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!

Since 2011 has come to a close and we, as pharma marketers, are preparing for a new year, I started reflecting on the changes we saw in the search world. In 2011, we saw several folks stepping forward to make the statement that the pharmaceutical industry is behind the times when it comes to SEO. As a search marketer who has spent half of my career working in the pharmaceutical industry, I can tell you that in many ways this is true, but it doesn’t have to be. If you have the right partners in place—partners that know the search marketing world and can navigate the pharma red tape—you can develop a search strategy that will catapult you ahead of the curve. To do that, the first thing is to understand what’s happened, what’s happening, and how you can be at the front of the line.

In this two-part series, I will talk about what happened in 2011 to get us to the point we are at now. I will follow that up with a look into the future of search to identify the prize our eyes should be on for 2012 and beyond. So without further ado, here is my list of nine things I believe have played a significant role in the evolution of search in 2011.

1. Social Signals Added to Ranking Algorithms
Early in 2011, the emergence of social signals started to have a larger impact on search rankings. Google social search included real-time updates from Twitter until mid-year when Google let the partnership expire. We now know that the partnership with Twitter was a short-term strategy before Google started rolling out their social network, Google+. Meanwhile, Bing maintains its partnership with Facebook and Twitter to deliver its own social search experience.

2. Google’s Farmer Update
Google search results saw their first major change with the Farmer update that impacted approximately 12 percent of all websites. The Farmer update was targeted at “low-quality sites” that offered little new or original content. Sites designed to game search engines explicitly to increase revenue took a big hit, seeing their search rankings drop dramatically.

3. Google’s Panda Update
This is not so much a single update as an ongoing series of changes that will continue into 2012 in order to enhance results on an ongoing basis. The algorithm shift is focused on shuffling the primary and secondary factors for ranking, and Google has said user experience is a big key. Below are a few of the bigger items we know have been emphasized by Panda:

• Page load time: If your site takes too long to load, there’s a good chance you may have seen an impact in search results. In 2012, be sure to streamline implementation practices in order to optimize load time.
• Blocked site statistics: Google introduced multiple ways a user can block sites from their search results. Initially, it was stated that the statistics were not taken into account within the algorithm, but in the latest round of updates Google is using blocked site statistics as part of its secondary algorithm (meaning it is not a key ranking factor, but it is taken into consideration).
• User experience: If you aren’t convinced that SEO and user experience work hand in hand, Panda emphasizes that this is needed. Sites with poor navigation, unclear topical relevance, or poor content display methodologies could see impacts. This could include excessive use of doorway (or orphan pages), ill-crafted or ill-named navigational hierarchy, etc.

4. Google Launches +1 Button
The +1 button is Google’s version of the Facebook “Like” button and serves essentially the same purpose. Initially launched within search results, the potential impact was immediately recognized by marketers as user preferences, or +1s, started showing up next to search results.

5. Google Launches Google+
Google+, touted early on as “The Facebook Killer,” launched in June and got off to a hot start. The excitement has tapered off, but Google continues to rollout new features and has made major pushes to ensure Google+ remains a player in the social space.

6. Google Announces “Secure Search,” Analytics Impact
As if two updates—the +1 button and Google+—weren’t enough, Google proceeded to announce secure search, which has had a significant impact on Web analytics data. We’ve seen between 10 percent and 12 percent of all site organic search traffic being impacted by this change. Signed-in keyword data is no longer passed to Web analytics platforms; instead it’s being displayed as “Keyword Unavailable.”

7. Mobile Search Behavior Growth
In 2011, there was continued growth in mobile search usage across all industries—including health and pharmaceuticals. Looking at the Top 200 pharmaceutical brands in 2010 (2011 sales are still being tabulated), there was an interesting trend. While desktop search volume for these brands (aggregated search volume) remained flat and even decreased from month to month, mobile search volume continued to increase throughout the year (with the exception of December).

8. Schema.org and Microdata
For the first time since partnering to create a standard format for site maps, Google, Bing and other search engines have teamed up for schema.org. This joint effort provides a collection of common schemas (markups enabling search engines to easily interpret information presented on the Web) for webmasters. Schema.org offers a unique opportunity for site owners to present information for search engines to interpret and improve displayed results.

