Winners & losers of SEO visibility in the supplements industry

With increasing health awareness, an ageing population, and a growing interest in fitness and wellness, the health and wellness sector has witnessed a boom in recent years. This is especially evident in the UK’s dietary supplements industry, which is experiencing significant growth. In just the first few days of 2025, the sector generated an impressive US $0.84 billion in revenue.

As consumers are prioritising their well-being, the demand for health supplements continues to rise, creating a highly competitive market. Previously, we have analysed other industries, including cruises, and funeral plans. This time, we want to find out how supplement companies are doing when it comes to SEO visibility and uncovering the strategies behind their websites. Having a strong online presence has become critical for such a competitive industry.

Winners

Healthspan

Our first winner is Healthspan as they have seen a significant growth in visibility recently.

We can see they had a strong SEO visibility until mid-2021 and had seen a big dip after that. However, a gradual recovery is evident from late 2022, leading to a consistent rise in visibility throughout 2023 and into early 2025. Recently they have seen their biggest visibility increase to date.

Why is Healthspan a winner?

Healthspan’s online presence has exploded in the past year. What’s their secret? We dove deep into their website to uncover the SEO strategies that may be fuelling their incredible growth.

Their first boom in visibility came after the August 2023 core update. This update, as with many of Google Core algorithm updates, has focused on relevant, high-quality content that is helpful to users. We decided to analyse one of their blog pages, to get an idea of best SEO practices that could be benefiting them:

By having a quick look at one of their blog pages, we can see that the page clearly demonstrates some SEO best practices:

• Descriptive Title: The title includes relevant keywords that fit users’ intents.
• Author bios and authoritative content: The blog includes an author bio and authoritative content written by a professional in health and fitness. This is essential for SEO as it aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
• Structured Headings: The use of clear headings and subheadings organises the content effectively, helping both readers and search engines in understanding the main topics covered.

To further investigate the cause of their success, we have also had a look at their categories and product pages.

Some of the observations we noticed when look at this category page are:

• Products: Each product is named clearly and descriptively. These titles include keywords that potential customers might search for.
• High-Quality Images: Clear and attractive product images are displayed. Images can improve user engagement and can rank in image search results when optimised with alt text (we have checked, and images also contain an optimised alt text)
• User Ratings and Reviews: Including ratings, which signals product quality and builds trust. It also helps search engines understand the product’s popularity and relevance.
• Call-to-Action Buttons: Such as “Add to Basket” buttons to encourage conversions, which is an important factor for SEO.

We have also tested the Page Speed using Google PageSpeed Insights, and the website passed the Core Web Vitals Assessment and scored 69/100 for its mobile performance:

A score of 69/100 for mobile performance is not ideal, but it’s not terrible either, especially considering the Core Web Vitals assessment was passed, which is a significant achievement for SEO and user experience. Passing this assessment shows the site offers a good user experience in terms of loading, interactivity, and visual stability, which is a major ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Vitabiotics

The second winner in our list is Vitabiotics. Below we can see their visibility since 2020, and improvements that they have made lately:

Vitabiotics had a clear and consistent growth over time, particularly from mid-2023 onwards. This indicates that the website is gaining more visibility in search engine rankings and has benefited from the most recent Google’s algorithm updates.

Why is Vitabiotics a winner?

As we could see, Vitabiotics had a good couple of years when it comes to SEO visibility, meaning they have been following a consistent and relevant strategy that helped them grow.

First, let’s have a quick look at their blog pages:

Just like Healthspan, their blog follows SEO best practices, including clear author bios, strong E-E-A-T signals, and a well-structured layout that makes the content easy to read and navigate.

We also had a look at their link graph to check the websites that are linking to Vitabiotics:

As we can see, they’ve got an extensive link graph, and that Vitabiotics has a strong backlink profile with some high authority websites linking to them, including the Daily Mail, and OM magazine.

We had a quick look at their product pages as well:

There are several SEO best practices that we can flag just by looking at their pages:

• High-quality images: They make use of high-quality imagery to display their products.
• Call-to-Action: Including options for a one-time purchase or subscription.
• Clear Structure: The product benefits are broken down clearly into bullet points, which improves readability and can help with featured snippets on Google.
• Reviews and Rating: The inclusion of a star rating and the number of reviews adds credibility.

In fact, we have tested the page (https://www.vitabiotics.com/products/wellman-multi-vitamin-gummies) using Google Rich Results tool to verify if they are using structured data on the page:

We can see that they are using different types of structured data, which helps their visibility on search engines by enabling rich snippets, such as star ratings, pricing, product availability, and reviews, to appear directly in search results.

