In my last post, I provided a high-level review of search marketing in 2011. This week, I want to take this a step further and provide thoughts on how pharmaceutical marketers can take action to improve their search presence in 2012.
1. Get Educated and Passionate About Search
We work with a lot of clients, across many brands, and one of the most common challenges we face is a lack of passion for the topic of SEO. Of course, not everyone is enthralled with SEO. It is no longer the bright, shiny object of digital marketing. When most people think about search, they think about purchasing ads on Google and other search engines, and how much money they will need to spend to get reasonable reach and frequency. For many, search has become the price of doing business in the digital age, and they simply dedicate a certain percentage of their annual budget hoping for good results. But search is extremely important. It is the difference between your brand being found, or not, on the Internet across mobile and desktop platforms. Once it is viewed in that light, it is necessary to understand what you want to achieve with your search strategy and take an active role in setting goals.
The first step is to make sure you have the SEO basics taken care of and optimally implemented, and then you can easily focus on ways to continue improving. SEO is not only about title tags and Meta data—though you have to use these correctly in order to have a foundation to build from. Work with SEO vendors to define your specific goals and actively participate in discussions to continue driving toward those goals. Understand that everything online may positively or negatively impact SEO.
2. Embrace Content as a Strategy
Content is king. Start saying it with me, and believe. Content is king. I’ve been a search marketer for nearly a decade now and I’ve heard this mantra since day one, and I still believe this to be true. I’ve heard all kinds of arguments over the years, the most common being we should create content for users, not for search engines. My response—absolutely, let’s create content for users—and use search-informed data to help define what users want and need. In doing so, we will be creating relevant content that people will search for and, hopefully, find when they search.
How do we know what users are looking for? At Intouch, we like to use Web analytics and keyword research to define what content people are looking for. If we understand what users are searching for (both on search engines and within our sites), we can use the data to develop content that addresses user needs while also appealing to the search engine gods (Google). Search-driven content strategy is one of the first and most important steps pharma marketers can take to improve search engine visibility in 2012.
3. Focus on Social Search Integration
You may hear people talk about how social and search are merging and becoming evermore intertwined. You may hear people spout something about how social signals are becoming an increasingly important factor for improving organic search rankings and visibility. What you may not hear is the answer to the critical question: So what, how can this help me? There are several ways that social media can positively impact SEO.
An easy first step is to integrate social sharing into your website in order to proactively offer users the opportunity to share content from your site across various social media outlets. This helps drive links to your website, which is a critical component of long-term SEO strategy. In addition to leveraging a social sharing widget, it could also be beneficial to include buttons for the top social sites. Adding a Facebook Like button, Google+1 button or a Tweet This button also adds the immediate value by giving users a quick way to share content that they like.
All social media activity can be optimized and offers an opportunity for pharma marketers to improve search engine visibility in 2012.
4. Get Mobile Now to Connect With Users
As I pointed out in my previous post, search behaviors are changing and adapting to technology. One of those dramatic changes is the rapid rise of mobile searches. We looked at the Top 200 (by sales) brands and found that nearly 20 percent of total search volume came from mobile users. This is only looking at brand queries and does not take into account unbranded disease category-related searches. In 2012 this will continue to grow, and it will become a top priority for brands to have a mobile-friendly website. Having a mobile-friendly website will need to include mobile search planning—both organic content strategy and mobile paid search planning.
Mobile search users act and engage differently than desktop search users, so it is critical to build a search marketing plan that leverages those differences to drive mobile experience and content strategy. Build mobile content that takes into account the modified user behavior on mobile devices and creates efficient mobile user experience. From a paid search perspective, leverage the ability to segment campaigns by device (desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet) and drive users where they need to be. Think about mobile users and how they will want to engage with the brand on mobile devices.
5. Think Beyond the Text and Leverage Universal Search
Whether talking about PowerPoint presentations, images, PDF downloads or videos, digital asset optimization is going to be an ongoing opportunity for SEO. When launching a new video on your site, figure out how to capitalize on video assets for search purposes. What can we do to maximize exposure? This is also important when creating an image library to show before and after pictures. Talk to your search team to understand what can be done to ensure the pictures are optimized for search exposure. The personalization of universal search is going to be a big deal, so make sure you cover all the bases.
6. Create a Link Building Strategy
Since nearly the beginning of time—referring of course to the day Google launched its PageRank algorithm—inbound link popularity has been critical for SEO success. If content is king, links are queen. Building unique, useful and interesting content can be a core piece of your inbound linking strategy, but it doesn’t stop there. Develop a strategic approach to create inbound links. Across the industry, there are keyword searches where pharma sites should have prominent placement because they are highly relevant.
As mentioned above, social sharing is an easy way to get people linking to your site. While social sharing is viewed more as an immediate opportunity and a way to engage in the online community and manage relationships, it is also a way to build inbound link popularity and authority. This is a topic that warrants future discussion so stay tuned for my future discussion about link building strategies.
7. Monitor Results and Push for Ongoing Optimization
Search engine marketing is not only about watching for rankings and resting on the success that you find there. To be truly successful, the critical next step is watching actual site usage stats and learning if things are working as planned. Have you obtained first-page results for your desired keywords and seen a strong funnel of site visits? Great. But what does that mean in terms of driving those users to complete desired goals, be it registration, downloads, or whatever the case may be?
At Intouch, search engine marketing and optimization is all about measuring, collecting insights, and optimizing the approach based on defined objectives.
Conclusion
Throughout 2011, the pharmaceutical industry was called out as being behind the times when it comes to SEO and search marketing. In order to change that perception, it’s time to make a commitment to successfully leveraging the power of search engines to help drive online efforts and objectives. Users entering through search can be highly engaged with the content we offer and are, generally speaking, more likely to convert (take the desired action we define). Committing to even a few of these efforts will have a marked improvement on overall site performance. Make 2012 the year of search and optimization!