How a Sleep & Wellness App Grew Site Traffic by 4,789% YoY
https://www.aurahealth.io/
Stats
16.8K to 819.3K Monthly Visits
Industry
Web & Tech
Niche
Mobile App
Reporting Date
March 2024
Aura is a leading app for mental wellness, meditation, and sleep. It has over 5 million users and features a community of over 100 therapists and coaches.
Aura Health was founded in 2017, but the company's online presence has flourished in 2024.
In March, its website surpassed 819K organic visits for an incredible 4,789% year-over-year (YoY) growth.
Join me as we examine Aura's SEO success story and share the winning moves behind its meteoric rise in the search landscape.
In This Article
The Catalyst: How Aura Reached 819.3K Monthly Visits
1. Content Focus, Big Results: Aura's Blog Boom
Between March 2023 and March 2024, Aura published around 3.3K new blogs on its website. This was a significant undertaking, considering how it brought the site's total page count to around 7.3K URLs.
However, Aura didn't just prioritize quantity.
Instead, it focused on the quality of its content and its ability to resonate with its audience.
Aura chose targeted topics that could interest its existing and future user base. Angel numbers emerged as the standout success of these targeted content efforts.
In these blogs, Aura discusses the meaning and significance of angel numbers. (According to Aura, these are “sequences of numbers that catch our attention repeatedly in our daily lives.”)
Each page follows a similar format and covers the same information for each angel number.
In total, there are about 220 of these angel number blogs.
And they’ve proved wildly successful.
Angel number blogs captured an impressive 82.8% of all site traffic in March and are among the site's top 10 organic pages.
Keyword rankings also exploded to over 66.6K by March, primarily due to these new pages.
All the site’s top traffic-generating keywords are also related to angel numbers.
Why this matters:
Aura's content strategy offers valuable lessons to improve a website’s visibility:
- Content is still king. A significant investment in high-quality, user-focused content can dramatically increase organic traffic.
- Target your audience. Researching and understanding your audience's interests allows you to create content that resonates and drives engagement.
- Embrace data-driven decisions. Tracking results and analyzing user behavior helps identify content that generates the most traffic and conversions.
- Focus on quality, not just quantity. While Aura published a large volume of content, its success lies in the quality and relevance of each piece.
How to create a content strategy:
A content strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that attracts your target audience and achieves your business goals.
It acts like a roadmap, keeping your content efforts on track and guiding you toward long-term success.
This guide shows you how to create a content strategy, but here’s a quick recap of the process:
- Pick your business goals.
- Determine your target audience.
- Create a big-picture sketch of your strategy.
- Match your content type to the best distribution channel.
- Measure your results and adjust as necessary.
Tools for your content strategy:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to every effective content strategy. It helps your audience discover the content you create via search engines.
For WordPress users, an SEO plugin can help you streamline your SEO efforts and maximize your content’s reach.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the leading SEO plugin and comes with a suite of tools to support your content strategy.
One of my favorites?
TruSEO On-Page Analysis.
TruSEO is a smart tool that analyzes your content in real-time and gives you actionable insights to improve its performance. It uses a series of checks to generate helpful recommendations that are easy to follow.
For example, the Focus Keyphrase Checklist signals that I should use my focus keyword more frequently in the subheadings. These details can make a difference in how easy it is for search engines to rank your content and for users to find it.
Next, let’s look at how Aura’s angel number blogs transformed its presence on the search engine results page (SERP).
2. #1 SERP Feature: People Also Ask Results
The top SERP feature for Aura in March was people also ask (PAA) results.
These rich results appear in Google's PAA box, which appears near the top of the SERP and aims to answer related questions to the user's original query.
It displays these questions in a dropdown menu, which users click to reveal the answer.
For Aura, they received 6.4K rankings in Google’s PAA box in March.
And remarkably, 98.8% of these rankings are for new blogs.
As for how they got them, Aura focuses on high-quality content with strong on-page SEO.
This means they wrote helpful content for people (not bots) and used keywords to help search engines find their blogs.
Aura also optimized for content readability.
Content readability measures how easily users can read and understand your content. And while it’s not a direct ranking factor, it impacts important user engagement metrics, like time on page and bounce rate.
Why this matters:
Earning a spot in Google's “People Also Ask” (PAA) results is a golden opportunity for website owners.
Due to their prominence on the SERP, PAA results are a great way to boost your visibility and introduce your brand to new users.
You can also increase your site's traffic by achieving higher clickthrough rates (CTR).
