Key Takeaways
As the telehealth industry matures, so do the marketing strategies that put some companies ahead of the pack. The space is growing more crowded by the day, leading to stiffer competition across marketing channels, and the rapid change in search marketing in particular has forced brands to try new approaches, invest heavily in content quality, and get smarter about their search marketing strategy.
As an SEO agency specializing in telehealth, Fire&Spark became interested in what tactics are working across the industry. We’ve worked with dozens of digital health companies; we understand the common difficulties of winning in telehealth SEO, including fierce competition, content creation challenges, and tight regulations.
So, who is overcoming these challenges to win in organic search?
To answer this question, we assessed over 400 telehealth brands to figure out who the winners are. From there, we dug into what’s working, what’s not working, and what opportunities even the fastest-growing companies are missing out on.
Note: While this analysis includes current and former Fire&Spark clients, our collaboration did not impact our methodology, the rankings, or our decision of which companies’ SEO strategies to highlight.
As we dug in, a few trends began to coalesce:
Looking at the telehealth brands with over 20,000 organic monthly visitors, the fastest growing verticals are:
Weight management/metabolic health and primary care/general healthcare providers also saw impressive traffic growth.
The growth of companies in these verticals is not necessarily due to growth in the market itself, but rather because the companies are making significant investments in SEO to capture the existing search volume.
The 2025 Telehealth 20 made significant investments in SEO over the past year, as evidenced not just by their quantitative performance but also by their impressive content quality, graphic design, technical SEO components, and on-site experience.
A number of the brands we assessed have achieved traffic growth while leaving conversion opportunities on the table.
Even those who saw massive growth in the number of conversion-oriented keywords they’re ranking for have not yet optimized for low-hanging fruit CRO opportunities on their site.
Capturing these opportunities will lead to better engagement metrics and higher conversion rates.
On the whole, SEOs focus on traffic acquisition when they should be focused on patient acquisition.
Many brands drop their SEO investment due to a lack of business results. This is because SEOs tend to measure success based on rankings and traffic when they should be measuring conversions and revenue.
The websites we assessed are no exception. Setting aside all the things they’re doing right, they still tend to:
These common SEO strategy gaps aren’t anything new. However, these brands (along with the vast majority of companies writ-large) are still getting up-to-speed when it comes to “GEO” (generative engine optimization). This presents a major risk to the sustainability of their growth.
Generative AI search tools are still used relatively seldom compared to Google (less than 5% of total searches in Oct 2024), but adoption is rising. In February 2025, 80% of surveyed searchers reported preferring traditional search to Generative AI search—but that was before the introduction of Google’s AI mode, the improvements to SearchGPT, and all of the developments still to come.
In other words: For now, organic search marketing remains largely the same, but anyone expecting that to be the case a year from now isn’t paying attention.
The winners over the next year will accomplish all three of the following goals:
Now, let’s dive deep.
Resilience Lab is a hybrid therapy group practice that offers a range of mental health services, including individual, couples, group, and family therapy, both in-person and via teletherapy.
Resilience Lab’s growth has come primarily from their blog, hence their explosive traffic growth, while (comparatively speaking, at least), their conversion keyword rankings growth has been more modest.
They have achieved top rankings for low conversion-value but high search volume informational terms, such as “acts of service” terms, ranked for by this blog article.
Looking at their top traffic-driving keywords more broadly, we can see that the majority of their traffic is being driven by these low-conversion intent terms.
Not only are these keywords “top of funnel” (meaning far from a conversion), but many of them don’t indicate any conversion intent at all. Someone searching “doomscrolling”, for example, is not indicating any interest in seeking therapy services.
In other words, while Resilience Lab has demonstrated remarkable ranking ability through their content, they are allocating their content production resources to poorly converting keywords.
One potential reason for this strategy is if they are making an awareness play; eyeing the increasingly competitive virtual mental and behavioral health landscape, they may be deciding to prioritize informational terms with lower difficulty to rank.
