How I Helped Jellyvision Build Its First-Ever SEO Strategy (And Increase Blog Traffic By 29%)

Jellyvision partners with employers to reinvent how employees choose and use benefits, measurably reducing the cost of benefits confusion once and for all. The company's benefits engagement platform, ALEX, delights and guides employees to make better benefits decisions — leading them, and their employers, to a more prosperous future.

In the last two years, Jellyvision's brand vision and product offerings have expanded significantly—but the company's marketing content hadn't quite caught up, and our new messaging wasn't reaching a wide enough audience. By implementing Jellyvision's first-ever SEO strategy, I helped the company define a new voice and brand vision, expand our organic reach, and increase blog traffic by 29% within a year.

Problem:

For years, Jellyvision's brand voice was quirky, comedic and light-hearted—with the noble goal of making a sometimes snooze-worthy topic, employee benefits, less boring. But as the company's brand and product offerings have matured, the marketing team identified an opportunity to reinvent our messaging to better reflect who we are now: an authoritative expert on employee benefits, with a platform that helps employers and their employees manage millions of dollars in healthcare costs per year. (That's some serious cash.)

But as we redefined our brand messaging, there was one problem: our blog content didn't reflect our new vision. It was outdated, off-message, and wasn't answering the questions we know our audience is searching for:

Old Jellyvision blog posts

The other problem? With low page-one search visibility and blog traffic declining month-over-month, our blog content was not reaching its intended audiences, and the company suffered from low brand recognition amongst potential new customers.

Solution

To accomplish greater top-of-funnel growth, we knew that high-performing, searchable content would be key to bringing new visitors to the website, establishing incremental, long-term visibility in search, and ultimately converting site traffic into qualified leads.

With that in mind, the Jellyvision team implemented its first-ever SEO strategy, utilizing blog topic clusters to improve search authority, establish brand pillars that better align with Jellyvision's future vision, and address every possible user question around a key set of topics.

What are topic clusters?

A topic cluster is multiple pieces of blog content that are grouped by a shared topic and related sub-topics. As a whole, these pages offer comprehensive coverage of a specific subject. These clusters enable site visitors to answer any search query they may have around a given topic, and show search engines that your brand is the expert on your chosen set of topics. (Source: MarketMuse)

Jellyvision topic cluster example

How did we build a topic cluster blog strategy?

1. Choose topic clusters

Before digging into keyword research, the Jellyvision team looked holistically at the company’s brand positioning. What general topics most relate to who we are? What do we do? Who are we speaking to?

Once we could answer those questions, we identified brand pillars that would serve as topic clusters on the blog. As a last step, we confirmed that there was a reasonable amount of monthly search volume for each of our topic clusters.

Examples of Jellyvision topic clusters

​Topic cluster	Monthly search volume
Benefits communication	720
Healthcare consumerism	1,300

2. Identify and publish blog posts for each cluster

Once we defined our set of topic clusters, our goal was to use the Jellyvision blog to answer every possible search query surrounding each topic.

Using SEMRush, we identified our target search queries and keywords for each cluster. We then built our blog content calendar around those topics, identifying existing content and planning new content that answer each query.

Jellyvision topic cluster planning doc

3. Build a topic cluster pillar page

Now that we have a full set of blog posts that answer every possible search query around each subject, it’s time to bring it all together with a topic cluster pillar page.

The pillar page serves as a comprehensive guide for each topic cluster, linking to each of the cluster’s blog posts and offering a brief summary of each search query. It’s like wrapping everything up into one nice package, signaling to search engines that you’re an authority on your topic cluster.

Benefits communication pillar page: An HR Team's Complete Guide to Benefits Communication

Results

As a result of our topic cluster strategy, we:

• Increased blog traffic by 29% within a year

• Saw a 71% increase in keywords that rank #1-3

• Saw a 49% increase in organic keyword volume overall

In short, we reversed 2020's disappointing results, with a huge spike in web traffic in 2021:

Now, not only does the Jellyvision blog perform well in search, but the content is more closely related to our brand positioning than if we wrote content based on one-off search keywords. We’re able to reach our target audience more meaningfully because we’re sharing content that’s most relevant to Jellyvision's brand and products.

Topic clusters allow us to take a more human approach to content creation. (And "being more human" is a key tenet of the Jellyvision brand.) Rather than keyword stuffing, we’re establishing ourselves as comprehensive subject matter experts—both in search and with our target audiences.

Learn more about the Jellyvision blog here.