Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful, efficient, and cost-effective digital marketing strategy that life science businesses use to reach their target audiences by improving their company website’s ranking on search engines.
Life science SEO can improve your online visibility, credibility, reach, and drive long-term growth, whether you’re a medical devices, in vitro diagnostics, pharma, biotech, or advanced therapy medicinal product-focused company.
But what exactly is SEO, and what are the main elements to consider when starting an SEO campaign for your life science company?
In this article, we delve into the realms of content creation, keyword selection, and website optimization to help you achieve your goals for growth in the life science sector.
What is SEO and why is it a crucial life science marketing tactic?
So, you’ve invested in the expensive research and development of a life science product or service and have launched a slick website showcasing your groundbreaking innovation. However, website visits remain low and don’t rank on Google when you search for words or phrases related to your highly competitive industry.
What now?
SEO is a strategy that helps websites rank higher in the organic results of search engines and increases the online visibility of your business to help you rise above the competition. It differs from paid search engine advertising, where payment guarantees that your website appears at the top of search results for your desired keywords.
The key is content. SEO ensures that the most informative and optimized content on specific topics ranks highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). Suppose your target audience can easily find your website thanks to a blog post optimized for a related industry-specific search term. In that case, you’ll boost the number of visits and increase relevant leads.
For this reason, SEO might be one of the most powerful marketing investments you could make.
Key benefits of life sciences SEO
Businesses with high-ranking, informative web content ultimately receive increased amounts of organic, targeted leads to their website, resulting in a level of trust hard to achieve with paid advertising. This rewards companies that implement thorough life sciences SEO strategies with an edge over competitors, ultimately increasing leads that are receptive to follow-ups.
Here, we provide some crucial considerations to boost your life sciences SEO campaign to the next level.
Core life science SEO marketing elements
1. Content is key: The crucial life science SEO catalyst
Arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO is content. Without content, there is no SEO…
Life sciences buyers often approach their searches with a scientific, data-driven mindset, so it’s essential to create scientifically accurate and informative content that addresses common pain points the searchers might have. For instance, blog posts that answer relevant questions or distill complex technical ideas or technologies into easy-to-read and accessible content will receive higher engagement levels and potentially more conversions, such as white paper downloads, contact form submissions, or product orders. High-quality content also encourages visitors to stay longer on your website or to explore other relevant content or products.
Each of these aspects increases your website’s chances of ranking higher in search results.
Scientific rigor should always be maintained in the content you create. Search engines value quality, and your potential clients do too, so avoid cutting corners or making scientific or typographic errors in articles. Science communication is an art form that can propel you ahead of the competition when done well but can erode credibility and trust when done poorly. Use AI-generated content at your peril as AI models convincingly write fiction as fact. Inaccuracies could ultimately damage your hard-earned reputation, so there’s still no substitute for human-written content and its manual verification.
But how do you decide on the topics that might resonate most with your target audience, and how do you optimize this content with words or phrases that could be relevant to your business sector?
2. Life sciences keyword research
Effective, high-ranking content goes hand in hand with thorough keyword research.
So, before you embark on your life science SEO content creation strategy, perform extensive keyword research to identify the words and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for information related to your area of expertise.
Keyword research helps you understand the questions and pain points your target audience is trying to solve, allowing you to tailor your website content to match their search queries. Life science keywords could include scientific terms, names of diseases, or specific technical questions.
To start, it’s crucial to have a clear idea of your target audience. Not all leads are created equal, so decide who is most likely to require or benefit from your latest innovation and put yourself in their shoes. If you’re making content your target audience isn’t searching for, you’ll limit your potential reach or attract people unlikely to make a purchase. Potential clients in the life sciences often include academics, scientists, investors, healthcare professionals, or other companies looking to collaborate.
Several tools are available to help you perform keyword research and are useful as a starting point for strategizing and designing relevant, high-ranking SEO content. Popular tools include Google Keyword Planner and Semrush, among many others.
While high-volume keywords will attract lots of traffic to your website, they might be too broad and miss your target audience or could be too competitive for your content to rank highly. Try to hit the sweet spot of low to mid-volume keywords with little competition to attract highly targeted visitors who are more likely to convert.
Once you’ve defined a list of keywords, these should be placed strategically but naturally in the content you create. Keywords must be included within URLs, page titles, headings (especially H1 and H2 headers), abstract, and main content. The presence of keywords in these locations makes your content easily discoverable by search engine algorithms, helps it rank higher in searches, and makes it easy for readers to navigate.
Appropriate meta-descriptions should also be added to content to make it stand out from the competition in search results. A meta description is a summary of a webpage’s content, typically 150-160 characters long, that appears in search engine results and aims to entice users to click through to the page.
3. Website crawlability, optimization, and backlinks
So, you’ve carefully crafted your scientifically accurate, keyword-optimized content. What now?
Next, you must consider some of the more technical aspects of SEO that enable search engines to find your website. If you forget this step, your website will be stuck in the unsearchable doldrums and your insightful and inspiring articles will be largely pointless!
To be visible, your website and its key pages must be discoverable by search engine crawlers. Website crawling is the process search engines use to find new and updated content and make it available for anyone searching for relevant terms. It is performed by programs known as spiders or bots that discover URLs, and then download and store the page content in an index. The indexed pages are now in the running to be displayed as results of relevant search queries.
If performing SEO for Google, one quick and effective way to ensure your highest priority pages are found is to submit a sitemap through Google Search Console that contains all relevant URLs on your site. The sitemap helps the crawler navigate your website and helps crawlers follow the path to your important pages. Many online tools are available for sitemap generation.
Website speed, responsiveness, user experience, and the number and quality of backlinks from other sites to your pages are also crucial to helping your website rank highly on SERPs, so these should be as streamlined and optimized as possible.
Long-term rewards with life science SEO
Investing in SEO is not a short-term fix. There are many more variables that might influence SEO than we have mentioned in this article. However, a strong life science SEO strategy and implementation is the foundation for steady, organic growth by creating a continual cycle of visibility and conversion.
As your content gains traction, your website’s authority grows, which translates to higher SERP rankings, increased traffic, and long-term success. You’ll increasingly reach the right people at the right time.
Ultimately, once the building blocks are in place for SEO and content development, with time and consistent effort your life science SEO marketing investment will pay dividends.
While the impact of generative AI on search engines remains to be seen, SEO remains a powerful tool to maximize your discoverability, build credibility and trust with your potential clients, and grow your business in a highly targeted way.