This kind of strategy is intended to balance out extra-low conversion rates by attracting an extremely large volume of traffic, growing brand awareness at scale.
The key to such a strategy is to effectively nurture that traffic via retargeting, email campaigns, social media marketing, etc. Here, too, I see significant opportunity for Resilience Lab (more on that below).
Resilience Lab is running the classic quantity-over-quality “SEO blog” playbook—in essence, writing a lot of content and putting a lot of words on the page. The acts of service page mentioned above, for instance, runs over 3,300 words.
While I am doubtful that someone interested in the subject is going to read 3,300 words (an estimated 13-minute time investment), it is at least working for ranking purposes.
Compared to many other companies on this list (including Midi below), Resilience Lab’ content is relatively barebones.
They use bullet points and headers to break up the text, with occasional attention-grabbing CTA boxes. They are also using AI tools to generate imagery.
Now that Resilience Lab has demonstrated their ability to rank for frequently searched terms, I would encourage them to:
All three of these are important for both making SEO a patient acquisition engine, rather than a traffic acquisition engine, AND, importantly, future-proofing their traffic against AI.
The keywords that are bringing in the most traffic for them, according to Ahrefs, are exactly the kind of keywords for which AI tools are already beginning to devour site traffic.
The “acts of service” search results page (SERP), for instance, is already dominated by Google’s AI overviews and other search features.
Over time, I would expect Resilience Lab’s traffic to decrease as searchers increase their use of AI overviews and LLMs.
While Resilience Lab’ content appears to be performing well, there are obvious quality improvements that can boost it further, make it more resilient to the changing tides of SEO, and improve reader engagement, including:
When it comes to content formatting and content quality, I would recommend taking a page out of the books of Midi or Bicycle Health—two brands that have put immense effort into the value their content provides. Not only will improved content quality help Resilience Lab fare better as search becomes more dominated by AI tools, it will also help them unlock more conversion value from their traffic.
Oshi Health is a virtual gastrointestinal (GI) care platform that provides patients with comprehensive support for digestive issues, including chronic diseases like Crohn’s Disease and ulcerative colitis.
According to Ahrefs, an overwhelming majority of Oshi’s organic traffic (essentially all of it) comes from non-branded informational keywords.
Explaining this is the way that Oshi has decided to build their primary landing pages. The “condition” pages in their main navigation are formatted and keyword-optimized for informational traffic.
Their Crohn’s Disease page, for instance, is optimized for both informational and conversion-oriented terms, as evidenced by the title tag: “Crohn’s Disease Causes, Symptoms & Treatment | Oshi Health”.
Here, “Crohn’s Disease Causes” and “Crohn’s Disease Symptoms” are informational terms, while “Crohn’s Disease Treatment” is the conversion-oriented term being targeted.
The formatting and content of the page itself also attempts to satisfy these dual intents.
The table of contents, blocks of text, and bullet point lists look more similar to a blog format than a traditional marketing landing page.
Predictably, this leads to better rankings for higher funnel informational terms rather than bottom-of-funnel conversion-oriented terms.
(Source: Ahrefs)
While these are excellent keywords to rank for if you treat Crohn’s Disease, the searcher is not necessarily looking for solutions (yet), meaning they provide short-term traffic value, where the conversions are more likely to take weeks, months, or years to materialize.
According to Ahrefs, this page does not rank for any “treatment” keywords.
This trade-off may have been intentional, given the intense competition in the search results for keywords like “crohn’s disease treatment”, which feature an AI overview, numerous paid ad spots, other search features, and large SEO competitors such as Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic.
Oshi has had a fantastic year when it comes to SEO results. However, like other brands on this list, they have room to better convert the traffic that they’re already acquiring.
As mentioned above, one opportunity that Oshi should consider (if they haven’t already) is testing a more conversion-oriented keyword targeting approach. This would mean A/B testing landing pages that take a more traditional lower-funnel approach to formatting, content, and calls-to-action, as well as creating/optimizing local pages, insurance pages, and long-tail treatment pages.
