Name: Mike Haney
Role: Editorial Director
Joined: November 2020
Past Experience:
.png)
Name: Casey Means, MD
Role: Co-founder, Chief Medical Officer
Joined: September 2019
Past Experience:
The Levels blog is not intended to be a marketing tool that sells product. It's instead a complementary component of the overall mission to reverse the metabolic health crisis. In short, we can't do that if people don't know that (1) metabolic fitness is real, (2) it matters, and (3) you can do something about it. Those are the three core pillars of all the content we create.
If the ultimate goal of Levels is to impact 1 billion people, that scale only happens through content, and by maximizing visibility for all content we make, spreading the message of metabolic health as widely as possible. The goal of Levels content is to become the online destination for all things metabolic health.
Because our content mission is education-driven, reader trust is our most important currency. That's why we prioritize deep and honest reporting and avoid marketing. Readers should trust that our goal is to help them make a better choice that will improve their health, not to convert them to a paid member. However, that trust will feed a desire for people to join our community.
<aside> 🚀 Go deeper: Levels Content Strategy - January 2021
</aside>
#17 - Building a content machine - Part 1
#18 - Building a content machine - Part 2
The blog currently hosts just over 150 articles, and we publish at a rate of 2-3 per week. Article lengths range from 1,000-3,500 words, and all are deeply referenced to primary sources, such as research or expert quotes. Typical article turnaround is around 6 weeks and we typically have ~20 in progress at any given time.
The blog is managed like an editorial site. Idea generation comes from the content team, (Editorial Director, Mike Haney, and Chief Medical Officer, Casey Means), with input from the SEO agency, Levels members, and other team members. Over the past year, we've built a stable of around 20 professional health and science journalists who write our pieces, as well as a team of fact-checkers, editors and agency support in editorial production and SEO. We've also begun assembling a robust list of experts who can review articles.
The Levels blog has become the most trafficked part of our site, with nearly 1.5m page views since its launch in January 2020 (compared to 788k views for the home page). In August 2021 alone, the blog had 160k page views.
Organic search is the biggest traffic driver and accounts for around 40% of overall traffic. Newsletter and social are growing sources, combining for as much as 20% in recent months. Most of this growth has come while prioritizing the site's education mission over SEO, leaving additional traffic blue sky to be captured.
We currently have the #1 search position for around 170 words (up from under 100 a year ago), including 50+ featured snippets on key terms like "what is a normal blood sugar level for a nondiabetic?" and "cgm program."