Healthcare SEO Strategy for the AI Era

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Ashley Petrochenko: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Ashley Petrochenko. I’m the VP of Brand Marketing here at Cardinal. I’m really excited for today’s episode. We’re going to dig into a familiar topic, SEO, but our guest is operating at significant scale, growing monthly organic sessions from 4 million to 12 million, and building a powerhouse enterprise program. I’m really excited to dig into it. Without further ado, let’s welcome John Vantine, the SEO director at GoodRx. Welcome, John.

John Vantine: Yes, thanks for having me, Ashley.

Ashley: Okay, I’m a little bit out of breath right there. Sometimes I just get it all out at once. Before we dig in, give a little bit of context on your background, how long you’ve been in the SEO space, and where you’re at today.

John: It feels crazy to say this. I’ve been doing SEO for over 20 years now, and I fell into it backwards. I don’t think most people went to school for SEO. I went to school for graphic design in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, which I now know you’re familiar with, and building websites and all that. I grew a curiosity for how people were finding this content. Back then, you could see all the keyword data. Google used to share all the referring keyword data, so I really nerded out on that and started to make the correlation between the content you create and the people that are discovering your content, and started doing something that I, years later, learned was known as SEO and found there was a whole community behind.

It’s always been a passion of mine. I’ve been very lucky to have this as my career, pretty much out of college. I’ve done it in a variety of capacities. I’ve worked at an agency. I’ve worked in-house for several companies, notably Edmunds and TrueCar, both in the automotive space. After about a decade of that, I realized I don’t really care that much about cars, actually. It feels nice to work for a company where you are actually helping people and improving health outcomes.

Enter GoodRx, where I’ve been for about seven and a half years now. I was the first SEO hire there. I’ve grown a great team there, have navigated us through a lot of big shifts, major algorithm updates, and most recently, what’s going on now in the search landscape with AI overviews. That brings us to today.

Ashley: A lot has changed over the last 20 years and over the last year. Any conversation about SEO would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the search landscape, how it’s evolving with AI, how that’s impacting things in the consumer journey. Visibility goes a lot more beyond just search. What have you felt has fundamentally changed in the past year? What’s the biggest shift that you’re seeing right now impacting your work that you do?

John: I think the biggest shift is that generative search tools, ChatGPT being the biggest one, they’ve become a household name. People are aware of this now as an option. I don’t think that these tools have replaced traditional search. I don’t think that’s going to happen, in my opinion. There’s a lot of people that think that it will. I think the lines between those two things, traditional and generative search, are becoming blurry. Google is introducing more generative search-like features in the search ecosystem. Whether or not people are intentionally looking to use these tools, they’re experiencing them.

We talk to a lot of people who don’t know what an AI overview is, but they’re seeing them every day. Google’s showing these for most queries, whether users want them or not. As a result of that, more and more people are getting their answers directly in the search results and maybe are clicking on web results less often. There’s less traffic going out into the open web. That’s one part.

Ashley: I think that’s an interesting call-out, what you said, that users don’t actually realize that their experience is changing. I think as marketers, we’re so hyper-obsessed, “Oh, my God, the SERP is changing. Everything’s shifting and moving around.” Sometimes, users, it happens more slowly, they’re not necessarily aware. They’re just like, “Oh, the answer’s right there.” At the top, I have everything that I need to do my next step. They don’t really think about how that is happening. Some are more savvy than others, but there’s definitely people who are just accepting of it, especially on the Google itself.

Have you seen changes with more and more people going to ChatGPT, going to Claude, going to Perplexity, and different ways that they’re actually trying to start their search journey, or any trends you’ve noticed there?

John: When you look at the data, the spokespeople for these tools and the Sam Altmans of the world have a vested interest in telling us that they’ve created this thing that’s like, “The cat’s out of the box. It’s so big. It’s so dangerous. It’s changing the world. Everyone’s using it.” It’s actually still a pretty small percentage of overall web traffic. There are a lot of studies that show that people are using ChatGPT, but not at the expense of traditional search.

I think sophisticated users are bolstering their experience with generative search tools, but I don’t think it’s coming at the expense of actually Googling things as well. I think there may be two different tools for two slightly different jobs, but there still is a substantial amount of web traffic out there to be had for the people that are still optimizing for it.