How to optimize for PAA results:
Landing in Google's People Also Ask section is no accident. Here's a sneak peek into winning these rich results:
- Start with stellar content.
- Answer the right questions (keyword research will help you find them).
- Speak their language by fulfilling search intent.
- Leverage FAQ schema markup.
For more details, check out this beginner-friendly guide on how to optimize for Google’s PAA.
Tools for PAA results:
FAQs are a great way to rank in the PAA box. With AIOSEO, you can write them using FAQ blocks in WordPress. The plugin will automatically add FAQ schema for you.
Next, we’ll look at another SERP feature: featured snippets.
3. Angel Numbers Dominate Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are rich results that appear below ads and sponsored posts and above organic results. (SEOs call this “position zero.”)
Here’s what one looks like on the SERP:
Featured snippets are one of the most covetable SERP features because of their prominence in search results. They’re impossible to miss.
And in March, Aura got 870 of them.
Now, here’s the thing about featured snippets: they’re generated on a per-search basis. This means you can’t force search engines to display them. (Granted, you can’t force search engines to do anything, but there are best practices for getting featured snippets. I’ll cover those shortly.)
For Aura, 75% of featured snippets are for angel number blogs.
The remaining 25% go to blogs related to astrology and the zodiac.
Why this matters:
According to SEO statistics, featured snippets have the highest CTR at 42.9%.
And, like PAA results, they excel at boosting brand awareness.
This makes them a powerful tool for Aura, and website owners in general, to attract a broader user base and get more eyes on your content.
How to win featured snippets:
Here are a few ways to optimize your content for featured snippets:
- Target question-based keywords. Conduct keyword research focusing on questions about your topic (e.g., “What is the meaning of angel number 1111?”).
- Give succinct answers. Provide a clear and concise answer to the target question.
- Structure your content effectively. Use clear headings, subheadings, and bullet points to improve readability and signal the answer to search engines.
- Optimize for voice search. Since voice search results often read featured snippets, ensure your answer uses natural language that people would speak.
Tools for featured snippets:
At its core, winning a featured snippet is about creating the best piece of content for a keyword.
Easier said than done, right?
Well, with TruSEO, it’s not as hard as you may think. This tool helps you understand your optimization efforts to maximize your content’s reach and rankings.
In addition to the Focus Keyphrase Checklist we explored earlier, TruSEO also has a Readability Checklist that makes it easy to optimize your content for users and search engines.
Before we wrap up, there’s one more win I’d like to point out from Aura’s new blogs. But they didn’t really optimize for it. (I’ll tell you how to do it better.)
4. Images Take Center Stage in Search Results
There was another lucky win for all these new blogs: image rich results.
Image rich results are enhanced search listings that feature an image. Google calls these “text result images.”
In March, Aura reached an unprecedented amount of image rich results, at 4.5K rankings.
Now, what’s interesting about this win is that Aura didn’t really implement image SEO best practices.
Note: Image SEO is the practice of optimizing your images to rank in search results.
Typically, you’ll see the following optimizations when there are a lot of text result images for a site:
But for Aura, they only did one of these three (alt text).
That said, their on-page SEO did most of the heavy lifting for the images.
The on-page signals are strong enough for search engines to understand the probable content of each blog’s featured image. (Aura includes one featured image per blog, which is what I noticed ranked in search results.)
So, while it’s working, I’d be curious to see how many more image rankings they would get if they implemented proper image SEO.
Why this matters:
Landing text result images isn't just about vanity—it's a powerful SEO tool. These visually enticing results grab user attention in a crowded SERP, encouraging them to visit your site.
Plus, optimizing images can help you rank in Google Images, which has over 1 billion daily searches.
How to do image SEO on your site:
In addition to the steps mentioned above, here are some additional image SEO tips:
- Create an image sitemap.
- Implement image title tags.
- Write captions when appropriate.
- Compress images to reduce their file size.
For even more ideas, visit this guide on optimizing images in WordPress.
Tools for image SEO:
Image SEO can be tedious without the right tools.
At AIOSEO, our Image SEO feature reduces the manual work of image optimizations for greater efficiency. You can customize smart tags to automate certain optimizations, like writing image titles or alt text.
Standout SEO Wins
Our analysis of aurahealth.io revealed one additional strategy that, while not directly responsible for their recent traffic surge, plays a significant role in their overall SEO success.
Connecting the Dots: Aura's Internal Linking Strategy
Internal linking might sound simple, but it's the cornerstone of a well-rounded SEO strategy. By seizing every natural opportunity to interlink its pages, Aura achieves several benefits:
- Improved User Experience: Users can easily navigate between related content, finding the information they seek more efficiently. This keeps them engaged and exploring Aura's library of wellness resources.
