"She Could Not Find Him.
Then She Could."
How Virtue 340B Went From 17 Page-One Keywords to 673

At a glance

• Client: Virtue 340B, LLC. An independent 340B compliance audit and advisory firm, founded in November 2022 by Edward "Eddie" Vargas, serving hospitals, health systems and community health centers nationwide.
• What we did: SEO on his most important pages starting in March 2024. Monthly blog posts from interviews with Eddie. Buyer and messaging work in 2025. A full website rebuild on WordPress, planned page by page, launched in October 2025. Ongoing SEO and GEO (generative engine optimization) every month since.
• What changed in 12 months (summer 2025 to summer 2026): page-one keywords went from 17 to 673. Top-3 keywords went from 6 to 191. Pages found in Google went from 43 to 319. Search impressions grew from 20,105 to 110,928.
• AI search: Virtue shows up in 7 of the 10 buyer questions we tested.

It was a Friday. May 31, 2024.

Eddie Vargas, who owns Virtue 340B, sent me an email. We had only been working together for a few months.

"We just landed a new deal from a prospect who explicitly stated she found Virtue 340B via Google. She mentioned that when she searched for 340B audit companies earlier this year, she didn't come across Virtue 340B and received proposals from other companies instead. However, when she searched again this week, she found us on the first pages, was impressed by our site, and decided to give me a call."

Read that again.

Earlier that year, she searched. Virtue was not there. Other firms were. They sent her proposals.

A few months later, she searched again. This time Virtue was on the first page. She liked what she read. She called Eddie. He won the deal.

Same buyer. Same search. Different answer.

I was thrilled for him. And then I thought about the part nobody can measure.

How many other hospitals searched before May and never found him?

Who Virtue 340B Is

Virtue 340B audits hospitals and health centers on their 340B drug pricing compliance. Independent audits, continuous monitoring, education and program support.

The word that matters is independent. Virtue does not sell software. It does not run a pharmacy. It has nothing to sell a client except an honest answer about where their program stands.

Eddie started the company on his own at the end of 2022. It is a small firm in a very big, very technical industry, up against national consulting firms and distributors with huge marketing budgets.

He described his industry better than I could:

"We operate a very niche industry, very technical, health care compliance, pharmacy compliance. I mean, it doesn't get much drier than that."

Dry does not mean nobody is searching. It means the people searching know exactly what they need, and they are not going to settle for a vague answer.

The Auditor Who Built His Own Website

Here is the part I love about this story.

Eddie is the professional his clients call. A hospital can buy 340B software and run reports all day long. That does not make anyone on their team an auditor. When the stakes are real, they call someone like Eddie.

And when Eddie started his company, he did what almost every founder does. He built his own website on Wix.

"Everything that I had developed up to that point was of my own creation. Website, trying to stay attuned and learn what search engine optimization was, what meta-tagging your pages was. All that was foreign and brand new. And although I thought I was employing a strategy, it was not a strategy in itself."

That was the right call at the start. You do not hire a web team before you have clients.

But I say this all the time, on webinars and to anyone who will listen:

Just because you know how to use WordPress or Wix does not make you a web developer. It makes you a person who knows how to use software. Just because you can use Excel and QuickBooks does not make you a CPA.

The site worked. It just was not built the way Google needs to read it. Pages without a main heading. Pages with more than one main heading. Page titles so similar that Google could not tell them apart.

None of that shows up when you look at your own site.

All of it shows up to a search engine.

Here is what Google showed us in March 2024, the month we started.

• "340B consulting," his most important search, was at position 22. Page three.
• "340B audit services" was at position 14.6. Page two.
• "340B auditor" was at 16.9. "Top 340B consultants" was at 17.3.

Page two is where buyers do not go. That is exactly where the prospect in his email did not find him.

Eddie knew it, too. He is an auditor. He can spot a gap.

"I definitely had a significant [gap between] how we were visually presented online versus what the nature of our business was."