Ashley: There’s definitely a lot of hype. It is coming from the LLMs themselves trying to hype up their own product and experiences. In terms of AI optimization, that’s the other hype that’s happening right now, what do you think actually matters, and what is noise that people really shouldn’t be obsessed with right now?

John: I wonder if these are the same question; what matters versus what works today? I would say it’s important to be wary of the growth strategies that people might be seeing on their LinkedIn feed. These usually look surprisingly simple, and they usually involve AI-generated content and a growth chart that looks like this. I’ve seen so many of these growth marketing influencers that are sharing, “Reply with rocket ship, and I’ll send you this strategy,” but the part that they don’t include in their posts that are often going viral, unfortunately, is the part where Google catches up to what they’re doing, which is usually spamming, and then the traffic falls off a cliff.

There’s stuff that works today that is not sustainable long-term. We’re still in the Wild West of generative engine optimization. I regret even using that term because I don’t think we need new acronyms here. We can talk about this. I think it’s a lot of the same strategy. The get-rich-quick schemes and the get-traffic-quick schemes, those are not sustainable, and that sort of thing has never been sustainable. As Google, and presumably as OpenAI and Claude and the other ones, become more sophisticated, they will have a vested interest in cracking down on these- what I feel are their exploits.

I think, in a way, generative search has brought us back to basics marketing approach, where the same stuff that mattered before matters now. Now brand sentiment and brand awareness and the more traditional marketing metrics, those are influencing generative search outcomes as well. The stuff that always mattered still matters, and things are shifted around a little bit, but I don’t believe it’s a brand new discipline.

Ashley: No. Google has never liked tricksters. They never wanted people to game them. The algorithm has always been evolving and adapting to prevent that, like you said. The things that matter, actually having preference and having a brand that people want to love, that’s what matters. If you’re not focused on that, and if you’re still trying to game the system, you’re going to get left behind because you’re just-

John: You’re gonna get left behind, yeah.

Ashley: I like what you said about those charts on LinkedIn, “Just do this. Here’s the playbook. Go.” Sure, maybe those case studies are on a very simple context I want to talk about with you, I think, as a good segue, is scale. You are dealing with a very large book of business. You have thousands of products, then you have the telemedicine, online health side. How are you prioritizing that roadmap? There’s thousands of pages, lots of different goals, lots of different business units. How are you figuring out, where do you tackle first? How do you prioritize that across the biz?

John: That’s a really good question. To start, I think it’s about having a very intentional content strategy, which we’ve always had from the beginning. GoodRx was not a publisher. We weren’t in the publisher game until about four years ago. When we started, it was a proof of concept. We were like, “Hey, we think we can do this thing. Give us X resources and let us prove it out.” We had a three-month goal. Because we had so limited resources, we were very careful with the keywords that we went after. We made sure that every single article that we published counted. I think in this proof of concept, it was 10 articles that we started off with.

We started off by focusing on the areas where we knew that we had some topical authority already, and that is drugs. Not drugs broadly, but specifically drug pricing. We had a few years of very clear product market fit that our coupon pages ranked really well for a drug and a discount intent query. We started by looking at, “Drug pricing, then let’s look at drug side effects, then let’s look at dosages,” and expounded a little bit more to the specific conditions that a drug might treat.

Little by little, we systematically started to fill out not all the gaps in this large content ecosystem, but the gaps where we believe that we can add something new, where we had something additional to bring to the table, because this is commodity content. A lot of this stuff exists on the web and has for a long time; drugs.com and WebMD were well established.

We’ve always been very intentional with the content that we create. Every page has a purpose. If it’s indexable, it exists for a purpose, and we want it to rank for a specific keyword that we believe that has demonstrable search volume, there’s people looking for it, it connects back to the business in a meaningful way, and we believe we can add something new to the conversation.

There are a lot of query classes that we haven’t gone after. We have a large library, but if you compare that to the index of a site like WebMD or drugs.com, we’re a drop in the bucket. I believe that’s actually largely why we’re not seeing the types of drops that some of the incumbent publishers in the space are seeing today. We didn’t chase current volume and go after every topic under the sun. From the beginning, we’ve been very, very intentional, out of necessity, and we still are.