- Enhanced Search Engine Visibility: Search engines use internal links to understand a website's structure and hierarchy. A well-linked site signals authority on a topic and can improve search engine ranking for all pages.
- Boosted Link Juice: Link juice refers to the authority passed between pages through internal links. By strategically linking across pages, Aura distributes its SEO power to improve the ranking of all content.
Tool: Link Assistant powers your internal linking strategy with suggestions that populate directly in the WordPress editor. It’s as easy as clicking Add Link.
Takeaways
Are you inspired by Aura's SEO success story?
Let's translate these impressive results into actionable steps for your website.
Here are the top takeaways for replicating their growth and unlocking your next level of SEO performance.
Top 3 Strategies to Emulate
- Become a content powerhouse. Focus on creating a steady stream of high-quality, user-centric content. Conduct keyword research to understand your audience's needs and choose topics that resonate with them. Remember, consistency is key! Aim for a regular content creation schedule to keep your website fresh and engaging for both users and search engines.
- Target user intent with on-page SEO. Don't just stuff keywords into your content. Analyze search queries and user intent to understand the “why” behind user searches. Craft content that addresses those needs and provides clear, valuable answers to their questions. Optimize your website for readability and structure to make it easy for users to find the information they seek.
- Go for gold with rich results. Don't settle for standard search results. Optimize your content to appear as rich results and featured snippets. This means understanding search intent, crafting the best content for a keyword, and using schema markup to give search engines more context about your page. By grabbing user attention in search results with these eye-catching formats, you can significantly increase your click-through rate and attract high-intent traffic.
Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider
- Ditch duplicate, non-descriptive page titles. Several of Aura's pages use generic page titles, like “Aura Health.” Instead, craft unique, descriptive meta titles for every indexable page. These titles should reflect the content and target relevant keywords while enticing users to click. Ultimately, strong page titles are one of the most powerful ways to improve clickthrough rates and organic traffic. You can use an AI meta title generator to write optimized titles for you.
- Stop publishing meta descriptions that exceed character limits. Even though Google tends to rewrite meta descriptions based on the search, it's important to put your best foot forward when publishing. If search engines display your meta description and it exceeds the character limit, it will be truncated. This can result in an unsightly search listing with unclear or missing information. Instead, aim for clear, compelling meta descriptions that don't surpass 160 characters. You should also check your metadata in a SERP snippet tool before publishing to preview how your page will look in search results.
- Don’t forget schema markup! I was surprised to see that Aura doesn’t implement schema markup anywhere on its website. Schema markup is an SEO fundamental. And today, schema generator plugins make it easier than ever to add it to your web pages. Schema markup communicates important details about your page to search engines in a way that’s easy for them to understand. Using it can help them decipher your content more effectively, thus potentially boosting its rankings. With AIOSEO's rich snippet schema, you can literally pick it from a catalog, and we'll format the structured data for you. It's that simple.
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Replicate Aura’s Organic Success With AIOSEO
In this deep dive into Aura's SEO strategy, we've witnessed the power of a data-driven content strategy and user-focused optimizations.
But what if you could skip the years of learning and trial and error that's usually a part of the SEO game?
With AIOSEO, replicating Aura's winning SEO formula becomes a streamlined process. Our all-in-one SEO toolkit empowers you to:
- Craft content with confidence.
- Optimize for visibility.
- Track and analyze results.
With thousands of 5-star reviews and trusted by over 3 million website owners, you’ll get all the tools to put your site at the top of the SERP. Plus, they’re beginner-friendly and don’t require a background in SEO, digital marketing, or web development.
Here are some tools you’re sure to love:
- TruSEO Score: Level up your content and go beyond a simple pass or fail. TruSEO analyzes your on-page SEO, giving you actionable insights to maximize your content's reach.
- FAQ Blocks: Add FAQs to your content to increase the likelihood of appearing in Google’s People Also Ask box. These results help boost brand awareness and increase clickthrough rates.
- Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with a single click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
- Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your content in just 1 click. Link Assistant helps you effortlessly build a better linking strategy.
- Cornerstone Content: Mark your most important pages as cornerstone content to make internal linking a breeze. This tool works with Link Assistant to streamline your link-building strategy.
- AI Title & Description Generator: This time-saving tool creates compelling metadata for any page on your site. With the click of a button, you’ll harness the power of AI and get options for unique meta titles and descriptions.
