SEO is an Art > Increasing Active Users
Increasing Active Users with SEO for a Vitamin Supplement Website
Increasing Active Users with SEO for a Vitamin Supplement Website
Search Engine Optimization is a core part of any website's digital marketing strategy. Read on to learn how SEO helped a website increase its active users from 406,244 in 2024 to 496,478 in 2025.
SEO Tasks for AI Overview Optimization
2025 was a year of changes for the search industry. Most notable among them was the widespread adoption of "AI". 2025 saw large language models (LLMs) help users find what they needed,. Users could then enter into dialogs with the search engine to continue their search for information.
AI augmentations change how people search. If people have one question to ask, like, "what are the effects of Berberine?", Google will tell them right there on the results page. They'll see a complete list of all the effects of this supplement. Google gets the information about Berberine (or about any other subject) by crawling websites like they always did. But the "AI Overviews" mean that visitors will no longer need to click through to your website to find out more.
This means the visitors might not be exposed to your website's marketing messaging.
Informational queries (like "what are the effects of Berberine?") have seen organic click-through rates (CTR) drop by 58% to 65% because of AI Overviews. However, while overall clicks are down, getting cited within the AI Overview is now the "new #1." Brands cited in the AI summary see significantly higher engagement than those relegated to the traditional links below.
Ironically, the traffic that does click through tends to be higher quality. Because the AI has already answered the basic "what is it?" question, the person clicking is usually looking for deep-dive details, specific products, or expert nuances.
So what do you need to do to get cited? That's where SEO can help, and that's what I did for this vitamin supplement website. Google has guidelines on what it expects from websites that dispense advice on money and health. Websites that don't meet those guidelines are much less likely to get cited in AI Overviews. These types of sites are known as "YMYL" sites, for "Your Money or Your Life"
Optimizing this website for its target search terms meant adapting its information so that their expertise in vitamins and supplements was clear to Google. Here are some of the steps we took:
Using Schema Markup
Schema is a way of telling google what information is. For example, suppose you have someone's telephone number, such as Jenny's number 867-5309 from the Tommy Tutone song. With Schema, you can put information around that telephone number to explicitly tell search engines that those seven numbers are a telephone number. The HTML code for schema looks something like this:
<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<h1><span itemprop="name">Jenny's Good Time Call Service</span></h1>
Phone: <span itemprop="telephone">867-5309</span></div>
We used schema to specifically identify the health supplements as products, with prices in US dollars. This was useful for getting cited in AI overviews because it's easy for search engines to render schema markup information in the search results.
Highlighting Page Content with the H1 Tag
When I reviewed the site, I found that their content management system did something a little strange. By default, every page had the title tag and the H1 tag exactly the same. Now, this isn't exactly a problem for search engines, because it doesn't impede them from crawling or indexing the site. However, when the title tag and the H1 tag are the same, it misses an opportunity to clearly inform visitors about the page they're visiting.
Try this: right-click on this webpage and choose "View Source" from the menu that appears. You will see a page with code on it. Near the top of the page is a <TITLE> tag. Search engines often use the contents of the tag in the blue link that points to your website. So, you might see the link below on Google, and that's the title tag:
SEO Increased Active Users
From an SEO perspective, the title tag is a way to inform both search engines and visitors what your page is about. This really helps both parties decide whether your page is relevant to what they want. Like if you're searching for "Vitamins and Supplements", you're more likely to click on a link that says "Vitamins and Supplements" then you are to click on a link that says "Bob's Car Parts".
Okay, so then you click the link from the search engine and you go to the page. Now, on the web page itself, that's where you can see the <H1> tag. On the page you're reading right now, the <H1> tag is "Increasing Active Users with SEO for a Vitamin Supplement Website". This is the "headline" of the page - like on a newspaper, it's a big, bold block of text that tells visitors what they will see on the page. It's different than the page title, which is "SEO Increased Active Users". Here, the H1 tag provides more detail about the page than the title tag. That's good, because it helps orient you, the visitor, toward the information that's on the page. Also, please note that you don't "See" the page's title tag anymore once you're on the web page. You'll only see the title tag on the search engine results page, and here you will only see it if you view the page's HTML code.
That's the power of the H1 tag. You want to make the most out of it.
We ran a test: we wrote new H1 tags for 100 pages on the site, and we left the site's other 1,400 pages alone so that their title tag matched the H1 tag. Before we went ahead with this change, and we wanted to prove to the client that the change would help our organic search profile and increase traffic. To prove the plan's viability, we developed a test roll-out of the new H1 tags. We took a baseline reading of engagement a month before the new H1 tags were implemented, and another reading of page engagement a month after we had implemented the new H1 tags.
The test proved that the pages performed better. Here's the breakdown:
- Pages with revised H1 tags gained a larger share of total blog traffic
- Active users increased month over month
- Event counts increased
The updated H1s helped:
- Clarify what the page is about
- Encourage more users to actually engage with the content once they arrived
- Reduce mismatched visitors
- Increase qualified users
- Facilitate stronger downstream actions