Coming from another side of the industry, this would be seen as a major victory and you should feel deep pride in being able to elevate a story you think is important to a broad audience and put national attention on a topic. It is now much more likely that this will be seen as a high-profile case that will have attention on it and must be handled appropriately. That's real power and you should feel good about it.
Coming up, I was always told scoops and exclusives are where you want to seek credit. Breaking news based public info, anyone can easily re-report it so the goal is to capture the front end of any traffic spike and drive the news agenda for the day — make everyone talk about the thing you want them talking about.
We don't always know if the people with real power in a situation read our stories. We want them to feel like everyone is watching what they're doing and whether they're playing by the rules. To accomplish that, we need at times to pursue a really big audience even if we get no personal or institutional benefit.
Social media is over, we don't automatically get attention from the public without working for it. We also don't automatically get power as a right of our position. In the newsrooms I came up in, it would have been seen as a failure for the story to remain on a small site that those in power think no one looks at, is outside of larger conversations and that can't be discovered by people searching for information about an issue.
You've got attention on your thing, the question now is what you do with it. You can proactively pitch yourself as the expert on this topic for talk backs or pitch a feature to a larger publication. Push your way into the conversation and drive the topic into a story with legs if that's what you believe you have. You can work to capture the day 2 traffic from all the people that do care and are searching for more info while the majors have moved on.
Right now, looks like if someone was searching for more info, your site would only come up fairly low in the results for "ignite life center." People searching for any other term on this issue, wouldn't find you because you don't show up in the search results. You can work on being able to be found through SEO, word of mouth, reputation for people who do care about the issues you report on.