I think that speaks to, at least, the content library and how we navigate that. There’s a lot of evangelization that the SEO team does to make sure that folks know that when we introduce a new page into the index, it needs to be pursuing a topic that we don’t already have a page that’s pursuing, otherwise, we get into this realm of cannibalization. We’ve done a lot of education on that as well to really tightly guard the overall site footprint. We have a very aggressive pruning process in place as well. These are all things that keep it under wraps and make sure that everything that’s out there serves an intentional purpose and doesn’t overlap with something else.

Ashley: That purpose that page is trying to achieve, how are you aligning with overall marketing leadership, business leadership? How are you identifying, “These are growth opportunities or where we want to move as a business”? Is it more focused on, like you said, search volume, there’s a need from the consumers for that information? It’s probably both.

John: We look at everything through a lens of overall business impact. Pure search volume or pure search traffic at this point is a vanity metric. It’s exciting, sure. If there’s an algorithm update and our search traffic goes up 20%, that’s exciting, but it doesn’t really matter that much if those users aren’t actually converting into– As you said, we have multiple lines of business. Certain categories are going to perform much better for us.

We have reporting to see that. Especially now that we’re getting more into telemedicine and prescribing weight loss drugs, it’s important that we write about those topics. Right now, traffic to those articles is a lot more important to us than, let’s say, traffic to an article about maybe a rash where you can buy over-the-counter cream for it or something. The traffic, sure, that’s great. It’s a sign that Google trusts us with answering sensitive health questions, but there are hundreds of thousands of those topics out there, and a lot of them won’t really do much for us.

Getting our name in front of people is important too, but to directly answer your question, we know the topics and the categories that serve us from a business standpoint, and we have prioritized those. That’s a list of specific drugs and the health conditions that they treat and other things. That’s all pretty clearly defined.

Ashley: Even just thinking about it as top-of-the-funnel, transactional. It’s really, “Do these pages serve a purpose? How does it align with what the priorities are for the business,” is where you’re starting your roadmap?

John: Yes. Then also, for pages that are performing well but maybe don’t cleanly align with a core business metric, can we nurture those users along the path so that– That might look like getting their email address. It might look like getting them to download the app because the awareness is important too. That’s why generative search is so powerful. It gets the brand in front of people. It doesn’t necessarily result in a transaction right then.

Keeping our brand top of mind so that when that moment comes that all of us will experience where we have a prescription and maybe we don’t want to spend a shocking amount of money on it, it’s good to know about GoodRx. We’re always trying to figure out, how can we, in a non-aggressive way, nurture this person so that they’re aware of us or maybe they’ve downloaded the app so they’re ready to use us when that time comes?

Ashley: You mentioned at the beginning how these marketing fundamentals like PR are coming back almost in terms of people like, “Whatever, it’s PR just focused on SEO, gaming the system, keyword stuffing.” They weren’t really thinking about that trust-building activity. Another way that people game the SEO landscape has been scammy, gamey things.

Where this is going is, when you think about building trust in this modern consumer journey right now, one, you need the consumer to trust you. Then you also need the algorithms to trust you too. You mentioned that your site, GoodRx, is trusted. What are you guys doing to earn that trust from both the consumer side and also just from the algorithms?

John: That’s a really good question. I’ll talk about the algorithm side first. You can do all of the SEO in the world, but if your product sucks or is just not what users are looking for, it’s going to be an uphill battle forever. Google tried to understand the content on the page and are looking at the technical SEO stuff and are looking at the backlinks, sure, but I think they’re also putting a lot of weight on nav boost, which is what they refer to as the user experience metrics.

What would be a better signal of whether a page is high quality or not than how a user is behaving when they land on it with an eye towards what their query was? I believe that nav boost probably applied at a query or category level so that if someone searches for snowboards and they click on a site, they click on the top site, and they get hammered with a bunch of pop-ups and annoying ads and stuff and they bounce, if Google sees that happening at scale for that keyword, they’re going to downrank that first site and test the second or third site in that position instead.