Looking at their page speed now, we can also see that they have passed the Core Web Vitals assessment, but they have scored only 40/100 for their mobile speed performance:

Passing Core Web Vitals is a great achievement, as it ensures the website meets the minimum user experience standards. However, a 40/100 performance score indicates inefficiencies, particularly in areas like asset optimisation, third-party resource management, and server responsiveness.

Losers

Nutri Link

Our first loser is Nutri Link, they are a and below we see their visibility for the past 5 years.

Their visibility started off quite low in mid-2022, and they managed to grow a lot in 2023 until mid-2024. Around mid-2024, their visibility started to drop following a series of Google’s algorithm updates. Especially after the August 2024 core update.

Why are they a loser?
We investigated their website to identify potential vulnerabilities to recent Google algorithm updates and understand how those updates might have impacted their performance.

Now we are going to have look at their blog pages, and see how their content is put together:

The first thing we noticed is that the URL structure for this blog is a bit confusing and too long (https://news.nutrilink.co.uk/2024/12/13/exploring-the-connection-between-visceral-fat-and-alzheimers-disease-a-comprehensive-review/) the URL should not should not include unnecessary details like the full date or overly long titles, as this can impact readability and SEO performance. A more concise and optimised URL would focus on primary keywords, making it easier for users and search engines to understand.

They also lack internal linking on the page, while they reference studies where they got the content from, there are no links to related articles, and only one link to related products. A lack of strong internal and external linking may limit the page’s SEO potential.

There is also no mention of author information, including who wrote the article, or any information about authors which is important for E-E-A-T, and to build trust.

When testing the website for PageSpeed, we can see that they show consistent results, as they have passed the Core Web Vitals assessment, however, they scored 56/100, which means they still have room for improvement when it comes to site speed.

London supplements

Also featuring our losers is London supplements. Let’s have a look at their visibility in the past 5 years.

The visibility index shows significant growth from 2021 through mid-2023, with a strong upward trend that peaked in late 2023. This could indicate that the website implemented successful SEO strategies during this period, likely involving targeted content creation and technical improvements.

However, we have seen a decline after the peak, suggesting that the site may have suffered from the latest algorithm updates. While the site remains at a higher visibility level than it was before 2022, the recent decline signals the need for renewed focus on addressing potential technical issues, content updates, or adapting to algorithm changes to recover its visibility.

What made London Supplements a loser?

As we have mentioned, visibility went down lately, especially after the March 2024 core update (6). This update focused on improving quality by prioritising content that demonstrates expertise, originality, and relevance while penalising low-value, unoriginal, or manipulative content strategies.

The first thing we noticed is how slow the site loads, and how long the first images take to appear.

That’s why the first thing we did was test the website using Google PageSpeed Insights.

The website has a slow performance as we can see score, and this reflects on the loading times of the website. The website’s performance score of 40 indicates that it is underperforming in terms of speed and responsiveness, especially on mobile devices.

Next, we checked the website’s content to see if we could find any issues with it.

We can see that the content is very superficial, while the blog provides general advice, it lacks depth in each section. The blog could include step-by-step guides, specific workout plans, or links to relevant tools to help readers implement these tips.

It also lacks visual elements, such as imagery or engaging content. Moreover, it does not include any author information apart from their name.

We have also crawled the website and we found some technical issues that needed to be addressed, these include:

• Images missing alt text: The website contains a large number of images with no alt text.
• Images over 100kb: We have also found many images over 100kb on the website.
• Meta Description: We have found several pages that are over the recommended limit of 155 characters.
• Redirects: We have found a large number of 301 redirects that should be updated to the correct destination. We have also found 404 redirects. Redirecting them to the most relevant, existing pages could help retain any potential traffic.

There are also many other issues that we have found and that could be addressed fixing these, along with addressing mobile usability, improving the internal linking structure, and resolving crawl errors, will help the website’s crawlability, indexing, and overall organic search performance.

Conclusion

The supplements industry is highly competitive, and maintaining strong SEO visibility is crucial for success. Winners like Healthspan and Vitabiotics showcase effective strategies, including high-quality content that complies with E-E-A-T guidelines, well-structured blogs, and strong backlink profiles. These efforts have allowed them to grow their visibility steadily, even benefiting from recent algorithm updates.

On the other hand, losers like Nutri Link and London Supplements have faced declines due to inconsistent SEO strategies, superficial content, and technical issues, such as slow site performance. To regain visibility, these companies need to address their technical SEO flaws, improve content depth and originality, and align their strategies with Google’s focus on quality and relevance.