CHOOSE PROJECT
Brief
Sermo had something most healthcare publishers couldn't easily replicate: thousands of real conversations between verified physicians.
The opportunity was to turn those discussions into useful, search-led editorial content without losing what made the source material valuable — genuine physician experience and opinion.
Way Marketing was brought in to develop SEO-optimised articles using Sermo forum discussions, polls and member comments alongside independent research. The work needed to balance search performance with editorial quality, medical credibility and Sermo's distinctive community-led voice.
Over the course of the project, we produced more than 50 articles spanning clinical developments, healthcare policy, physician careers, technology, patient communication and wider challenges facing the profession.
Top challenges we overcame
Forum threads contained rich insight, but rarely arrived as ready-made narratives. We identified the strongest themes, disagreements and recurring concerns to give each article a clear editorial angle.
CHALLENGE ONE
Finding the story inside the forum
CHALLENGE TWO
Balancing SEO with genuine physician insight
Articles needed to answer search intent without turning Sermo's member conversations into generic SEO copy. Search structure supported the story rather than dictating it.
Member opinions could not simply be presented as established fact. Claims were checked against credible external evidence and appropriately qualified where viewpoints differed.
CHALLENGE THREE
Handling medical and healthcare claims responsibly
Turned community discussions into editorial narratives
Rather than simply summarising forum conversations, we analysed physician comments and poll results to understand what the community was actually saying.
We looked for tension between viewpoints, patterns within responses and questions that deserved deeper exploration. That gave each article a central narrative thread — using Sermo's proprietary community insight as the foundation rather than an occasional supporting quote.
Built every article around search intent
We worked from SEO briefs, keyword research and the likely questions behind each search.
Article structures were designed to answer those questions clearly while creating space for Sermo's physician perspectives to differentiate the content from conventional healthcare articles.
Headings, supporting terminology and on-page copy were optimised naturally, avoiding keyword-heavy writing that would undermine the editorial quality.
Researched and validated the wider story
Forum discussion provided the starting point, but not always the complete answer.
We researched medical literature, healthcare organisations, government sources, industry research and other credible publications to check factual claims, provide additional evidence and place physician opinions in their wider clinical or policy context.
Sources were referenced throughout so readers could distinguish evidence from opinion and explore the underlying research themselves.
Made physician voices central
Sermo's biggest content advantage was access to doctors themselves.
We carefully selected member quotes that revealed something useful: clinical experience, uncertainty, disagreement, practical advice or an alternative perspective. Rather than allowing quotes to stand alone, we connected them to poll findings and external research to explain why each viewpoint mattered.
This helped the articles feel genuinely physician-led rather than simply written for physicians.
Created content across the full physician experience
The programme covered subjects including physician burnout, AI in healthcare, vaccine hesitancy, healthcare misinformation, reflective practice, health inequalities, climate change, oncology salaries, new treatments and patient use of AI symptom checkers.
That breadth helped Sermo build organic visibility around both high-level healthcare topics and the practical professional questions physicians search for.
Result
The programme developed into a library of more than 50 SEO-led editorial articles, combining search strategy with proprietary physician insight.
Analysis of the US search performance found:
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428 keywords ranking in the US
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970 US organic visits per month from the articles alone
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182 keywords ranking within the top 20
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Around 42% of all ranking keywords reaching the top 20
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21 commercial-intent keywords and 161 informational-intent keywords within those top-20 positions
The results showed the value of treating Sermo's community as more than a source of occasional quotes.
By combining physician conversations with rigorous research and SEO strategy, we turned an existing pool of first-hand expertise into an organic content asset that could attract new audiences while still sounding unmistakably like Sermo.
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