The Prescription for Pharma SEO: Mastering Content, Tech and Compliance

🎙️ Welcome to another episode of OUTCOMES, your go-to podcast for healthcare and biopharma marketing insights.

In the latest OUTCOMES Podcast episode, we explore the intricate landscape of SEO for the pharma sector. Our guest, Christopher Carlson, SEO Strategist at emagineHealth, shares invaluable insights on achieving visibility while navigating the stringent compliance requirements unique to pharma.

The conversation also addresses practical, technical SEO tactics vital for the pharma sector. We emphasize the importance of image alt text not only for accessibility purposes but also for embedding relevant information related to pharmaceutical products without coming across as spammy. Moreover, we reveal how minor details, like the strategic naming of image files, can significantly influence search rankings in a field where content development faces more restrictions.

Whether you're a marketer in the pharma industry or just keen on the intersection of AI and SEO, this episode is a goldmine of tactics that align with both search engine demands and industry regulations. Christopher's expertise shines as he covers the need for a meticulous approach to technical issues and the nuances of creating a 'clean' site for Google's indexing.

Tune in for a deep dive into SEO for pharma and discover how to leverage these insights to enhance your digital marketing strategy in a sector where every detail counts.

Remember to subscribe for more conversations that keep you at the forefront of digital marketing in the fast-evolving pharma and healthcare sectors.

Website: 
https://www.emaginehealth.com/

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https://www.linkedin.com/company/emagineusa/

Insights:
https://www.emaginehealth.com/blog/

Thank you for listening to OUTCOMES. Please find more healthcare and biopharma marketing thought leadership in the Insights section of our website and follow us on LinkedIn!

