Willful
Sustaining traffic and conversion growth through major algorithm updates.
729%
22k
11%
As the Director of SEO and Organic Channels at Willful, my goal is to ensure Canadians have access to affordable estate planning options. Making sure our website supports Canadians as they learn about estate planning is my top priority.
We work with Flywheel because they truly feel like an extension of our team. Their goals align with ours, and they’re dedicated to helping us achieve our mission.
Together, we developed an organic search strategy that empowers Canadians to create their estate plans by providing educational content at the right moment. Since I joined the team a year ago, we’ve increased organic traffic by 84% and helped thousands of Canadians create their legal wills with Willful.
Alyssa Hanson
Director SEO and Organic Channels, Willful
Context
Willful engaged Flywheel 3 years ago for SEO and content support. We helped them focus their target keywords, fix their tech debt, and expand their SEO-informed content library. Between September 2021 and March 2023, we helped Willful increase traffic to their content hub by 365% (8,800 visitors/month to 41,000 visitors/month).
However, in March 2023, Willful’s traffic growth began to stagnate. The reason was simple: our content hub had covered every major product-related topic. We seemed to have no net-new topics to write about without going outside our area of authority.
Our challenge was to find new ways to grow without just writing about new topics. (because they had already written everything they could in their core product topic).
Outcomes
Process
1. Taking a persona-focused approach
Before, Willful took a keyword-focused approach, writing general content for anyone looking for information about wills.
We collaborated with Willful to understand their audience, focusing on a few specific personas:
- Indigenous Canadians
- Those recently divorced
- Single parents
- Women aged 30-39
This allowed us to unearth insight into new, more specific queries and win keywords related to these personas.
Examples of persona-focused content*
wills and estate planning for indigenous canadians – ranking #2
divorce financial planning – ranking #1
2. Shifting from production to optimization
E-E-A-T optimization
Willful offers legal advice, which means the content has an even higher standard for E-E-A-T requirements. It needs to be demonstrably up-to-date, trustworthy, and credible.
Upon our recommendation, Willful added a fact-checked badge (Fig. 1) to guarantee review by a legal professional or estate planning expert and show Willful’s commitment to editorial currency and accuracy.
We also collaborated with Willful’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): lawyers and estate planning professionals. We used AI (ChatGPT) to assist with developing insights in content briefs to prioritize E-E-A-T from the inception of each article.
We added author bylines linking to an author info page to demonstrate credibility further.
Competitive content
SERP visibility optimization
Next, we focused on optimizing for featured snippets to maximize SERP visibility for existing content. We analyzed the SERP for each target keyword to see what type of content Google favoured in the featured snippet so we could update articles accordingly—for example, by adding a list or table.
We also analyzed People Also Ask questions to guide content optimizations and include the right questions as headers to improve SERP visibility.
Examples of successful optimizations*
- Executor Fees in Ontario (secondary term: “when are executor fees paid”)
- Pre-optimization ranking: 2nd page
- Post-optimization ranking: Featured snippet
- What is a Witness (secondary term: “who can witness a will in ontario”)
- Pre-optimization ranking: 9
- Post-optimization ranking: Featured snippet
3. Localizing content
Willful’s content focused on information for Canadians. Most articles covered Canada-wide rules and information. We realized that rankings varied by province, with Google favouring provincial government resources and province-focused content. Because most of these topics fell under provincial legislation, not federal, we identified a mismatch between Willful’s published content and what Google prioritized.
We expanded our content around Power of Attorney, probate, and cost of a will, creating province-specific blogs and interlinking them from the main existing page.
Examples of localized content*
- cost of a will ontario – ranking #1
- probate fees alberta – featured snippet
4. Customer journey-driven strategy
Willful’s strategy focused on those specifically looking for wills; however, will planning is a crucial step within the broader estate planning process. Willful works with lawyers to provide a comprehensive estate planning service. We saw an opportunity to have our content strategy reflect the larger customer journey that their will product sits within. For this reason, we expanded Willful’s content strategy and added a new estate planning topic cluster to capture these individuals.
Willful used to have 1-2 articles on estate planning but now ranks for 625 keywords containing “estate,” bringing in an entirely new high-intent audience.
Examples of “estate” keywords*
- estate planning – ranking #3
- wills and estate planning – ranking #5
- estate planning ontario – ranking #3
*Canadian SERP rankings pulled from Ahrefs
