Online magazines and SEO: Bringing it all together for the Oncology Nursing Society

Elliance recently worked with the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) to brand and develop a new online magazine concept and design called ONS Voice.

The ONS digital magazine, partner to a monthly print edition, needed to accomplish several major objectives. As an inbound marketer, I was focused on:

1. Effectively organizing and classifying years of existing content (while establishing a foundation for new content)
2. Ensuring the site performs well in internal search, as well as in Google search

Addressing objective one:

To begin organizing content, I needed to first review existing articles/stories and place them into groups based on topics. Building these groups was no easy feat; not only was the volume of content I needed to classify massive (good work ONS!), but also cancer is a HUGE topic.

I needed to create a reasonably-sized list of groups, which would ultimately function as content topic “tags” within the content management system (in this case, Drupal 8). Building solid content relationships into a taxonomy was critical to…

Addressing objective two:

For related content to appear within the topic-based design we created in the ONS Voice site, each article, current and future, would need to be tagged.

I found that the task of tagging, which at first seemed simple, would present a few challenges. If there were too many tags in the taxonomy it could lead to a bad user experience because it was possible only one to two articles would appear under that tag. Conversely, if there were too few tags there would not be enough content filtration and a site visitor could be inundated with years’ worth of articles. The taxonomy that I created for ONS (based on keyword research and ranking potential) ended up at 142 unique tags to cover the entirety of the topic of cancer — from access to cancer care to U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

By developing a solid internal taxonomy, the ONS Voice digital magazine will be better prepared for performing well in Google search. Not only did we create 142 topic pages (think 142 title tags, meta descriptions, h1s, alt tags, etc.) based on critical cancer subjects, we uncovered areas of ONS thought leadership. Focusing on these areas of expertise and bringing them to the forefront with optimized and categorized articles will provide higher visibility in search results, and added value to the oncology nursing community.