I would recommend viewing this as an experiment. Currently, their informational keyword approach is working for them. One could take an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach.
However, given that we’re expecting AI search features to continue vacuuming up informational traffic, I believe that a meaningful attempt to pivot to a lower-funnel keyword targeting strategy should at least be considered.
One of Oshi’s top-performing pieces of content is their anti-inflammatory foods article. According to Ahrefs, this page garners 4,900 monthly visitors. This article is over 2,400 words, and does not feature a call-to-action box until the very end.
While the top navigation (and “Get Started” CTA) follow the reader down the page, I would recommend including (tasteful and appropriate) calls-to-action within the content itself or on the sidebar. These calls-to-action should be custom, meaning they are written for this particular piece of content, referencing the problem/condition about which the visitor has searched and the solution that Oshi can provide.
When you’re attracting a large number of searchers who are early in their conversion journey, you should be thinking of more ways to nurture and convert traffic than “Book an appointment” calls-to-action.
If you’re in a position similar to Oshi, you should consider adding other conversion actions, especially to higher-funnel pages and content. These could include:
Other channels, including paid advertising, can be involved in nurturing these higher funnel searchers, but (as telehealth marketers are well aware), compliance and regulations are making that more and more difficult as time goes on.
Midi Health is a virtual care clinic focused on women’s midlife health, specializing in perimenopause and menopause. They offer personalized care plans, including hormonal and non-hormonal medications, supplements, lifestyle coaching, and more, to address a range of symptoms. Midi’s goal is to help women feel and look their best by providing expert-led care tailored to their individual needs.
Midi is doing a lot right when it comes to their content. Their SEO strategy seems to be a matter of quality over quantity, with an emphasis on right-fit informational and conversion-oriented keywords.
Their content is formatted beautifully, and the quality of the writing is top-notch.
Midi has identified informational keywords that their right-fit patients are searching. As an SEO strategist who focuses on conversion—and speaks often of the importance of “conversion-intent” keywords—I think this presents a great opportunity to highlight how “conversion intent” and “informational” are not mutually exclusive. Just because someone is early in their conversion journey doesn’t mean that they are poor fit site visitors. Put another way, don’t conflate conversion-readiness with conversion-intent.
While most of Midi’s top traffic-driving pages appear to be blog articles, they are meticulous in their topic selection, favoring keywords that either:
Deliver search results pages that prioritize blog posts, while still conveying high intent to convert
Are top-of-funnel (informational), but the searcher is likely to move down the funnel to convert.
Table of contents
Clean, easy-to-read content formatting and design
Use of headers, bolding, and underlining (i.e., “skimmability”)
Relevant and easily accessible calls-to-action
Citing data, studies, and other hard evidence for claims
Multimedia assets
Bullet point lists
Summary of “Takeaways” at the end of the article
High-quality author with other notable publications
Medical reviewers
Quotes from providers
Cited sources
Putting faces to the brand (personnel headshots)
Embedded video testimonials
Publicizing editorial standards
While Midi is killing it when it comes to informational content, they have left some meat on the bones when it comes to creating and optimizing lower-funnel, higher conversion intent pages.
Despite their domination with local content, Midi’s site has room for improvement when it comes to bottom-of-funnel landing pages. These are the types of pages that you would typically find in a site’s main navigation, which commonly describe the conditions you treat, the treatment styles you provide, etc.
Compared to blog articles, these landing pages are relatively light on copy, instead highlighting the information that someone who is close to a conversion decision needs to know to build the confidence to convert.
Midi’s landing pages are underoptimized. In the case of their Menopause page, the title tag (a foundational element of SEO) isn’t optimized for keywords.
Optimizing these landing pages presents low-hanging fruit opportunities for Midi to move toward position 1 for highly valuable terms such as “online menopause treatment” (current ranking: 7).
