Health Conditions SEO Sector Deep Dive

Across the UK, the charity sector plays a major part in supporting people with health conditions ranging from dementia, to Parkinson’s disease, to arthritis. These health charities focus their efforts on a specific condition or group of conditions, making them experts within their individual subject matters. As part of this audit, we wanted to investigate the search landscape for these health charities and investigate opportunities to improve organic visibility and traffic. The charities we reviewed were:

• Alzheimer’s Society
• Alzheimer’s Research UK
• Epilepsy Society
• Parkinson's UK
• MS Society
• British Heart Foundation (BHF)
• Stroke Association
• Versus Arthritis
• Dementia UK

Reflections on our data

The Domain Authority (broadly defined as an indicator of the overall “strength” of a domain) of charities in this sub-sector averaged 65/100. This average was brought up by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) who had a score of 76/100, which is significantly higher than the other charities within this group.

British Heart Foundation was a standout charity within the group, with the highest number of non-branded rankings by a huge margin. At the time of the audit, BHF held over 5,000 non-branded rankings in position one (the third highest score of all the charities we looked at during this project); this is significantly higher than the second place charity within this sub-sector: Alzheimer’s Society, with just over 1,400.

The number of referring domains a site has impacts significantly on a domain’s ability to rank in search, and again, the British Heart Foundation had the highest number in this group, with over 30,000. This was significantly ahead of other charities, followed by Alzheimer’s Society who have just over 25,000 referring domains. In comparison, the Epilepsy Society has the lowest number with 4,590, demonstrating that the backlink profiles of the charities within this sub-sector varies significantly.

The average score for Core Web Vitals (metrics that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience) for this sub-sector was 44, which was third overall compared to other sub-sectors. The individual scores of health charities within the group vary widely, with Alzheimer’s Research UK having the lowest score of 17/100 and Epilepsy Society having the highest at 71/100. Interestingly, the two top performers for referring domains and rankings, BHF and Alzheimer’s Society, sit firmly in the middle of the Core Web Vitals scores, with 53/100 and 40/100 respectively.

Competing with the NHS and Medical Sites

One of the main challenges within this space for SEO is working within the context of competing with the NHS, WHO, Healthline, WebMD and other medical sites. Typically, for medical-related keywords, we often see these organisations rankings above charity content. There is also the added challenge of the medical knowledge graph appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs), featuring data from the NHS.

With pay per click (PPC) adverts, the new indented search results (which often appear for the NHS) and other SERP features such as ‘people also ask’, all of the top search positions are frequently taken up, making for an extremely crowded results page, as in the example below for ‘symptoms of MS’:

This can be frustrating for charities who are experts within their field, such as MS Society, because they are forced to utilise PPC adverts to gain top positions for some queries.

This is the same for the Stroke Association, who use PPC ads to appear in top results; they also have to compete against American and Australian stroke charities, as well as NHS and WebMD content.

As an example, for a general symptoms keyword such as ‘parkinsons symptoms’ (12,000 searches per month) the NHS outperforms all competition. The NHS has a double result alongside the medical knowledge graph, and Parkinson’s UK is way down the first page.

However, what is interesting is that the NHS do defer to charities to provide more information and link out to them, which happens on the NHS page for Parkinson’s Disease:

Other examples of this include the NHS website linking to the Stroke Association on the main Stroke pages, and the British Heart Foundation on the heart attack recovery page. This demonstrates to both users and search engines that these health charities are specialists in the UK.

Informational Content Hubs

Informational content hubs are well structured information pages that link together to build overall relevance for the website for the topic. Creating content hubs of this type is one of the primary ways to build a long term organic search strategy and is one of the most powerful tactics for growing organic traffic.

Dementia UK, Alzheimer's Research UK and Alzheimer's Society all have informational pages about dementia, which form content hubs to build relevancy for dementia-related terms.

Alzheimer’s Society has ‘About Dementia’ and ‘Get Support’ sections and these contain the highest performing content hubs of the three dementia charities. Their informational sections cover topics and subtopics such as:

• About Dementia > Risk Factors and Prevention, Treatments, Types of Dementia
• Dementia Care > End of Life Care, Care Homes
• Daily Living > Eating and Drinking, Delirium, Hydration

Within each of these main topics, there are more niche topics covered; for example, the Risk Factors and Prevention section has top position rankings for the following subtopics:

• Dementia and Alcohol
• Physical Exercise
• Sleep
• Genetic Testing
• Turmeric

By producing a large amount of informational content on a wide range of topics related to dementia, Alzheimer’s Society has been able to gain a high number of position 1-3 rankings in Google search. This also includes ‘featured snippets’ which is the very highest organic result that is available. An example of this is for the query ‘is dementia hereditary’ which has 4,400 searches per month:

Overall Dementia UK and Alzheimer's Research UK have significantly fewer rankings in the top positions compared to Alzheimer’s Society. However, both charities have similar comprehensive content hubs on their websites and have gained rankings in positions 1-3 for a number of supporting keywords such as:

• young onset dementia
• how to get a dementia diagnosis
• power of attorney dementia
• dementia and learning disabilities

This also includes a smaller number of featured snippets, such as Dementia UK’s snippet for ‘can delirium be fatal’ which is outranking the NHS, Alzheimer’s Society, Mayo Clinic and NCBI.

