What pharma and healthcare marketers can learn from Tom Vaughton’s 4 core SEO strategies shared at brightonSEO

14th Apr 2025

Before sharing the four core strategies, Tom opened his talk with an important lesson he has learnt from his 25 years in search:

“Your SEO strategy will never exceed the quality of the questions you ask.”

Tom’s message was clear: success in SEO doesn’t start with keywords or content. It starts with clarity. The most effective SEO strategies are rooted in asking better questions. These are questions that connect your search activity directly to your business, patient, and HCP goals. This advice is especially relevant in the pharma and healthcare space, where marketing teams must balance compliance, education as well as impact; and often within tight regulatory frameworks.

Here’s how the four strategic approaches Tom outlined can help healthcare marketers and pharma brand teams make smarter decisions with search.

1. The cost-led strategy

For many pharma and healthcare brands, marketing budgets may be needed to stretch across multiple channels, stakeholders and audiences. A cost-led SEO strategy focuses on impact; not volume. It’s about identifying high impact improvements that can be delivered within existing resources.

This approach can be particularly valuable for early stage product websites for example or regional brand teams working independently from global campaigns.

In healthcare, this might mean:

• Building internal buy-in with measurable progress over time, rather than expecting overnight results.
• Prioritising the top-performing content assets (e.g. patient FAQs, condition pages) and refining them for better discoverability.
• Using internal linking strategies to surface high value pages more effectively.
• Automating metadata generation or HCP keyword grouping using AI tools.

2. The differentiation strategy

Healthcare is filled with repetitive, templated content. A differentiation strategy offers the chance to stand out by offering information that better reflects patient concerns or the needs of specialist clinicians. This isn’t about gimmicks or going viral. It’s about insight. What questions are being asked that aren’t being answered well by others? What experiences, perspectives or data can your healthcare brand uniquely provide?

Tactics for pharma and health brands include:

• Testing new content formats (e.g. interactive explainers, structured Q&As) via paid search to validate what resonates.
• Identifying information gaps through search data: e.g. misunderstood symptoms, unaddressed concerns, or underrepresented patient experiences.
• Partnering with patient groups or HCPs to co-create more authentic, credible content.

3. The niche strategy

Niche SEO is about becoming the trusted authority in your category and that takes time and precision. Your audience is smaller but deeply engaged. When your digital footprint is targeting consultants, nurses, or highly informed patient groups, depth of content and clarity of expertise becomes essential.

To succeed here:

• Keep content evergreen, but structured for updates as clinical data, regulatory info or treatment pathways evolve.
• Map out the entire patient or HCP journey and align your content to each stage (awareness, diagnosis, treatment, support).
• Create rich content clusters that go beyond basic descriptions—think journal reviews, guideline updates, and expert insights.

4. The growth strategy

This approach is essential for pharma and health businesses scaling up digital transformation or rolling out major brand initiatives. Tom stressed that SEO teams must speak the language of value creation to get a seat at the table. In pharma, this often means aligning with broader brand strategy, commercial planning and omnichannel engagement goals.

To succeed, you need to:

• Ensure your reporting demonstrates business impact, not just traffic; highlighting referral volume to CRM journeys, downloads, or resource views.
• Engage senior stakeholders to understand the company’s growth ambitions.
• Connect SEO objectives directly to HCP or patient engagement KPIs across global and local brand teams.
• Integrate SEO planning early in the product lifecycle.

Final thoughts

Tom argued that in an AI-powered search landscape, the basics still matter, but they must be strategic. Pharma and healthcare marketers have a unique responsibility: to ensure that patients and professionals find trustworthy, accessible, and meaningful content. That’s not about volume, it’s about alignment.

“Your tactics matter. But your SEO strategy will only succeed if it’s aligned to your business goals and your audience’s needs.”

If you’re unsure which strategy best fits your goals, our team at Varn Health can help. We bring together SEO expertise, healthcare insight and data clarity to guide the right approach. Contact our expert team.