We sat down with Aakash Shah, co-founder & CEO of Wyndly, to discuss how he used Parse.ly to scale Wyndly’s content and SEO strategy, leading to 5,300% growth in visitors from organic search in one year. Aakash is a deep content practitioner—writing frequently on his website, aakash.io, and hosts the Founders and Builders podcast where he speaks with people taking big bets with new companies and ideas.
Aakash created Wyndly with co-founder and cousin Dr. Manan Shah in 2020, participating in the Y Combinator W21 batch. Wyndly fixes allergies with personalized care plans, combining the latest research in allergy care with the ability to deliver healthcare remotely via telehealth.
Because allergy immunotherapy isn’t widely known outside of the allergist’s office, their customer base prefers to deeply research the topic before making healthcare decisions. Wyndly recognized this as an opportunity for content marketing: if they could provide authentic, valuable answers to the questions allergy sufferers were Google searching, they could both help potential customers with their healthcare decisions and also introduce their brand.
How does Wyndly use Parse.ly?
At the beginning of 2022, Wyndly received only 600 visitors per month from search traffic. Twelve months later, they were receiving 32,000 visitors per month—a 5,300% improvement.
Aakash shared the strategy Wyndly used to achieve that growth, and how Parse.ly helped his team achieve their goals.
Wyndly’s audience-first, search-oriented content strategy and results
Parse.ly enabled Wyndly to power a content flywheel:
- Create content with insights from audience research and data
- Measure content velocity and quality
- Discover new content opportunities
Wyndly’s content strategy is elegant in its simplicity: create content for their audience, and double down on what works, while maintaining best practices for content velocity and quality.
First, Wyndly focused on their audience: the allergy sufferer. They dug into three things to drive content strategy:
- What questions does an allergy sufferer have?
- How do allergy sufferers ask those questions—what language do they use?
- What answer format resonates with an allergy sufferer?
Through rigorous audience research, Wyndly learned that allergy sufferers wanted to know about their allergies on a deeper level than what was available at the time. Wyndly also learned exactly what language their audience used to look for resources, and that shortform video presented by a doctor was the preferred format.
So, now they knew what kind of content they needed to produce. Up next was establishing the quantity and quality requirements.
Their expertise and research into SEO indicated that success required a minimum of 3 posts of 2,000 words every week. The 3 posts meet Google’s minimum for content velocity, and posts of 2,000 words should meet the minimum for high quality. However, writing 2,000+ words takes quite a lot of work—how were they to determine where to invest their time?
Wyndly landed on a two-step process to ensure they could scalably meet these requirements:
- Create videos that answered questions their customers asked, like “What are the Best Ways to Strengthen Your Immune System Against Allergies.” These videos spoke directly to the customer using the shortform video format they preferred.
- Measure their high quantity of content for which topics gained legitimate interest, and then select those for their practice of regularly updating historical content to increase quality—like this cedar fever article including a video, infographics, a chart, and original research, which started out as just the video.
Search engines like Google are looking for brands with high expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. The way that brands can signal to Google that they fit this profile is through consistent, educational content with good engagement metrics, combined with regular updates to increase quality. In turn, Google will drive more traffic to these trusted brands.
“Google sees millions and millions of new pages every day,” Aakash says. “By publishing quality content with a consistent cadence, we’re teaching the Google ranking algorithm that our site is a good custodian of Google’s search users.”
How Parse.ly enabled Wyndly’s content growth
Parse.ly was a key tool in Wyndly’s content and SEO toolkit. Parse.ly provided the Wyndly team with the ability to measure their efforts and discover content opportunities:
- Content velocity, measured with the new post counts
- Content quality, measured with average engaged time, recirculation rate, and video playback rate
- Per-page traffic improvement, discovered with the timeline view, timeline comparisons, and word count filtering
- Trending topics, discovered with smart tags
“It’d be impossible to use Google Analytics to do what we do with Parse.ly. We regularly audit thousands of pages for quality on a case-by-case basis, and Parse.ly saves us weeks of work compared to Google Analytics,” Aakash says. “Parse.ly also has key features we use every day that aren’t anywhere else: publish date filters, word count filters, new post counts, and smart tagging.”
