Why SEO for healthcare is not just a tickbox exercise
20th Feb 2025
As we move through 2025, the SEO landscape is changing rapidly. AI is impacting both how search engines work and how they are used. In response, SEO strategists are rethinking their approach to improving website rankings and traffic. As always, it is important to approach organic search strategies with a flexible mindset, creating a bespoke response to each website’s particular goals and challenges rather than simply following a checkbox list of tasks.
This is even more true when it comes to the healthcare and pharma industries, where website goals and KPIs are likely to be more complex and nuanced than simply growing traffic and rankings. Over the years that the Varn Health team has been focusing on search marketing within this complex industry, we’ve learned that when it comes to healthcare, SEO is always much more than just a tickbox exercise.
How does SEO fit within an omnichannel marketing mix?
Adopting an omnichannel approach to marketing has become increasingly important for pharmaceutical brands. A cohesive omnichannel strategy will provide customers (whether HCPs or patients) with a smooth and integrated experience of your brand where individual touchpoints are connected and consistent. SEO is just one of the elements to take into account as part of a bespoke omnichannel strategy, and your precise approach to SEO will be influenced by your wider goals and tactics as part of the overarching marketing strategy. Rather than following a generic approach to your organic search plans, it is important to ensure that your SEO strategy aligns with the wider omnichannel planning. As a simple example, keyword research may reveal that potential customers are using specific queries to search for particular information, but this language should be used carefully if it does not align with the way you talk about your brand within other digital channels or in-person. Or perhaps the way you talk about your brand across all channels will need to be updated to reflect your SEO keyword research. Likewise, although building strong backlinks via offpage SEO tactics is important for long-term organic search success, this must be approached carefully within the healthcare space to ensure that third-party sites reflect your brand and products in a way that aligns with your whole marketing strategy.
Where should content be shown?
Unlike many industries, sometimes healthcare SEO is about where you don’t want your content to show. For example, some information may be intended for HCPs but not patients, some pages will not be suitable for visitors in specific locations due to local regulations, and promotional content can only be shown in specific circumstances. All of this means that healthcare websites need to be configured with a plan for which content should be accessible to search engines and AI crawling bots, to avoid inappropriate content being pulled by these tools. Rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy, each site will need a bespoke approach which takes into account the particular information available, the audiences it is intended for, and where this should be shown. Technical fixes can then be put in place to block search engines from accessing specific information, or to signpost which content is suitable for which locations.
How can misinformation be avoided within health search?
Within the pharmaceutical, life science, and healthcare industries, avoiding misinformation is essential. Heath marketeers and website owners put a lot of effort into ensuring that their website content is correct, credible and supported by reliable sources. This is also essential from an SEO perspective, as Google considers healthcare content to fall within their YMYL guidelines, meaning it is subject to stricter content accuracy standards than other website types. However, with the advent of AI within search, there is a growing danger of potential misinformation. AI tools often scrape content from multiple sources, combining this information in ways that may be misleading, incorrect or even ‘hallucinatory’. Specialist tactics must be put in place to help AI to correctly understand website content, especially as new research by SEO Clarity suggests that Healthcare tops the list of industries where AI Overviews are featured within SERPs.
What does an out-of-the-box healthcare SEO strategy look like?
Generally speaking, an off-the-shelf SEO strategy would involve working through a tickbox list of generic actions for your website. This would include:
Offpage strategies; supporting your onsite activity by growing good-quality backlinks from other websites tells search engines that your site is highly relevant and trustworthy. A tickbox strategy would mean approaching large numbers of websites related to your site and requesting backlinks from their content to yours.
Technical fixes; ranging from fixing broken links to implementing schema markup, technical fixes ensure that search engine bots can access and understand all your content. A tickbox SEO strategy would mean simply working through a list of general technical best-practices and making sure each is implemented on the website.
Content amends; ensuring that content is structured and optimised correctly, based on topical keyword research, again helps search engines to discover and understand your website content. A tickbox strategy would likely include adding keywords to page headings, URLs, and metadata across your website.
What might a bespoke healthcare SEO strategy look like?
A comprehensive, thoughtful and bespoke SEO strategy for a health or pharmaceutical website will still incorporate the same main streams of SEO, but will approach each item in a more nuanced and specific way, informed by your site’s aims and market:
Offpage strategies; when it comes to backlink-building for pharma websites, quality should be prioritised over quantity. A single link from a good-quality, relevant and credible website that is topically connected to the pertinent subject matter is more impactful and important than a handful of lower-quality or less relevant links. Extremely targeted offpage tactics can be used to reach out to and build relationships with the most relevant and impactful websites in your space.
Technical fixes; a bespoke strategy should prioritise the technical elements that will help your site achieve your specific goals. For example, an international pharma website may need a focus on how and when gated content is crawled, as well as correct hreflang implementation to show specific pages in specific geographic locations. Meanwhile, a product-focused site promoting a specific medicine or drug may utilise specific Product Schema markup to explain this context to search engines. Elsewhere, an informational website for patients which relies on infographics or videos would need a technical strategy that helps to ensure the information within these formats is accessible and comprehensible to search engine crawl bots.
Content amends; content strategies for healthcare sites should be based on keyword data and an understanding of search intent, particularly informed by how HCP and patient searches will differ. Consideration should also be given to creating YMYL content, and structuring pages to help AI pull out information correctly and consistently. Often, not every page will need to be optimised – especially as compliance considerations may limit the way certain language can be used – so a precise keyword strategy must be developed to target relevant terms in the most impactful places.
Need a hand?
Need help putting together an SEO strategy which fits within your wider omnichannel approach to health and pharma marketing? The award-winning Varn Health team can help! With many years experience working within this industry, we know how to navigate the healthcare landscape to help you achieve SEO success. Get in touch today to talk about your goals and challenges.
