Pelion's activities

In October, the number of unique users of the medme.pl health portal exceeded 600,000 per month. Thus, medme.pl is probably the fastest-growing website on health in Poland. To compare, in September 2016, the website received merely 161,000 visits, whereas in September 2017, the number was already 479,000, indicating a threefold increase during the 12 months. And the portal is still growing. Each month, traffic on medme.pl increases by 20%. Every day, more than 25,000 users visit the portal to read tips on health, nutrition and psychology. What is the driving force behind the success? First and foremost, an effective SEO strategy and an editorial mission focused primarily on educating the readers.

“It was not easy at first. I became the managing editor of medme.pl more than a year ago. I remember that when I started working on the website in June, together with the team we long deliberated on the strategy to follow. The portal had already existed for several years and had much content, but did not perform too well. We had to find a way to change that, and to do it quickly. We decided to focus on SEO. We optimised the old content and formulated a strategy which we have been following for a year and a half now,” says Joanna Barczykowska-Tchorzewska, editor-in-chief of medme&cafesenior. “On the other hand, we made sure that readers of medme.pl can find the most complete and reliable information on any health-related subject here.”

Soon it turned out that the SEO strategy was a right one for medme.pl. Within three months, traffic on the website increased by a quarter and, most importantly, continued on the upward trend. However, it was new articles posted on medme.pl that were a real boost to the website performance. Each month, several dozen new articles on health, beauty, nutrition, psychology and sex are published on medme.pl. Many of them become real hits, getting into the Top 10 of Google search results.

“We asked professional journalists who have been writing about health issues for renowned magazines for many years to write advice articles for our website. We have built a steadily growing team of authors, who have been working with us for a year and a half now. Facing strong competition from the major health-related web portals in Poland, we decided to focus on more specific issues, such as examination and treatment of pharyngitis in children and pregnant women, rather than just treatment of influenza or common cold. For our authors, we have compiled Ten SEO Rules to be followed in all articles. For each article, we first prepare a content graph with key words, which must then be included in the article to improve its positioning. All these elements have contributed to our success,” explains Joanna Barczykowska-Tchorzewska.

Along with the increasing traffic, medme.pl started changing inside and outside.

“In July this year we completed an extensive project under the working title ‘Cinderella’. The title is not accidental, as the whole layout and structure of medme.pl were changed profoundly over the last half a year. Its new UX and UI were designed by MOSQI.TO. We did not only change the graphics, but, most importantly, we added new facilities for the users and focused on keeping readers within the portal. Introduction of related sections, topics and tags translated into readers staying longer on the website. Intuitive navigation within the site was equally important to us,” adds Tomek Soluch, Head of UX at MOSQI.TO.

The ‘Cinderella’ project triggered a 40% increase in the number of page views per user. As a result, in October we beat another record: one million page views in a month.

Apart from the new design, we introduced a new, expanded structure. On the new medme.pl, featuring 6,000 articles, you can easily find sections devoted to throat, liver and intestine diseases, as well as descriptions of more than 600 other conditions and a database of over 5,000 drugs. The editorial team of medme.pl created three major thematic sites – on brain health, medical diets and online childbirth classes.

“We are most pleased to see that we have achieved the success through organic work. More than 80% of our unique users find medme.pl via Google search, that is for free. Now we are working on how to convince more of these users to keep returning to medme.pl,” Joanna Barczykowska-Tchorzewska says.