Measuring content velocity with new post counts
Parse.ly’s new post counter is the fastest way to measure content velocity. One click on the timeline reveals how many new posts were published.
Measuring content quality with engagement metrics
The Wyndly team looks at three metrics to measure content quality:
- Average engaged time
- Recirculation rate
- Video playback rate
“Every few months, we review all of our posts to identify what’s working and what isn’t. If engaged time, recirculation rate, and video playback are all high, I know the content is high-quality and our audience is getting the answers they need,” says Aakash. “Then, it’s only a matter of time before the search traffic starts to come.”
Finding content refresh opportunities with video and word count filters
For posts that don’t meet the quantitative metrics, or for posts that aren’t receiving search traffic, Wyndly uses Parse.ly’s filtering feature to find content opportunities.
“Search engines want to put the best content in front of their users. They’re constantly tweaking their ranking algorithms. Quality inevitably rises to the top of the rankings,” Aakash says. “By improving on existing content with more text, an infographic, or a video, we show the search engines that our content is always the most up-to-date.”
Parse.ly made Wyndly’s workflow for finding content refresh opportunities simple:
- Set a word count filter or video content filter
- See which articles are outperforming their publishing cohort on engagement metrics (using the publish date filter)
- Refresh the winning articles with additional content
- Have Parse.ly perform a metadata update to capture the updated content
Here’s an example of refreshed content driving a 100% increase in traffic:
From March to June, this page only had a video and a transcript—nothing else! In July, the Wyndly team added text to let searchers engage with the content in two formats: video and text.
After two months, the search engines rewarded Wyndly’s improved content with twice as much traffic to this page!
Tracking per-page performance with the timeline
After publishing and refreshing all these posts, Wyndly turned to Parse.ly to measure when search traffic began to come in. “Parse.ly is way easier to use for tracking search traffic to specific posts than Google Analytics,” Aakash says. “Usually, it takes six months to know if you’re seeing search traffic. With Parse.ly, there’s a signal much sooner if you know how to look for it.”
Here’s an example of how Parse.ly can show what traffic Google is driving in an easy-to-see way.
In the first seven weeks after publishing, this post received almost no traffic. Then, Google started driving more traffic as Google discovered the great engagement metrics on the page. Google increased rankings for weeks eight through sixteen. Finally, at week seventeen, Google provided another significant bump—Google’s algorithms had fully vetted the page as quality content for their searchers.
The Wyndly team hadn’t touched the article since they published it! They knew their engagement metrics (average engaged time, recirculation rate, and video playback rate) were high, so they knew Google would reward their content eventually.
This pattern in traffic is something they saw over and over—here are two more examples:
Discovering trending topics with smart tags
Every organization has their own ways of tagging content, and none of the systems are perfect. Wyndly uses Parse.ly’s smart tagging system, which auto-generates tags through natural language processing, to get a deeper system of their content by topic.
Wyndly uses the tagging system in Compare mode to see which topics are doing better than average. Here’s their workflow:
- Open the dashboard to the “Tags” tab.
- Hit Compare and set the time frame for this month versus the previous month.
- Find the winners!
“It’s so easy—we just sift through and see what’s doing better than average,” Aakash says. “Now, we know what’s a trending topic for our readers, and we can share this content on our other channels.”
Here’s Wyndly’s smart tag data from Dec 2022 compared with the previous month. Parse.ly’s smart tags highlighted Rhinorrhea, Allergic rhinitis, and Histamine as trending tags, especially compared to the overall average of a 4.5% increase.
Using Parse.ly content recommendations to drive engagement
Aakash and Wyndly are committed to content for their audience—and committed to Parse.ly. They can clearly see the results of investing in content. Their next initiative is to use Parse.ly’s Content Recommendations API to embed the highest recirculation content on Wyndly’s pages and newsletters. This will provide the most interesting and highest value content to their audience, deepening the relationship Wyndly has with their audience.
Learn More
Interested in learning how other editors, writers, marketers, and organizations use Parse.ly every day? Reach out to our team for a free consultation.