Adriane Campos has dedicated her life’s work to researching sugar alternatives, all with the goal of empowering people to make informed decisions and ultimately lead healthier lives. After years of intensive knowledge gathering, she was finally ready to share her findings with the world. Only one question remained: How would the world find her website?

The business

A guide to the plethora of sweeteners sold across the United States, WhatSugar.com is a goldmine of information for anyone looking to consume less sugar in their diet. Pioneered by Adriane Campos, who describes herself as a chemical engineer, food technologist, mom and wife, the blog’s unique value is that it translates “science-speak" into digestible tips that can help home cooks make sense of the sweetener aisle. 

Adriane added to her chemical engineering expertise by earning a graduate degree in food technology in Curitiba, Brazil, before moving to Los Angeles to conduct research at Caltech under the mentoring of a Nobel Prize winner. However, it was when she took a hiatus to raise her family that the idea for WhatSugar.com was born.

“I was often asked what I did in my previous life before becoming a mom to two kids,” she recalls. “Without fail, whenever I would tell people that I did years of research on sweeteners, I always got the very same question: “What’s the best sweetener?” And so, I launched the WhatSugar website to finally answer it.”

To get those answers, Adriane went down what she calls “the sweetener rabbit hole”: “I gathered information from different sweetener websites. I deconstructed the front and back of sweetener packages—ingredients, nutrition facts, label claims. And I personally contacted countless manufacturers and sellers to find all the details about their products,” she lists. 

This meticulous research formed the basis for her blog-turned-business. She now offers three main digital products: a free resource which is the Sugar Alternative Shopping Guide, the entry-point product Sugar Swap Starter Kit, and her core offering which is Sugar Alternative School. She has also recently pivoted into selling physical sweeteners directly to customers.

The SEO challenge

While Adriane was clearly an authority on sweeteners, she was new to the world of SEO. What would the point of all her years of research be if her findings never reached the very people who were searching for it? There was no two ways about it: SEO had to become a key focus for her business. 

The solution 

Wix proved to be the perfect platform for an expert blogger like Adriane. With built-in tools to help her take care of SEO, the food technologist and author is free to focus on what she does best: creating quality content that resonates with her target audience. This has played an essential role in allowing her to build up authority for search engines, and in turn, this helps her site reel in impressive amounts of organic traffic. 

Adriane also followed the Wix SEO Setup Checklist, customizing her site’s meta tags, URL structure, canonical tags, structured data markup, and more.

“I never hired anyone to do the SEO part of my website, I just followed Wix guidelines: I named images with ranking keywords, filled out all the SEO Basics and entered the keywords in the Advanced SEO section,” she describes. 

Wix’s SEO tools work out-of-the-box, giving Adriane the ability to spend less time on SEO and more time on content optimization. “With the feedback from my WhatSugar readers, I’m constantly discovering things I don’t know,” she enthuses. “And that has been a huge help for me in refining my content and making my products crystal clear for newbies. I’ve now launched my core offer twice and I’m currently working on making it evergreen.” 

The results

Adriane officially launched WhatSugar.com in 2019. Within weeks, impressions and site visits were soaring. With time, she was ranking for thousands of keywords and had dozens of featured snippets. 

As of Q1 2023, WhatSugar.com:

• Experienced a 400% increase in users 

• Gained 5.49M impressions in the previous 90 days

• Ranked for 7.8K keywords

• Earned 64 featured snippets

One particular win for Adriane is ranking for the keyword “erythritol” (a natural sugar substitute), which Semrush classifies as a difficult keyword to rank for. WhatSugar drives around 7K visitors every month from this one keyword. 

“I didn’t know much about SEO but Wix turned out to be exactly the launchpad I needed to help get my content seen.”

Want to spend less time on SEO and more time crafting quality content? Check out Wix’s intuitive SEO tools and explore our SEO Learning Hub for more insights from industry experts.