SEO Success: From Taboo to Top 5

How SEO Turned a Taboo Topic to a Top Performer

Why Safe Sex Worked for us … and Brought 15k Visitors to Our Site

You might be wondering, “What’s sex got to do with SEO!?” Well, in the case of one of our clients, a lot. Their "Safe Sex After Surgery" article was one of the first blog posts for their website, but not exactly a, erm, high performer. Between 2018 and 2023 the article had 32 total visitors. So, how did we get it to 15 thousand visitors and counting?

SEO - Pure and Simple

If I’m really being honest, I think there was skepticism at first. And maybe that is why this specific article was chosen as the first to undergo optimization.

I’ve been doing SEO my entire career and while I knew all the steps, this was the first time I was put to the test. It felt like the team turned to us and said, “try making Safe Sex After Surgery a best seller, SEO dorks.” I’ll admit - even I was skeptical. I know “sex sells” and all that, but in this context? Surgery? Hospital? Sex? No thank you.

But that was the assignment. I put on my glasses and got to work.

Making SEO Work for You

So let’s break down how we turned a low-driver into a top performer.

1. Choose Your Keywords Carefully

I realized as I read the article, the topic specifically referred to “sex after hip replacement surgery.”

It’s a small detail but the point of the article wasn’t “safe sex” or even “safe sex after surgery.” No - “hip replacement” is a very obvious distinction here. All of those words are needed to match the intent of the reader. Most folks aren’t interested in safe sex after an appendectomy. A new pelvic joint, though? We can’t leave that out.

First step in optimization is that keyword research. What are you writing about? Be specific and be on topic.

2. Give the People What They Want

Once you understand a user’s intent - what are they hoping to find - give it to them. With safe sex after hip replacement surgery, thinking through and do your own searches to better understand what someone in that, er, position might want to know. The best way to really get here it to brainstorm some questions and answer them. There is a ton of data already available on those commonly asked questions and search queries. Find out exactly what people want to know.

Best place to start - look for keywords and questions with high volume and low competition or difficulty.

3. Format for Fork's Sake

How you format matters - this is not just how the content looks but is how it’s coded. For your title, you need to use an Heading 1 or H1 tag. Only once. That is the first heading on the page and the only H1 you should use. For the rest of the article, break up the text with H2s and even H3s. Include your keywords in those headings - just enough to be natural and serve as a flag for search engines to quickly understand. Outlines are your friend, here. Make sure you have a solid, clean outline for your content with subheadings. Write supporting content for each subheading - keeping your on topic. Again, this makes it easier for bots to scan your content but it makes your article easier to read and skim for human readers, too.

We added a few internal links (links to other pages on our website) and a few outside links (other domains). I like to aim for two of each. Remember to add your image alt text (again, include that keyword) and please, name your image with that keyword topic included as well.

4. Ask the Tough Question AND Answer Them

Last, we added FAQs at the bottom. We’ve seen these get picked up by search engines directly and it’s also been a way for us to track what those most common questions are for readers. Our FAQs are formatted as accordions, meaning we can add “internal link text” tags to see what’s been clicks - almost like a hyperlink’s anchor text. We also specifically mark up our FAQs like this in our code with schema markup - this signals to search engines “hey - this is an FAQ!” That’s handy because search engines can quickly understand and may pull it into search result page as “People Also Ask” content. FAQs are also fantastic for training large language models (LLMs) used in AI.

The information was there - we just needed to reorganize, format and use those specific words. A year later - without any promotion, distribution or backlinking, the organic traffic went from zero visitors per month to 3k per month on average.

Boost Your Business Online with SEO

And that’s really the heart of SEO. What do people want to know + give them the answer in a clean, clear way. We barely touched the content of this article.

Is it really that easy? Well, sometimes. There are all kinds of factors and ways to optimize, but that's really the fun part. And if you’re looking for some help to get going, SEO Dorks are here for you. We nerd out on this stuff and stand by the results.