People have tried. I don’t think it’s very easy to fake those UX metrics. Google has access to a wealth of them through Google Analytics tags, through the Chrome browser. They can see what people are doing. Satisfying the user’s intent combined with a good, or let’s just say a not super annoying user experience is necessary at a certain point for you to stick at or near the top of page 1.

That’s on the algorithm side, but those same tactics that will drive positive UX metrics are also things that will inspire user trust. If you’re hammering the user and you only let them read the first paragraph and then you need to collect their email address and there’s pop-ups everywhere, that doesn’t inspire trust. I think what does inspire trust are these things that we’ve come to refer to in the space as YMYL. I have thoughts on whether all that stuff is really necessary or not. Some of it I think is and some isn’t.

Knowing that they are getting their answer from someone who’s qualified to write on the topic, whether it’s a doctor or a pharmacist or something else, people who clearly are qualified to be speaking on the topic that they are, that inspires trust too.

We’ve been really intentional with coming back to UX, making sure it’s clear to the user why we’re generating this content, how we generate it, how often we medically review it, and who is the person behind it, understanding how people are interacting with the content, how to make it easier for them to access, making sure we’re writing it at a reading level that is representative of our target demographics. Lots of stuff like that. I think that inspires trust too.

What’s interesting about GoodRX is that a lot of people don’t understand how the product works, so they love it, but they’re also suspicious of it. There are a lot of assumptions about how GoodRX operates. A lot of those are untrue. You’ll even see them if you type in, “Is GoodRX–” or, “Does GoodRX–” The autocomplete shows some of the paranoia and trepidation that people maybe have about the brand. I think our content has helped a lot there to show that there are real, genuine people creating helpful content and answering questions in a way that the incumbents weren’t really doing before. I think that also [inaudible 00:14:37] trust.

Ashley: AI space too, if you’re not answering those questions, if someone is searching for that query and they have those doubts, if you as a brand aren’t addressing them and providing the answer and controlling that narrative, someone else is going to write a review, there’s going to be something out there published in the space that’s going to set the narrative for you. You really have to control that narrative more in AI search or else who knows what’s going to be out there.

John: Definitely. That’s a tricky one in our space for sure, but I’ve seen that. How does GoodRX make money? I think NerdWallet ranks for that right now. You’re welcome, NerdWallet, for all the traffic you’re probably getting now.

Ashley: I love the conversation about the user experience. I think a lot of times marketers are under pressure to make their ad campaigns super efficient. They have all this pressure to make the most of their budget, and then oftentimes, the actual next step sometimes gets forgotten about and extends on that website experience. What happens when you try to make an appointment? If you can’t even find, “Where do I book an appointment? Who are the doctors here?” There’s a complete lack of trust. Really, you have to make that visible because consumers are pretty lazy and they’re not going to click around and go on a journey to explore every page of your website because no one has time for that.

John: You’re probably not the only game in town. We’re not. There’s other options out there. If they have a better user experience, it could be game over pretty easy.

Ashley: Then Google takes that knowledge and then you’re just shifted down to the next level, like you said. Maybe there are keywords that you have very competitive head terms where you want to rank for number one. Maybe it’s a pie in the sky. Maybe it’s WebMD. Maybe there’s someone who just owns that space. How do you approach your strategy where it seems like it’s incredibly competitive? What do you do to maybe earn that recommendation or to– Do you just give up and you tackle maybe the next term?

John: I think it’s more of the latter, but it doesn’t feel like giving up to me, actually. It’s pretty intentional because, as you probably know, the highest volume terms often are pretty ambiguous from an intent standpoint. Let’s say something like, GLP-1s are so hot right now, Ozempic. There’s probably, I don’t know, I would imagine, multiple millions of people searching for that term every month. What are they actually searching for? What are they hoping to accomplish? That is as top-of-funnel as it gets. If you take it down a step to a suggestion of what their intent is, there’s less volume, but they’re more qualified. They’re higher intent.

