Helpful Content Updates (HCU).
Clearly something is working; however, I’m a bit reluctant to offer hard advice on how to navigate the HCU as there are so many unknowns and few (if any) sites that were negatively impacted have recovered. With that said, between what worked and what we learned from the Google API leak in May, a few key ideas seem worth sharing:
On the content side, we stuck to our topic area of expertise and did not stray into wider topics (even if keyword research tools suggested it would be a good idea to do so).
Content publishing cadence was measured and consistent; while some periods warranted more frequent publishing, we never flooded the web with articles.
When a piece worked particularly well, while we’d certainly learn from it, we did not chase it. I’ve seen other sites get manual actions by flooding Google (particularly Discover) with content that is too similar to other content on the domain.
Looking at sitewide considerations, we don’t run any ads on the site and, beyond contact forms, there is minimal use of widgets. Both of these factors help prioritize user experience.
In addition, it’s safe to say that accounting for considerations beyond SEO (e.g., user experience) ultimately helps SEO. The Whole Health Practice delivers here with an active WhatsApp group and newsletter, which both drive meaningful volumes of ‘non-Google’ traffic as well as brand searches.
Continued plans for growth on Google with Wix
Seeing the power of an effective web presence, The Whole Health Practice now sees its site as “a real tool, not just a window shop.” With that in mind, the business leverages articles not only to target new search terms, but also provide existing clients with information to help them on their health and journeys.
On my end, building and optimizing on Wix is a welcome departure from what I am used to with SEO projects for corporations and publishers. The starkest difference is that we are doing this without the need to coordinate with a system admin, schedule the development team, or communicate requirements to the designer.
Implementing changes is a straightforward process between SEO and client… no Jira tickets, IT departments, or sprint scheduling needed. The SaaS nature of Wix fills a much-needed space between custom CMSs (where new feature requests can turn into lengthy development projects, if they are accepted at all) and open source (where there is no direct line of support from the platform itself).
Rob Peck is a T-shaped digital marketer with 14+ years of SEO experience. Specializing in the SERP (organic and paid), Rob consults independently and in collaboration with marketing and branding agencies to drive performance marketing for brands and publishers alike. Linkedin