How Eddie Found Us

Eddie found me through a webinar.

He had been going to public webinars on SEO and AI for a while, trying to learn it himself. He saw one of mine early on, before he was ready to hire anyone. Then he saw a newer one of mine a couple of weeks before he reached out.

"By that point, I knew a little better what I should be looking for. And you really just nailed it across the board. It felt like a no-brainer to reach out."

Chapter One: Starting Where It Counted

Eddie did not go all in on day one. We started with the pages that mattered most to his buyers.

We optimized them around what his buyers actually mean when they search, not just the words they type. We found the keywords that mattered. And that summer, we started writing a blog post with him every month, built from interviews, so his knowledge ended up on the page in his own words.

Then came the May 31 email.

Chapter Two: The Business Outgrew the Website

Virtue kept growing. More clients, more services, more types of hospitals and health centers to serve.

Eddie was running an audit firm and managing his own website at the same time, adding pages as the business changed. Any owner who has done that knows what happens. The site gets messy. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because it was never planned for the company it was becoming.

By early 2025, he was ready to hand the whole thing to professionals. The same way his clients hand their 340B programs to him.

So we went back to the beginning.

Eddie told me something I think every business owner should hear.

He has hired vendors before. Good ones, on paper. But if they do not take the time to learn his business, the relationship ends fast.

"If they don't take the time to understand our business and what we're doing and who we're servicing, we don't make it to step two together."

That is why we start every client the same way. Before we write a single page, we learn the business. Who the buyer is. What they are worried about. What they ask before they pick up the phone. What makes this company different from the one next to it in the search results.

For Virtue, that meant figuring out who is actually on the other end of the search. A 340B program manager at a hospital. A pharmacy director at a health center. A compliance officer who just heard HRSA is coming and needs someone they can trust.

Eddie said the exercise changed more than the website.

"Those in and of themselves were excellent exercises that helped us craft better content for the website, but it had the downstream effect of remembering it in the way we hold sales calls or proposal delivery."

Chapter Three: Built by Professionals

In the summer of 2025, Eddie made the big decision. A whole new website.

We moved it off Wix and onto WordPress. We planned every page before we wrote any of them. Then we wrote them, one by one, with Eddie, through the end of September. The new site went live in mid-October 2025.

• One job per page. Each type of buyer gets their own path.
• Service pages for independent audits, continuous monitoring, education, contract pharmacy analysis, TPA configuration and more.
• A facts page that states plainly who Virtue is, what they do and what they do not do.
• A 340B glossary with more than 170 terms, written in plain language by the people who do the audits.
• Thought leadership. Blog posts that answer the questions 340B teams are actually asking, often within days of big news breaking in the industry.
• Schema markup, which people never see but search engines and AI read, so the facts on each page are labeled clearly.

Eddie put it simply:

"We took our website from being kind of a one-size-fits-all. We found the better approach is to segment it, so anyone who comes here can have their own unique journey."

Here is what that means in real life.

A 340B manager at a rural hospital lands on a page written for rural hospitals. A pharmacy director at a large health system lands on a page written for health systems and large hospitals. A community health center lands on a page written for health centers and grantees.

Each one reads it and thinks, this firm understands us. Then each one sees a clear next step to book a call.

What Happened Next

Here is Virtue in Google.

Source: Google Search Console.

Nearly seven and a half times more impressions in one year.

And summer to summer:

Source: Google Search Console, June 1 to August 31 each year.

Read that page-one row again. Seventeen to 673.

So far in September 2026, Virtue's average position is 9.6. That is the first time it has ever been on page one on average.

Normally, when a site starts showing up for many more searches, the average position gets worse, because the new searches come in low. Virtue's visibility went up more than five times and the average position still improved by 17 spots.

The glossary did a lot of the heavy lifting. More than half of all of Virtue's search impressions now come from glossary terms. When a 340B team Googles a term they do not understand, Virtue is often the one explaining it.