A practical example for GoodRx is cost or price or coupon or insurance coverage. Anything that suggests, “I would like to get a hold of this. What is it going to cost me, or how can I make it cheaper?” That’s where we shine. I’m not saying that those are the only keywords that we go after, but I find that if you can just enhance, if you zoom in a little bit and go to the next thing that has a semblance of intent behind it, those users, they know what they’re looking for. They’re not casually trying to learn about something. Maybe they have a prescription in hand in our case. We are well qualified to rank for that traffic.

I think there’s pattern recognition that shows if there’s a new drug and someone’s searching for the cost, GoodRx is going to rank, even if we only have a stub page for it. I don’t want to hammer that specific example too much. I’ve seen this across the board. It’s like if you are looking for a topic, the top-of-funnel topics, they’re hard to rank for. I don’t think it’s necessarily even worth trying because those people don’t often spend a whole lot of time in their session.

Ashley: The intent’s not there. It’s probably someone who maybe saw the Super Bowl commercials and was like, “What’s this? What’s Ozempic? What’s Ro?” They’re really at such a high level. Building that roadmap is focusing on where you can actually find that intent and the people who are going to actually convert into customers.

John: If you own, I think, a large percentage of the smaller ones, you’re going to get the bigger one too over time.

Ashley: As you rank for all of those subcategories or subterms, you really are building that authority to rank for that top one?

John: Yes. I think that’s the theory behind the classical hub-and-spoke model in content marketing. It’s, you go after chapters 1 through 10. That’s not a great way to describe it, but you’re in the top one if you get all the ones that roll up to it.

Ashley: To wrap up the episode, let’s think about, what’s the biggest mistake that you see healthcare brands making today with SEO?

John: The boil-the-ocean content approach that I think the incumbents in our space have long gone after is going away. I don’t think it’s really working anymore. It’s specializing in either a category or an approach to the content that is unique and differentiated is really important, and I think it’s what users are looking for.

That model, I think, worked really well for decades, and it made a lot of people a lot of money, but here’s a shift happening right now. You can see, if you look at even just external estimates of traffic to sites like drugs.com, it has been going down for quite a while. I think they’re losing their grip on these topics that are– Smaller brands that are more intentional in their approach are taking that traffic away. These are people that are not going after every topic under the sun.

A thoughtful and very intentional approach to a specific set of content or a specific thing that connect directly to your product market fit and the thing that you’re putting out there is probably where you want to focus today.

Ashley: That goes back to what you said about, if you have something unique to say, if you can actually add to the topic, that’s when you should be creating that content. If you don’t have anything unique to say, you’re just going to be like every other listing on the SERP that says the exact same thing about every healthcare treatment thing. Going to your doctors, going to your team, and understanding, “What is our differentiation to our doctor’s point of view that is unique?” and really incorporating that into your content. Otherwise, it’s all the same.

John: It’s just commodity at that point.

Ashley: Yeah, it is a commodity. My search habit is I actually go to page 2 usually because I’m just so over page 1, they’re all exactly the same. I’m like, “I’m really trying to find something.” Users, they know, and they adapt their search preference, or I just go through ChatGPT to get the answer now. Consumers are changing. If you had one last final advice for a CMO at a healthcare brand, where would you tell them to focus now for the rest of 2026?

John: To the earlier point, narrow your focus, but also get really close to the data and see what’s working and what’s not. Don’t just put content out there and hope that it’s working. I think it’s really important not to have any dead weight on your domains. Only putting stuff out there that’s working so that every single page on your domain is sending high-quality signals, those UX metrics to Google, is going to be like a rising tide, lifting ships situation. A library of 50 articles that are performing really, really well is probably a better thing at this point than a library of 5,000, where only a percentage of those are ranking.

Ashley: Like you said about pruning; pruning your entire page, know what your page is, what you need them for, and that if they serve a purpose, they’re great. If not, just cut them. [chuckles] 

John: You got to do that pruning every couple months to make sure everything is carrying its weight. You can’t have any dead weight.

Ashley: I think we all have some homework after this. John, thank you so much for joining Ignite. If anyone wanted to connect with you, where can they find you?

John: LinkedIn. LinkedIn works, or Bluesky. There’s three people on Bluesky, so you can find me easily.

Ashley: We’ll drop that in the show notes, and thanks everyone for tuning in. This is a great episode, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks.

John: Thank, Ashley. Have a good one.

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