Every telehealth brand should have a sophisticated local SEO strategy. Local keywords (such as those following the formats “[treatment] near me”, “[treatment] in [city]”, and “[treatment] in [state] that takes [insurance]”) are typically very low search volume, but are incredibly meaningful when targeted at scale due to their higher conversion intent.
These are very low funnel keywords, and it is important that telehealth companies pursue them. Of course, if lacking in-person offices, important considerations—in terms of practicality, compliance, and accuracy—must be taken into account when crafting your strategy for local search.
Rather than ignore the local opportunity if lacking brick and mortar presence, determine how you could create content that ranks for local terms AND still provides valuable info and relevant conversion opportunities to the searcher.
Mochi Health is a telehealth company specializing in obesity medicine, offering personalized weight care plans, including virtual consultations with board-certified providers and registered dietitians, and prescription medication options.
Mochi has taken off like a rocket ship over the last couple of years. While SEO has played a key role in that, their efforts on other channels (including TikTok) have contributed to their massive growth.
Their SEO has helped them achieve impressive gains, but it has also been bolstered by branded search (an indication of growing brand awareness from SEO and other channels), as well as the rising tides of GLP-1 medication as a category.
Search interest in ‘ozempic’ over the last 5 years
(Source: Google Trends)
Many (if not most) brands see a large percentage of their organic traffic coming from branded search terms.
That is especially the case for Mochi.
(Source: Ahrefs)
While they have also seen impressive gains for non-branded terms up and down the funnel (like the other brands highlighted on this list), this presents a great opportunity to investigate SEO success from a new angle:
The answer to this question lives at the intersection of SEO, UX, and CRO (and likely a few other acronyms).
Let’s focus on people who are searching “mochi” terms because they are familiar with the brand. Perhaps they’ve seen one of Mochi’s TikTok videos, or a friend mentioned Mochi, or their provider encouraged them to check Mochi out.
These are people who are searching Mochi’s brand terms with the intent to learn more, and Mochi’s goal becomes to inform them about the brand before their competitors (or AI tools) get the chance.
Landing on the Mochi homepage, a visitor is greeted by a few things that will help them determine whether to continue browsing.
Mochi makes it clear: Our solution is for women with obesity.
If that describes the searcher (or if they’re not sure whether it does), they can click the “Am I eligible?” button (shown below) to learn more.
Scrolling down the page, they’ll find trust factors (publication logos), followed by information about how Mochi works.
The kinds of questions in the searcher’s mind that are being addressed include:
Further information can be found by navigating deeper into the site, including to the FAQ linked from the main navigation.
One of the most common branded search patterns is different versions of “is [brand] legit?”
(Source: Ahrefs)
When you search “is mochi health legit?”, you’re greeted by Reddit threads, Facebook threads, and the Better Business Bureau. The results are… a mixed bag. Getting in front of these terms is important because they’re often one of the last things someone searches before pulling the trigger on a conversion.
While most SEO campaigns focus on non-branded search, you must be able to identify the right times to invest in branded search, as well. Positively influencing the search results pages for branded terms can provide substantial ROI, helping to address final barriers to conversion and convince brand-aware searchers that you are the best solution for their needs.
Neglecting these terms allows for misinformation and competitors to crowd you out, turning away potential patients who are otherwise open to converting.
Mochi should seek to control the perception of their brand by addressing queries like this directly. Some brands are willing to address them directly by creating a “Is [brand] legit?” landing page. Another, slightly more roundabout way of addressing these queries is by creating a testimonials/review page, as Form Health has done.
Furthermore, Mochi has the opportunity to engage directly with their community online. This could mean participating (tastefully) in threads on Reddit, Facebook, and other forums. However, marketers need to tread lightly; no one likes a community they find valuable being astroturfed.
Browsing the online discourse about your brand, however, you may find opportunities to authentically engage and provide answers people are looking for.