Transcript

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Welcome to Outcomes, the healthcare and biopharma marketing podcast, where marketing leaders discuss the most effective strategies for the health sectors coming from a digital first AI powered perspective. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of our Outcomes podcast. Today, I have here with me as our guest, Christopher Carlson. Uh, Christopher is an SEO strategist at Imagine. And imagine health and um, one of the topics that we've been talking about a lot lately across Various competencies that we have here at imagine. They're just the the nuances that come along with marketing in the health care and biopharma industry Um, we all know that it's a very it's a very nuanced. It's very regulated. It's a very unique industry and all of those All of those facets are constantly evolving. And then when you combine that with the fact that digital in general and technology and marketing strategies are always evolving, um, it's a constantly moving target. Uh, and so. Over in SEO here, Christopher, uh, worked with a variety of our healthcare and pharma clients. And so I just, um, I wanted to chat with him here today about, uh, some of the various considerations, um, or, or challenges that he experiences with those types of clients and ways that he's able to navigate them and overcome them and, and so forth. So let's jump right in, Christopher. First of all, thanks for joining. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Bill. Nice to be here. Yeah. And, um, so, you know, just take over. What are some SEO challenges that you experience with drug sites specifically? Specifically drug sites, they are their own entity. You know, they, they, they have different restrictions than other sites. So you essentially need to take those into account and work with them. Um, it's a different sort of optimization. So essentially, um, when you have a drug site. The challenges are probably the biggest one is making sure you are square with the FDA guidelines for, for advertising on the internet. Um, one of the most challenging things there is the only document that speaks directly to the internet, um, was developed specifically for advertising through, uh, social networks. Um, and it's from 2014 and that's, so. The web now and compared to 2014 is light years. So yeah, you're, you're navigating a century ago in, in internet years. It's like prehistoric. Yeah. So there's that to consider and you have to follow those guidelines because they're the only thing out there that you, you can rely on. Um, Also, when you're talking about drugs, there's always a legal process with all your content. So there are things you can't say because you don't want to open yourself up to litigation. So there's a legal review. Another challenge with content and I should, I should just back up a little bit and say content is huge in getting a site, uh, to, to have relevance in the eyes of Google and rank. Um, so it's, um, we say an SEO and we said it for years and it continues to be true that content is king. So it's something that we work on diligently with every, with every website. Um, the other challenge with content is a lot of times drug sites are a brand new drug. Um, and the content is, is, um, focused on the drug itself. Um, and it could be that a lot of people, you know, patients and even healthcare providers don't know about it. Um, so, you know, that's a challenge because people aren't necessarily looking for you. So you have to navigate that. Um, Another challenge is a lot of them are brand new sites and Google puts more relevance on sites that have established a history. And drug sites and health related sites undergo a little extra scrutiny because they're what's called your money or your life sites. And that's going to be anything health related, legal and financial. Um, so, um. That's potentially Google wants to see that you're an authority and that what you're saying can help people. So that's that's another thing that you have to take an account. That's that's another challenge. Um, so those are the big ones when it comes to working with the drug site right out of the gate. Yeah. And I was having this conversation with, uh, Kristen and Michelle here who work on our paid team. And, you know, like you say, the, the, the, the document that you refer to, if you even bother referring to it is from 2014 and even then, you know, the, one of the challenges in marketing in this industry is we don't have any hard rule book that we could consult with. Um, it's, it's interpretation. It's experimentation. It's hoping and praying you don't get slapped on the wrist for doing something, um, that they view as nefarious versus just a little mistake in doing something the way they don't ideally want it. Uh, so it makes it. It makes it really challenging, but I also think that it emphasizes the importance of experience in doing this, because that's ultimately what we're relying on. Again, we can't open up our rule book. We don't have it. But after so many years of working with so many clients in these sectors, And realizing what works, what's allowed, what, and we, and we lean a lot on our clients, regulatory affairs people, um, because they have, you know, we're not attorneys here. We're not regulatory experts. We know a lot from experience, but we have to lean on them a lot because that's their job. Um, so we learn a lot, uh, from them and that kind of helps shape what will. Do in the future for other clients as well Sometimes they they really help us, um structure our guidelines and then like you said, you know I've been talking a lot in in much of our content here about patient centricity lately audience centricity in general and You know, it seems like such an obvious concept. It seems like something that any marketer would subscribe to and be doing but like you said So many drug sites so many even let's say pharmaceutical corporate websites healthcare sites They're about them, they're about healthcare, it's about the organization and all their capabilities. A drug, it's about their brand name and the brilliant science that went into it. Um, and ultimately the patient or caregiver who's out there looking for