How to craft a healthcare content strategy that delivers results in a search and AI-driven world

In our previous article, How to measure LLM visibility, we explored why tracking your brand’s presence in AI responses is essential in today’s healthcare landscape. We showed that a modern organic strategy needs to cover both traditional search and AI visibility to stay competitive, and that understanding current performance and opportunities is a key input for planning.

Now, we’re asking: how do you define a content strategy that drives real results for both your brand and your audience, in a world where humans and AI are equally important consumers of content?

A successful content strategy doesn’t start with channels, formats, or AI models. It starts with a clear understanding of brand and audience goals, and then uses data strategically to turn those goals into content that delivers results and earns visibility in search and LLMs.

Business goals still drive content strategy in an AI world

Even as large language models (LLMs) and AI-driven discovery change how people find and interact with content, the core principles of content strategy remain the same.

Your business objectives should stay front and center, whether you aim to:

• Educate healthcare providers with evidence-based clinical insights
• Support clinician decision-making with key messages and brand USPs
• Attract high-intent patient or caregiver queries that lead to meaningful engagement
• Strengthen authority and trust across clinician and patient communities

Clarity on these goals ensures that every piece of content has purpose and measurable impact.

Equally as important is understanding your audience and visibility goals:

• Audience goals – such as clinicians seeking up-to-date evidence and patients wanting trustworthy guidance
• Visibility goals – ensuring your content is discoverable in both traditional search and AI-driven answer layers via LLMs

When you know where to meet your audience and how to support them, you can focus your efforts on driving visibility across the user journey.

What data sources should inform your understanding of audience goals?

Search and query behaviour data for patients and HCPs

There are several very important functions of understanding search behavior:

1. It allows you to understand areas of interest. You can categorize keyword research into audience-segmented, semantically-relevant portfolios of keywords. These clusters represent areas of demand.
2. You can look at the longtail to identify actual questions that people ask in search. This is a good proxy for the kinds of questions that may be asked in LLMs.
3. Keyword research helps build an understanding of the language that your audiences use to describe and discuss specific areas of a brand or treatment.

Analyzing search query data – from search consoles, keyword planners, or AI prompt trends – helps you model content around how real users express their needs, enabling clear, direct answers that support both human and AI visibility.

Social listening data across HCP and patient audiences

Social listening turns online conversations into actionable insights, revealing audience needs, questions, and concerns. It adds emotional context to search behaviour analysis, deepening your understanding of what drives demand.

For example, if search data shows high interest at the diagnosis stage of a disease, social listening can help you understand the patient experience at that point in the journey. This allows you to plan content that not only supports diagnosis, but does so in a way that’s sensitive to how patients are feeling.

Search and social listening data also helps you align your content with the opportunity in search and LLMs. By mirroring the language of real users, your content will gain visibility and engagement.

Competitive and benchmark data

Understanding how your content performs compared with competitors provides valuable insights to shape your strategy. By identifying where competitors succeed, you can analyse the factors behind their success – whether deep, well-structured content or stronger domain authority – and apply those lessons to your own approach. The process outlined in How to measure LLM visibility gives you the tools to gather this data.

This isn’t an exhaustive list; first- or third-party data can also reveal market trends and audience needs that should inform your planning.

Now you have your insight, what next?

How do you build a strategic vision, content strands, and objectives?

First, determine the strategic vision for your content, which serves as your north star for meeting business goals by addressing audience needs. Next, define your content strands (typically between 2-4 strands). Finally, ensure each strand has a clear objective so you can measure whether it has achieved its purpose.

An example might be:

• Strategic vision: Empower patients with clear, trustworthy content that supports their journey, builds brand confidence, and is discoverable in search and LLMs.
• Content strand 1: Voices of experience: First-hand patient stories of diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes that build trust and humanize the brand.
• Content objective: Build trust and credibility by sharing authentic patient journeys that emotionally engage audiences and support decision-making while boosting organic visibility.

How can you turn your content strategy into a plan that delivers results?

The next step is to create a detailed plan for each piece of content. Here, we focus on web content, but the same strategy and insights should guide all channels, from emails and social posts to ad creative.

Each piece of website content should have a clear brief outlining its purpose, a synopsis of the finished piece, the format, and the keywords and questions it should address. This is where search and LLM opportunity analysis is mapped to ensure visibility is built where it matters most.

In our next article, we’ll explore key factors for structuring and optimizing your content to maximize search and LLM visibility.

Making your content work harder

By connecting your content to both business and audience goals, and using search, social listening, and competitor insights to guide decisions, you can create content that truly delivers value and gets noticed. A clear strategic vision, with defined content strands and measurable objectives, helps ensure every piece has a purpose. When insight shapes planning and execution, healthcare content can engage audiences, drive results, and maintain visibility across search engines and LLMs.