In a recent global survey, doctors across all specialties’ were asked when time is essence for them what channels they use to find information. Their answer was they ranked search highly and cited search engines as the best way for finding instant information when it’s most needed. They also pointed out they often obtain information they want within just 10 minutes of search.
According to a Google Health Vice-President, an estimated 7 percent of Google’s daily searches are health-related. This amounts to 70,000 searches for every minute. Searches relate to queries regarding health conditions, medications, symptoms, insurance coverage, and pharmaceutical companies.
The importance of search is such that ranking position #1 in Google search results enjoys a CTR of 34.36 percent while the 1st five pages of Google search results gets 67.60 percent clicks. This presents an opportunity for pharma marketers to make sure that their website’s content is optimized by a top SEO agency in India like Wireframes Digital for search; and also take into account, the wide variety of sources the doctors or physicians rely on and become multichannel providers of information.
WHAT SEO STRATEGIES SHOULD BE ADOPTED?
SEO by a top SEO agency in India will help pharma marketers to reach potential patients with content that is not just visually appealing but is also pharma and non-pharma friendly; patient-focused; unique and informative; and actionable.
This will also ensure appropriate SEO strategies are adopted like
KEYWORD RESEARCH
The first move in SEO strategy must be full-keyword research.
This must be done after researching and finding out what search terms and phrases potential patients use when searching for information online, with the focus more on those who look for pharma companies or products/services offered by pharma companies. For instance, if someone is looking for products, say cancer tablets, made by your pharma company, which let us say is XYZ Company, then make sure your XYZ Company’s website contains the keyword ‘cancer tablets’. This will ensure that the web page containing the keyword ranks high in Google and the content is relevant to the potential patient’s needs.
Once it’s clear what terms and phrases they use the most, then those must be used as primary and secondary keywords in the website content. This will ensure that the content answers their queries more thoroughly than generic search results. A good example of this – your pharma company may want to rank for non-branded terms like ‘Astha Drug’ or ‘Astha Inhaler’, then they must be used as specific keyword terms and highlighted in the content, preferably in the early part of the content.
Whatever the nature of the website, care must be taken to not include irrelevant or unrelated keywords; and avoid keyword stuffing into the web pages. This will otherwise reduce the utility value of the website, and make the search engines believe that your website is trying to manipulate them.
WEBSITE CONTENT
Website content must be value-driven, and compelling enough to target and influence target-audience.
The process for developing website content must start only after the target prospects and relevant keywords are established by your chosen SEO agency in India. The focus of the content must be on information that is of relevance to the target-audience and revolves around health products or treatments. Rather than being just being a routine run-of-the-mill content, the site content must be meaningful and include answers to queries relating to common patient ailments; and other such like information.
Pharma companies must ensure that their website also includes quality content that provides details about their drugs, its uses and side-effects, and other such relevant details of value to readers; and avoids duplicating pages; or generic landing pages like site maps, contact pages, and legal pages; or pages with little or no content.
Aside from this, the website must also include attractive designs and interactive visual elements across all web pages; and must be easy and quick to download.
ON-PAGE SEO
If you want your web pages to attract and earn more relevant quality user-traffic, then on-page SEO plays a key role. It will improve your web pages ranking on Google.
On-page SEO involves optimization of your XYZ company’s website with focus on optimization of title tags and meta descriptions; ensuring SEO-friendly content of relevance to users; and fine-tuning site navigation to make site downloading easy and quick.
OFF-PAGE SEO
Off-page SEO is vital for pharmaceutical companies.
Your XYZ Company’s website influence should not be confined to just online. Its influence offline also matters a lot. This is where off-page SEO plays a role.
Off-page SEO involves link-building; local SEO with focus on forums, guest authors, and influencer marketing; and social media with focus on bookmarking and networking. Link building is especially crucial for it will help your XYZ company’s website to gain as many links as possible from quality websites thereby helping it rank higher in the Google algorithm and win over its competitors.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE TO OPTIMIZE WEBSITE?
To leverage SEO techniques effectively, it is also vital to optimize the website, as per the following guidelines.
- Long tail keywords are important for a successful SEO strategy and powering SEO techniques. A good example of long-tail keywords is ensuring informative content in the blogs targeted at a specific audience.
- Common keywords or common search terms within pharma industry sector. To obtain the most appropriate common keywords, it’s important to study competitors and then search volume, through efficient keyword research.
- Inclusion of a powerful meta description (the short description found in search results below the headline). This will help drive high traffic flow to the website.
- Optimization of main title tag and post headlines. This will enable the website to be more easily found by searchers when they search for specific keywords. Effective optimization of tagline or headline of every web page or blog post will make them more easily found and attractive enough for the site users to click them, and also rank higher-up in the search engines.
- Optimization of website architecture and URL. A simple and easily understandable URL is also crucial for attracting and building quality traffic. This will enable not only the search engine spiders to find the content in the website, easily, and crawl, but will also help the users to easily find them and then share.
It is also important to consistently evaluate the status of the website usage data and website speed. They both have tremendous impact on the SEO techniques.
While website usage data will help to find out if website users are staying longer than a minute on the website, website speed on the other hand, critically affects the way the website loads, which in turn will define its ranking in Google and other search engines. In case the website is loading very slowly then it is time to stand-up and make note of the same. The problem could be due to excess presence of flash imagery content and other common performance issues.
In an age where Smartphone’s have become a ubiquitous part of people’s lives, having mobile-friendly websites and optimizing websites for mobile is critical to success. This will help pharma companies to connect with not just patients but also healthcare consumers, and partners who look for details about their products and services.
If pharma companies do not have mobile-friendly and optimized websites, they should at least optimize their websites for voice search. This will add value to their marketing strategies while helping searchers to obtain additional information like answers to their queries not found in their websites, aside from keywords-related ones or links that appear on the screen.
CONCLUSION
Considering that 15 percent of all daily searches relate to new queries, more opportunities can be unearthed with SEO.
By enlisting the expertise of the best SEO agency in India like Wireframes Digital, your pharma company can get the benefit of SEO strategies that will generate for its website quality traffic, improved organic ranking, enhanced brand awareness, and trust of people who matter to your pharma company’s business.