something to help them with their problem, make them healthy, can't find what they need because the content has not been structured. Toward them. Um, so it's a, it's a big, it's a big problem, but it's also a big opportunity. It's a big opportunity for everybody to do this stuff better. Um, first of all, content's more engaging, but as you're going to, you know, talk about more here today, it'll also be found more by the people that are searching in Google. So with that, you know, what are some of the ways that you get around this myriad of challenges, Christopher? Some of the big ones are we want to create more content within these restrictions within these these considerations, Um, and there are definitely ways to do that that work really well. They work with users and they they make it more attractive to Google and the other search engines. But, um. You know, as you, you're able to do more market research and that type of thing, you know, figure out ways to include it on the site. So like if you start getting, you know, patient testimonials, for example, those are great for the site, you know, finding out that patients have specific questions, you know, and FAQs page can, can do a lot. And, and Google likes those. It likes that helpful content and you're establishing yourself as more of an authority. Um, You know, video is great and you can, uh, who loves video. Um, so just figure out ways within these, this, uh, structure to, to get more content on the site and there's, there's actually a lot you can do. Um, the other huge thing is realize. Even though you're super excited about your drug, um, you know, as you said, you're not really understanding what the, the, the patient is looking for, which is the disease itself, you know, so take the time to write about, um, the condition. And, you know, one of the restrictions is you can't really say this cures this, you know, that's too huge of a claim, but you can talk about without saying that necessarily, you can talk about the, uh, the condition itself, um, which is what people are going to be looking for because they don't know your drug name yet. Um, uh, the other thing is to consider when you're doing that, um. So what I'm trying to you're too general, you are competing with a WebMD, you're creating, you're competing with these huge sites that Google loves. So what you want to do is, say if someone has like lupus, I had a good friend who had lupus when, when we were kids. You know, if you like this drug, uh, helps lupus overall, you know, chances are the drug won't do that, but what you want, what you want to do is do your keyword research and find out how many people are searching for, you know, lupus that has affected the kidneys or that type of thing, or a specific, so you're looking more at the specific, which is what people and healthcare providers will be looking for. And then they'll see that your drug comes up and they'll make that association and they'll click through to your site. Maybe they'll be like. Oh, I want more information. I want to talk to my healthcare provider about this. I want to prescribe this, um, that type of thing, you know, when you're developing this content, you always have to schedule it. Um, you know, it's, it's never going to be a blog or anything like that, where you're putting on content like multiple times a week, you have to schedule it out and understand that it's got to go through that process, that, uh, that legal process before it goes on the site. Um, the other thing is you're going to want to, um, You know, you might be fighting for, um, space just based on your brand name. You know, once people understand your brand name, your, um, pharmaceutical company site is going to have, have talked about that already. They're going to have, uh, put out a press release that other outlets will pick up. And so your brand name, you could have a challenge. Um, you might be, you know. Way down the line as far as publicly talking about your brand name on the web. So that's another challenge is, is just, and it, it relies on, you know, putting out good content and establishing yourself, um, as the site to go to when someone searches for that specific brand name. Yeah. And then the other thing you can do is because, um, you're linked to from a number of sites, especially your, your, your overall pharmaceutical company. Um, Corporate site and a lot of, you know, this isn't something that, um, you'd think about right off the bat, but make sure that you have a link coming from that well established site, um, to your site, you know, and make sure it says your drug name in the anchor text. So you're getting essentially an endorsement from a site that Google loves and you're a new site and it'll help you build that relevance and that that authority. Yeah, that's good stuff. It's, you know, we talk to clients all the time about their competition online and we have to make very clear. That that is not the word competition is not how you usually think of it. We don't mean your direct competitors in business online. Your competition could be your own corporate website. Your competition could be a press release about your drug. It's not your competitive businesses necessarily. It's every page and every piece of content that you're competing with on Google. Um, and then the other thing I want to, you know, just going back to your previous points here. I am not an SEO expert, so I tend to oversimplify things, but I think it's very important. I mean, ultimately, Google... Google wants to provide what users need, okay? So the more successful Google is at doing that, the more people will return to Google, keep using it, the more advertising they can sell. It's a simple concept. So Google cares about providing users with what they want. So, like all marketing, and anybody who listens to or reads any of my content is going to get sick of me saying this about every single marketing tactic there is. But at the end of the day, it's about your audience's journey. It's about those personas. And it's about the things that they're looking for. So when it comes to drugs, Um, like, like you said, Christopher, you said they might not be looking for that brand name drug. They might be looking for