And in September 2026, during a check-in with me, Eddie told me what that looks like from his chair.

"There's been a couple of times that I've Googled something program related, whatever it might be, and a Virtue link popped up as one of the results, and it made me laugh."

Then he said the part I keep thinking about.

"Just kind of one of those surreal moments of knowing where we started and where things are currently."

Two years earlier, a buyer could not find him. Now he runs into himself.

What the Inbox Looks Like Now

Numbers in a report are one thing. Eddie told me what it looks like from his side.

A few weeks after the new site went live, during a busy season in his industry:

"More leads probably in a 40-day span than we had in the previous six months altogether."

I asked him how he knew those leads came from search. He asks every single one, on the contact form and again on the call.

"We're at a point now where our leads, 80% they say they're finding us through search, whether it be Google or AI-supported search."

And when those prospects get on the phone, they already know why they are there.

"Usually everyone will comment when we have a prospect call that did find us through search, will make a comment that we were going through your website and seemed like you were a great fit."

That is the part people miss about SEO. Getting found is half of it. The other half is that when someone lands on your site, it sounds like you, it explains what you actually do, and there is no bait and switch when they call.

Eddie said it this way:

"It's not a bait and switch feeling, but rather, oh yeah, it's exactly what I anticipated. Definitely increases the likelihood of entering an agreement."

Becoming the Name People Call

Something else changed that is harder to put in a table.

When big news breaks in the 340B world now, Eddie's email lights up.

"My email starts popping off because folks are thinking of us first."

He said the visibility changed how he thinks about content. Early on, why spend a day writing an article that four people will read? Now he knows people will see it, so he and his team want to write.

I asked him if he would say it out loud. He did.

"I am a thought leader in my industry."

Even Virtue's largest client came in through a partner who found them online. Eddie said that partnership was based on how Virtue looked on the web before they had ever worked together.

The AI Moment

In September, I ran live AI searches on the questions Virtue's buyers ask.

Virtue showed up in 7 out of 10.

• For "independent 340B auditor for a hospital covered entity," Virtue's home page was number one.
• For "best independent 340B audit firms in 2026," Virtue showed up three times in the top seven answers.
• When we asked AI whether Virtue 340B is a reputable audit firm, every source it used was Virtue's own website.

That last one matters. When someone asks AI about your company, you want AI reading what you wrote, not what someone else wrote about you.

None of this was luck. Eddie saw it coming, because we told him.

"Everything you hear in the news today, I heard from Jennifer and her team three, four, or five months ago. Before I could even make sense of it."

He said that in January 2026. Nine months later, AI is naming his firm.

What We Are Still Working On

I always tell clients the truth about what is not done yet.

The glossary is pulling in a huge amount of traffic, but most of those people are learning a term, not hiring an auditor. The next job is turning those readers into booked calls. The independent audit service page still needs to rank as well as the glossary pages that point to it, so we are rewriting it to do one thing clearly. And there are three questions in our AI test where Virtue does not show up yet. On at least one, bigger national firms are still ahead.

That is the work for the next few months.

What This Means for Your Business

If you are a consultant, or you are in a niche that is technical and hard to explain, this is for you.

Eddie did exactly what a smart founder should do. He built it himself when that made sense. And when the business outgrew it, he hired professionals, the same way hospitals hire him.

You do not need a giant marketing budget to be found. You need a website that explains what you do better than anyone else can. In plain words. One page at a time. Written from what is actually in your head, not from what is already on the internet.

When I asked Eddie who would benefit from working with us, he said:

"Folks in similar service delivery, whether you're consultants or operating niche industry. Something that's less direct of how to position yourself and express your value proposition."

And when I asked him to describe our work together in one word, he picked this one:

"Energizing."

Numbers from Google Search Console, pulled September 26, 2026, plus a Search Console snapshot from March 2024. AI results from a live test in September 2026. Quotes are from Eddie Vargas's email of May 31, 2024 and recorded meetings in January, May and September 2026.