Featured Snippet Opportunities

When comparing the number of featured snippets gained by the charities within this sub-sector, British Heart Foundation had a significantly higher number of snippet positions than any other charity, with over 700.

BHF’s snippets are driven largely by their successful ‘Heart Matters Magazine’ which covers a huge amount of medical, nutrition and wellbeing topics that contribute to overall heart health. There are a number of question queries that BHF answers directly such as ‘how much protein do i need’, ‘is porridge healthy’ and ‘what is u&e blood test’.

An example of snippetable content is this summary of HSCT treatment from MS Society, where ‘HSCT’ is in a heading tag, and a two sentence summary is provided underneath:

Accordingly, this description has been pulled into the featured snippet that MS Society holds for ‘HSCT’ (1,000 searches per month).

Versus Arthritis also hold a number of featured snippets, most of which are medical terms related to conditions or treatments, such as ‘sulfasalazine (11,000 monthly searches), and ‘rituximab’ (10,000 searches):

Versus Arthritis has successfully created a comprehensive ‘drugs’ hub which lists different treatments alphabetically. These pages provide a succinct ‘snippetable’ description of each drug, link to other information pages and provide well structured information on each drug, which has resulted in the charity gaining top ranking positions.

Parkinson’s UK also holds medical featured snippets for drugs such as ‘apomorphine’ (1,900 monthly searches) and specific symptoms, for example ‘rigidity’ (1,700 searches per month).

Health charities within this group show that it is possible to gain top position rankings and featured snippets within their fields. Focusing on providing informational content is a more effective strategy than trying to regain top positions from the NHS website for head terms such as the condition name or condition + symptoms.

Blog Content

Blog posts are a great way to provide additional information on topics that are related to your health condition, and use them as a platform to link to core content. Blog posts can be a great way to support campaigns with evergreen information that provides value in the longer term, and the content can be used on other channels such as social media.

Alzheimer's Research UK utilises blog content to provide information on related topics that are not part of their core pages such as ‘Dementia Information’ or ‘Our Research’. These blog posts have rankings in positions 1-3 for keywords such as ‘smoking and dementia’, ‘coconut-oil and alzheimer's’, ‘7 stages of frontotemporal dementia’.

MS Society, Epilepsy Society and Alzheimer’s Society all hold rankings in positions 1-3 with their supporting blog content. MS Society, for example, provides spotlight content on certain topics within their blog such as ‘hsct treatment’, ‘MS MRI scan’ and ‘MS and menopause’.

Non-English Content

The Alzheimer's Research UK site ranks in position one for ‘demencja’ (1500 searches per month), which is the polish term for ‘dementia’. Creating language-specific content like this is a great way to reach non-English speaking audiences and provide unique value, as the NHS website does not actively produce non-English health information.

Dementia UK ranks further down on page one for the term ‘demencja’ with PDF content, which is potentially a missed opportunity. PDF content is generally a poor landing page experience from a UX perspective, as the searcher cannot easily navigate to your website from the PDF, and internal links do not pass the same equity as on webpages.

Stroke Association ranks on page one for a Polish term for ‘stroke’, which is ‘udar mózgu’ (700 searches per month). This ranking has an indented double result, however, both of the URLs are also pointing to PDF pages:

What's interesting about these results ranking is that Google is rewarding them above pages on Polish (.pl) domains. Google clearly recognises the searcher is physically in the UK but looking for language-specific content. This could be an opportunity for charities with large audience segments that speak other languages.

An example of this is around Polish terminology on arthritis and gout (a type of arthritis), which includes words like ‘artretyzm’ and ‘zapalenie stawów’. These keywords have 2,300 searches and 200 searches per month respectively in the UK. Currently, the search engine results page for ‘artretyzm’ contains only .pl domains, so there is a potential opportunity for UK charity to rank within these results, if that audience is relevant:

Demonstrating E-A-T

Another major factor to consider within the health space is that medical search results are generally considered ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) content by Google. This stands for “Your Money or Your Life”, and it is Google’s definition of content that, if presented inaccurately, could impact the health, financial stability, welfare or safety of the searcher. Ranking in these types of search results require an extremely high demonstrable level of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust (E-A-T).

In our audit of the Mental Health Charity sub-sector, we found a number of ways in which the charities are clearly demonstrating a commitment to content quality. These tactics include using an ‘about this content’ section at the end of pages that includes information such as when the content was last updated, and whether it had been peer-reviewed by experts. These signals are important for demonstrating E-A-T, and tactics such as these are utilised extensively on sites such as Healthline and WebMD.

An example in this sub-sector is Parkinson’s UK, who use a ‘last updated’ and ‘about this content’ section on their pages:

What’s interesting within the Health Conditions group is that these tactics aren’t being utilised as often across the board as they are within the Mental Health Sub-Sector.

Brand strength for these charities is incredibly strong, meaning the charities within this group are able to gain rankings from their existing authority. However, there is an opportunity for charities within this group to start utilising E-A-T tactics, as this would contribute towards ranking more highly in medical search engine results.

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