information about the disease. Well, let's go even one step back from that, where it's a patient just researching symptoms. They haven't even gone to the doctor yet. They haven't been diagnosed with anything yet. Or let's suppose it's rare disease where no one can diagnose them. I just read recently that someone, um, There's a really interesting article that a, that a mother ended up diagnosing her son's very rare disease through chat, through chat GPT, um, that many doctors were not able to diagnose, but through her entering symptoms endlessly and, and interacting with chat GPT, it. It determined, uh, what their disease is. I mean, it's going off on a little tangent there, but the point is that there's the people out there who are desperate for educational, informative information, disease awareness sites, sites that speak to the symptoms that someone's experiencing. And then, then very strategically, you lead them over to your product and you do your marketing. But it's all about understanding their journey first and developing the content that's going to attract them Based on their journey or that caregiver that's that's doing the research for them. All right, so Christopher Let's turn to a little bit more of a technical topic now In addition to some of the other strategies that you've already mentioned here. What are some other avenues? That companies can explore, you know from an SEO standpoint, but again specifically for drug sites Yeah, um, what we like to look at and, um, you essentially have to understand how Google understands the web and the way it does that is it breaks it down into entities, um, and, and different, uh, different, essentially, you know, Characters on the web, but entities is huge. And what entities are is, you know, your drug itself. That's an entity, um, the, the pharmaceutical corporation that developed the drug, another entity, and because you're a new entity on the web, you want to help Google understand that, you know, you're this entity that it just was introduced to, but you are connected with all these established entities. Um, so Google can see, Hey, you know. We've known this site for a long time. We understand this pharmaceutical company, brand new drug, brand new site, but it's connected to this entity. And, and the way we can do that is through, um, what's called schema markup. And what that is is it's, it's code that, that lives in, uh, the actual header of the site. People don't see it. Search engines see it. Um, it's a protocol they developed. The search engines got together, developed to understand the web. Um, And what you can do with schema is, um, you know, you'll see a lot of basic schema on a site. Like this is a web page. This is a website. There's so much more you can do. You can, um, identify the web page as a medical web page. That's the start. So Google's already seeing it's medical, um. You can, um, identify the audience. So are you talking to direct to consumer? Are you talking to the patients themselves? Who's the audience patients? If you're talking to healthcare providers, who's the audience healthcare providers? That's a different level of conversation. It's a different type of conversation, completely different audience. You can identify that through schema. Um, and then you connect it with the drug itself and Google understands a drug as a product. Um, so, but you can. Enter so many variables and help Google understand this drug, like not the drug name, the brand name, um, but also, you know, what are some of the warnings that go along with it? What's the dosage you get? Um, you know, all these different aspects you can tell Google, um. Before they jump into the content on the page, it helps them understand. Um, you can also, because the company is another huge entity, you can identify, you know, not only is this a web, a medical webpage connected to a medical website about this drug, but the webpage was produced by. Uh, a corporation, a manufacturer, and you can list a lot of entities for that corporation. So you've got the corporation itself, but then you've got notable people who work for that corporation. And what are they connected to? Are they connected to journals? Are they connected to, um, A different, um, you know, an educational organization, a medical practice. Um, you can make all these connections with schema. Um, and, and it helps Google, you know, understand the basis of the drug and, and where it came from. Um, and that can be huge in, in, um, building authority and, and helping Google know that your drug site is, is a huge, is, is. beneficial to the people who have this condition. it's kind of a complex tactic, right? I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a programming language, right? And it's different from the, the, you know, most of us laymen, um, who are not SEO people know that behind a website, you've got your title tags, you've got your meta description. I don't even know if keywords tags still exist, but it, this is different from those, correct. And it's more technical. Yeah. Yes. Um, more technical. Um, it's something I've found that you can. You keep finding new things so you can build on it and build on it and build on it, um, while maintaining the basic structure and having it work. Another great thing that Schema can do is once you've identified the drug as a product and you've, you know, maybe there's video, you've identified a video, um, Maybe there are images, your logo, that type of thing. It's going to feed into what Google calls rich results. And what rich results are is when you do a search and you see the normal, you know, the title tag, that's a link to the site, the meta description, which is a little blurb, there might be a video up there. There might be a list of questions underneath your, uh, your listing, your link, um, there could be an image, um, schema can help. Google understand that it should pull those results. And it not only increases the, the attractiveness, um, the ways someone can interact with your site, but it takes up more real estate. So rather than this little thing, you've got this and we want to act to, uh, Occupy as much of that, of that real estate as possible and essentially, you know, not share it. Yeah. I