Pharmaceutical SEO Consulting Services

Pharmaceutical companies are in one of the most competitive industries in the world with over 1,000 billion dollars attributed to the pharmaceutical industry there is ample opportunities available.

In general, a professional SEO agency or SEO consultant can have success with a website even if that agency or consultant doesn’t have experience working in that industry.

This is not the case with pharmaceutical websites. If you hire someone without experience doing pharmaceutical SEO they will likely struggle to perform like they have in the past.

What makes Pharmaceutical SEO difficult?

Every enterprise SEO project has it’s fair share of approvals by the brand, legal, etc. but within the pharmaceutical world there is also something called HPRC.

What is HPRC?

HPRC is a committee that helps pharmaceutical companies remain in compliance. Every single word, image and video place on a pharmaceutical website must be reviewed by HPRC.

The challenge is many of the people on HPRC are not digital marketers nor do they understand digital marketing. For example, you might submit a title tag with 55 characters and they might tell you it isn’t long enough or not descriptive enough.

You need to hire an SEO agency or consultant who has experience in these dealings if you want your website to improve in the search rankings.

Pharmaceutical SEO Challenges

Beyond HPRC there are other unique challenges that are specific to pharmaceutical SEO such as gated content and targeting non-branded keywords.

Gated Content is one of the most common challenges your SEO projects will face, especially in the international markets like Australia. These types of sites require you to use gated content, which means there is some sort of interstitial appearing when you first enter the website.

Non-Branded Keywords are also difficult to optimize for on many pharmaceutical websites. In the world of pharma many searches are conducted in the middle of the sales funnel which is the consideration portion, here you will see a lot of comparison searches “brand x vs brand y”.

These types of searches generate hundreds of thousands of searches per month but you will rarely see brand x or brand y at the top of the search results, instead you will see third party websites. Why is this? Because many pharmaceutical companies do not want to put their competitors names on their websites and we know that if the content isn’t on your website Google cannot rank you for that keyword.

How To Win In Pharmaceutical SEO

Here are three tips to a successful pharmaceutical SEO campaign.

Leverage Data

The difference between SEO and PPC is that with PPC you can target keywords even if your website does not rank well for them organically. Although this does not mean these PPC campaigns will be successful, you can take a lot of great data from these campaigns such as what type of keywords people are searching for and what your audience might look like.

Likewise, if your pages do have some rankings you can dig into Google Search Console for similar data.

Build Your Brand

Much of SEO is typically mid to bottom funnel targeted but with so much emphasis on branded searches you want to make sure your brand is easily found and the messaging around your brand is also positive.

Some important keywords to really own are “brand reviews” and “brand pricing” these are often owned by third party sites but you can create content in creative ways to put your website in a better position to succeed.

Market Case Studies

Speaking of awareness and middle of the funnel content a really powerful way to reach your target audience is through case studies and testimonials.

If you’d like to work with an experienced SEO consultant with pharmaceutical experience, please contact me.

Frequently Asked Questions