One crucial variable that highly impacts a pharmaceutical company’s organic growth is marketing. The traditional approach of face-to-face interaction is increasingly expensive, time-consuming, and even fairly outmoded.
Digital marketing, however, provides better exposure for pharmaceutical companies. It has the unique ability to reduce the marketing cost and time while concurrently increasing one’s target audience reach.
Employing search engine optimization (SEO) can help to harness Pharma’s digital marketing successfully. It’s almost impossible to match the impact and value of SEO tactics for organic growth.
The pharmaceutical industry is valued at about USD$1.27 trillion. So it matters which pharmaceutical company’s website comes up first when a user performs a pharma-related search or searches for a specific medicine. SEO optimization immensely increases your chance of emerging at the top.
Pharma SEO: What’s Different
The SEO process is often not straightforward. For instance, gene synthesis companies would need to know which keywords are most valuable to their content and SEO strategy.
The challenge is optimizing websites and other content channels while simultaneously producing off-site content to gain authority through links. These should help engage with potential visitors and customers on platforms like social media and, of course, through search engines.
The pharmaceutical industry differs from other industries because most user acquisition strategies revolve around unbranded properties intended to reach, educate, and interest patients without necessarily advertising the parent brand.
Pharma SEO: Implementation
1. Target Patients/Prospect And HCP
A sound Pharma SEO strategy always begins with a deep understanding of the patients/prospects and Health Care Providers (HCP’s) course. It is simply incorrect to write blog posts and web articles in an attempt to create a buzz and attract visitors without considering your target audiences and prospects as well as the fundamental idea of health care professionals.
The pharmaceutical company in question will need to define its target audience thoroughly. You need to clearly state the age range, location, employment industry, and especially frustrations or ailments.
HCPs’ preferences, behavior, and priorities may often change. However, it’s essential to monitor them to avoid veering off-course closely.
2. Compelling Topics And Content
It is easier to write relevant content once the target prospects and HCP plan are established, as you can craft your content around that. But the work is far from over; pharmaceutical companies are no longer the sole gatekeepers or providers of the information surrounding health treatments or products.
There are a large number of health-related web posts that do not originate from pharmaceutical companies. Ultimately, you can only stand out if you’re ready to double or triple your efforts.
Your brand will become more trusted and prominent if you provide answers to common patient ailments in an inspiring, engaging way. Your content provides more value when it is relevant and timely to its audience. Also, remember to pair good content with good load speed and design across all web pages.
Healthcare is not a trivial matter; thus, there are policies to outline the dos and don’ts regarding health information to protect patients’ privacy. Be sure your content complies with such laws and regulations.
3. Keywords
When SEO is the goal, you simply can not overemphasize the importance of keywords.
However, keywords to be used in an article or blog should be consistent with the laid-out information. Relevance to the topic should be the objective.
It is a significant misstep to use unrelated or irrelevant keywords. It easily puts off most readers once they realize their reason for reading isn’t even a subject of discussion in the web post. Consequently, your site visitors or readers may reduce, which is quite costly, and the complete opposite of the intended goal. Just like automotive keyword knowledge is essential for automotive SEO services for an auto body shop, pharmacology knowledge is essential for pharma SEO services.
4. On-page SEO
This is a practice of improving a webpage’s rank on search engines to earn more relevant traffic. The focus is solely on factors you can control on your website. Each page of your pharmaceutical website is an SEO opportunity.
There are many on-page elements of your pharmaceutical website that you can optimize to bring in more site traffic. You can improve your webpage by optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, writing in-depth, value-driven content, streamlining site navigation, and speeding it up.
5. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO regards your website’s influence like link building, social media (networking and bookmarking), and local SEO (influencer outreach, guest authors, forums).
This type of SEO is particularly crucial for Pharma companies since you want to have as many links as possible to your site from other first-rate sites. By creating links to your website, you are essentially trying to win over your competitors and rank higher in the Google algorithm.
Conclusion
There are still many opportunities with SEO, especially when Google has already seen over 360 billion searches this year. And 15 % of all daily searches are new queries.
All SEO strategies aim to generate traffic, raise brand awareness, build trust, and improve organic rankings. SEO is at the heart of organic growth, as each channel directs traffic to pages on your site that need building from the onset to meet the high standards of an intelligent SEO strategy.
If you create information-rich, relevant content with your target patient or HCP in mind, you will achieve measurable results.