mean, you could really have the trifecta in that you're, you're showing up on the first page with a snippet, you're showing up with an organic result and you're doing some paid advertising on that same page. Right. I mean, that's the perfect storm. Yeah, definitely. And as we move into more AI powered search, we've got to understand what AI powered search is looking for. And, uh, from what we've seen, it's these entities, it's how it's going to understand. So we want to be present for that as, as well, um, because it's going to become more and more prevalent. It's already. Huge. It's just going to get used more and more. It's going to become more sophisticated. We want to get, get in on the building blocks and make sure we're providing not only what Google search wants, but what Google AI powered search was. Yeah. Yeah, and I think admittedly we're, we're telling everybody that, you know, nobody really knows exactly what the search world is going to look like in six months, 12 months, let alone a few years. But we all know it's going to be different. Um, yeah, so. As digital marketers, you know, I know we, but specifically you and, and the rest of your team over in SEO are just staying on top of it all the time, because again, no one really knows how this is all going to shake out and, and it won't, it's not like it's just going to be resolved one day, uh, we're, we're just going to see this stuff continue to evolve and change, I think forever. Um, you know, which makes, makes life a little bit interesting. Any other, you know, any other specific, like technical tactics and such, um, that you wanted to mention, Christopher? You definitely want to look for everything you can, especially given that you're going to be building content very slowly. So, you know, seemingly minor things like, um, image alt text, which is what, uh, Google reads it, but it also improves. accessibility, which is huge. Um, so people who are visually impaired, when they come to a site, they can't see their reader can't see an image, you know, rather than providing them with what would essentially be a blank space. The alt text is what the reader is going to read. So, um, You want to use that you want to be as clear as possible as to what the image is, but it also provides, you know, sites about your drugs. So if you show man meeting with doctor with stethoscope, that type of thing, that's what the image is. But, you know, hyphen drug name, you know, you're not, um, Being spammy, you are explaining what the image is about and why it's there. So any little tactic you want to look at all the technical issues is the way the site's set up or coded presenting any impediments to Google crawling the site. You want to address all that, have a perfectly clean site for indexing, um, And then do everything you can, just these minor things, make sure everything is on point, um, as you're working to, to build the site. Yeah. And, and one, you know, the, the, the image alt text, I think is such an, such an example of just something that's really easy, that is not scientific and yet neglected, so easily neglected because we all know you build a website and even on a relatively small website, you could have dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of images. On a website and for somebody to have strategically named each of those. Um, it's, it's very unlikely. It's very rare, but if you've got, if you're a marketer or you're a website owner and you've got some extra time and you just feel like doing some tedious work. Um, in, in your off hours or, or, or hire an intern to do it. Just rename those images like crazy because it does matter. I learned over on, on the YouTube side of things, um, that, you know, YouTube's got their description. They've got their title of a video, but apparently the name of the video file that you upload. Actually is as if not more important than some of those other things that you do and some of the tags they allowed you to do so these, uh, and again, that's not rocket science, but. We can assume very, very neglected tactic that people could benefit from addressing. Exactly. Yeah. Image file names are important, every little aspect, and that's what you're going to want to do. Um, you do that with every site, but it's of particular importance to drug sites because you have these restrictions or with content, it, you know, the process, um, and for me with alt text, you know, it is tedious, but I'm a nerd, so it's like eating chips, you know, I just like. One after the other, and as you said, you know, it's not uncommon to find a site that comes through with completely blank alt text, um, or like alt text that makes no sense. It doesn't relate to the image. So I've seen paragraphs in there. You should have four or five words. Um, so essentially, yeah, you're going to want to scour the site, look at technical issues, look at everything you can do, because Every little bit helps. Yeah, you know, there's there's some some of the stuff that we do and talk about is really hard. Um keyword strategy is something that Should be very strategic and audience focused schema. Like we said before, it's a pretty technical language, but some of this low hanging fruit, like file names, it's easy stuff. And so, you know, I think the advice to any marketer out there is, even if you're not doing real advanced SEO and digital marketing, knock off some of this low hanging fruit in your spare time, because it can move the needle for you. Christopher, this has been really insightful. I, uh, I want to thank you for joining me. And, um, you know, especially with regard to AI, which we touched upon here today, things are obviously going to continue to evolve and evolve rapidly. So, uh, I would envision you coming on here pretty often with me so that we could stay updated on all this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I, I. I love that you're having me. I appreciate that. And, um, yeah, AI is a, is a super powerful tool, um, but it is a tool. We're learning how to use it. We'll work with it as it evolves and, um, it's, it's part of the, the future of, of advertising on the web. Sure is. All right, Christopher. Well, thanks. This was great. Yeah, great. Thank you, Bill.