What is SEO for Life Sciences?

Firstly, what is SEO? A really good definition of SEO is, “Increasing the quantity and the quality of visitor traffic from organic search results of search engines such as Google.”

Firstly, increasing the quantity of visitor traffic – that’s a given. The more people that we have coming to our site, the better, right? The more people that see our stuff, see our products, see our services. But what’s even more important, really, is the quality of the visitor traffic. Because if that quantity, if that visitor traffic comes to our site, bounces and never comes back again, that’s actually kind of useless, there’s no real point in even getting that traffic. What we really want is really good quality traffic. It’s the people that come to your site that is actually going to buy your services, buy your products, or even just spread your information. Or come back later even. So that’s a really important factor to consider with SEO.

To explain SEO a little bit better, I tried to draw out a search result, the best I can. This is the search result for ‘Alkaline Phosphatase Detection Kits’. What we usually see with the search result is the top two to five search results are paid search ads. These are search results that companies, in this case, Cell Biolabs, and Reaction Biology, they’ve paid to be there. Right when you click on these, these companies are gonna pay for every single click that they get. And that’s why they’re at the top, they pay for it.

At the bottom here we have organic search results, or better known as natural search results. And this is free. If you are ranking high in the natural search results, that’s because Google has found you, it’s crawled the internet, it’s found your website and your webpage, and it’s considered it very relevant and very valuable content to people that are searching for this particular search query.

Historically, around twenty percent of searchers will click on the paid search, and about eighty percent will click on natural searches. So that’s why this is a huge area of opportunity to rank high in these natural search results. We found that a lot of life science companies are pumping so much money into that paid search, anything from between $2000 a month to $90,000 per month. Again, that’s why this is such a huge area of opportunity. You can put some money into SEO rankings or some kind of SEO service to improve your rankings and to improve your SEO. Once you’ve done that once, once you rank it’s very evergreen, it’s much more sustainable to keep on ranking without any further investment. When you pay for your paid search, as soon as you pull the money out, and take down those paid ads, that’s that traffic gone. But these natural searches will keep on going and keep on getting that traffic. So, that’s why there’s such a huge area of opportunity. That’s why it’s very important.

So, what are some tactics for SEO? I’ve just briefly explained a few of them here. Firstly, a given is improving your rankings. The higher up the search results get, the more traffic that you are likely going to get. That’s very important, obviously – improving your rankings. More people are likely to click on the first search result than a search result on the third page halfway down, of course.

But that’s not where we stop. Next thing you want to improve is your click through rates. You could be ranking number one, two or three for any search result, any search query, but if your message here isn’t compelling enough, then it’s likely that people aren’t going to click on your search result and your webpage, even though you’re ranking very high. That’s why you want to see this here as your ad copy, your title element, and your meta description. This is your title element here, this is your meta description. We’ll go more into those concepts in future videos. The idea is to get this as good as possible so people click on it and actually go through to your webpage. That’s very important.

Last, but not least, is targeting more keywords. If you rank for a few keywords, fantastic. But, the more you can rank for, the better, right? The way we target more keywords is either finding the webpage that you currently have and finding good keywords to target for those, or it could be building out more content. So, finding the keywords that you want to rank for, and creating some new content that would rank for them.

That’s it for today, thanks for joining me.