“Within is a revolutionary way for the millions of people who suffer from eating disorders to receive clinically-superior continuous care attuned to their needs.” (Source: Within)
From where I sit, it appears that Within Health has put a similarly impressive amount of effort into their content as Midi. This means a lot of care put into both the content (words on the page) and the formatting. Furthermore, they have clearly focused on keywords up and down the funnel, including super-high conversion intent local keywords, which they target with their directory of local treatment pages (ex: North Dakota).
Within Health is walking and chewing gum at the same time. They are:
Author (with headshot)
Medical reviewer (with headshot)
Editorial policy
Health disclaimer
Source citations
Table of contents
Easy-to-find subject matter tagging
Read time estimator
Use of headers, bolding, and underlining (i.e., “skimmability”)
Relevant and easily accessible calls-to-action
Approachable length (approx. 1,000 words)
Helpful, relevant graphics
Embedded quizzes
While Within Health’s content quantity is great, they could achieve more value from it by more effectively connecting the dots between the intent behind the search and the treatment they provide.
Within Health does not prescribe Topamax—or any other weight loss medications. As they say in their on-page disclaimer, “Within does not endorse the use of any weight loss drug or behavior and seeks to provide education on the insidious nature of diet culture.”
The people searching the terms that would land them on this page, such as “topamax for weight loss”, are demonstrating an intent to pursue medication-assisted weight loss, or are at least curious about it.
After describing the downsides, the article does not clearly present other treatment options.
That means that Within Health does not provide the solution they’re researching; after getting in front of these searchers, it becomes Within Health’s job to then present alternatives (which Within Health does provide) to the searched-for solution.
You don’t want to sacrifice the quality of your content by inserting a sales pitch; visitors and search engine ranking algorithms are both likely to take issue with this. However, there are some tactics that could be deployed to approach this challenge tastefully:
Better matching the intended search intent (someone looking for a method to lose weight) by presenting alternative solutions (and even alternative framings of the “problem”, ex: desire to lose weight) will improve the conversion value of this kind of content, making the most of the significant resources that went into producing the article in the first place.
How to optimize for AI search (aka GEO):
AI search is coming fast. As of publication of this piece in July 2025, the development we’re monitoring most closely at Fire&Spark is Google’s AI mode. For those unfamiliar, AI mode allows searchers to essentially chat with the search results, blending the chatbot experience (i.e. ChatGPT or Gemini) with the traditional search engine results page.
As of July 2025, adoption of these tools is relatively low but continues to grow. One study finds that 27% of Americans have used AI to search. (Note: Importantly, this does not mean they primarily search using AI tools—yet.) As the major players refine their AI search experiences, adoption will increase.
AI search optimization strategy isn’t so much completely new as it is an evolution of existing SEO techniques.
The dominance of the sites on this list, fueled largely by top-of-funnel content success, may not last. Generative AI search tools (LLMs, Google’s AI Mode) are continuing to become more prevalent, and the largely top-of-funnel marketing tactics that these brands employ may gradually become obsolete as searchers adopt the new technology.
Brands aiming to turn SEO into a powerful acquisition engine should invest in it as a core part of their patients’ conversion journeys, rather than as a quick fix or ‘hack’.
Create content that builds visitors’ trust in your solution, and serve it to them via an on-site experience that makes it intuitive for them to make the best decision about their healthcare.
Pulling this off isn’t easy. But if you can swing it, you won’t just scale your organic traffic; you’ll scale your business.
A few notes on the decisions we made in performing this analysis:
We welcome feedback. 2025 is the first year in which we are performing this analysis, and we would love to hear what was helpful, what wasn’t, and what would be valuable for us to assess in the future. Reach out to [email protected] with any feedback, questions, or suggestions for future analysis!
Author
As Fire&Spark’s Director of Client Services, Noah Goldfarb leads the development of data-backed, conversion-focused SEO strategies for our clients. Get in touch with him directly at [email protected]
Reviewers
David Cooper, Therapists in Tech
Luis A Argueso, InHealth Advisors
Carrie Olson, Helios Innovation Lab