9. “Author” Tag
The rel=“author” tag is a newer feature that is starting to gain some traction. In order to leverage brand or user “authority,” content owners can claim content that could potentially improve organic search rankings and display. In order to claim content with the authorship markup, content owners can simply add the rel=“author” tag.

Stay tuned for part two of the series where I will take a look at the trends and some things to expect in 2012.

As a search marketer with a strong interest in social media and how the two play together, I get very frustrated when I hear someone say “SEO is dead.” In my mind, I don’t know how on earth anyone could say that SEO has no relevance in the digital marketing landscape. I’m happy to acknowledge that social media has taken a permanent, high-priority place in the way people interact online, however that’s a far cry from “SEO is dead.”

In fact, SEO can be the foundation of your entire digital strategy. Without a solid SEO foundation you may find your digital strategy floundering to accomplish critical business goals. Based on the latest comScore report, there were over 17.1 billion searches completed in the U.S. in July 2011. That’s a lot of people using search engines on a regular basis. Using a search engine is still one of the top activities performed online. But if you look around just a little, you will find those digital marketing folks that insist social media is where you need to be and that search doesn’t matter.

Search provides foundation for social media

Search marketing, both SEO and Paid Search, is built on the legs of strong keyword research that defines HOW users are seeking information relevant to you. Search behavior within Google and Bing directly correlates to how people are using social media. You want to know what conversations are happening? Learn what people are searching for and then find the conversations that are based around the keyword research topics.

However, it goes deeper than that. Search is about connecting with your audience and providing them content that is critical to what they are searching for. Similarly, social media marketing is about understanding your users and the conversations, and providing content that is useful and usable. Both channels are key components to connecting with your users in a way that provides them useful, relevant information.

Social empowers search

On the flip side, social media is an important component that can feed search engine optimization efforts in ways that may not be obvious to everyone. Social sharing can play a very big role in improving organic search positioning and only requires a little bit of effort (well, maybe more than a little bit when talking about pharmaceutical marketing). Facebook “Likes,” Google +1’s, Twitter @mentions and Tweets all have a valid role in ongoing search marketing efforts. Social sharing widgets like “share»send»save” offer a fairly economical (and pharma-friendly) way for users to quickly and easily link to a site.

In April, Google launched their new +1 feature within their search results that essentially allows users to like a Web page directly from their search results. The +1 feature was launched with the intention of acting similar to the way that the Facebook Like button works.

When they launched the +1 button in April, Google also announced that they would be making this button available to website owners in the near future. Google has officially announced that the +1 Button is now available for site owners to place on their site. For their initial lanch, Google has partnered with several notable sites, including: Mashable, TechCrunch, and AddThis. The timing of this launch is right, as Bing has continued to advertise their integration with Facebook. The partnership between Bing and Facebook is one fairly significant differentiator between Google and Bing – especially since Google to date has not made any move to integrate with Facebook.

Social sharing has a positive influence, not only from a social media marketing perspective but also from a search marketing standpoint. Evidence shows that the more Likes, Tweets and other social mentions received, the better your site will perform in search results. Google +1 is another form of social sharing that can positively impact your digital marketing efforts. If you are trying to enlarge your social and search footprints, integrating Google’s +1 button could be an important consideration.

There are a few things you need to know if you plan to add the +1 button to your site:

Don't Panic: Pharma Has an Exception

This Monday, April 18, Google sent out an announcement that new search ads enhancement will be rolled out gradually over the coming days. This new paid search enhancement will roll in Google Instant Preview as a feature of paid search ads. An example of Google Instant Preview for organic results is below:

From an organic search perspective, this feature has been relatively consistent in terms of user satisfaction. The initial launch of Google Instant Preview had a few flaws that were widely discussed – namely the fact that Instant Previews did not display Flash® well. This issue has recently been addressed (for the most part).

This latest announcement has, as should be expected, created a bit of a stir within the pharmaceutical marketing world. As pharma marketers, we are always concerned about enhancements that could potentially violate regulatory concerns. Google makes many exceptions to their rules and display to benefit pharmaceutical marketers, and this new enhancement is no exception.

As of Tuesday afternoon (4/19/11), Intouch Solutions have received notification from our representatives at Google that there will be an exception from the Instant Previews for paid search for the pharmaceutical industry. This exception will be in place until a long-term solution for modification is defined.