The Importance of Technical SEO for Healthcare and Pharma Websites

30th Jul 2024

Healthcare and pharma is radically changing, particularly when it comes to the discoverability of brands and healthcare solutions online. Digital presence and visibility is more critical than ever and online platforms are becoming the go-to source for health-related information and services. This all means that ensuring your website is optimised for search is more important than ever.

So why is Technical SEO important in Healthcare?

Technical SEO Improves Search Engine Rankings

Search engines like Google will prioritise websites that are technically robust and provide a positive user experience. We work closely with our clients to support them in optimising all of the technical aspects of their website. This can include elements such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, structured data markup, and crawlability.

Technical SEO is Important for Compliance

Healthcare websites must adhere to strict regulatory standards. Implementing considered and robust technical SEO will ensure that your website meets these requirements, protecting patient information and maintaining trust. For instance, ensuring certain content is correctly gated. We recently shared a helpful blog which explores compliance when creating content in the highly regulated environment of healthcare.

Technical SEO Improves User Experience

Technical SEO is focused on optimising your website, which will ensure it is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and provides a seamless user experience. In healthcare, user trust and accessibility are paramount, which means a smooth browsing experience will significantly impact your audience’s engagement and satisfaction. Simple issues such as a user landing on a 404 page or a slow loading time can hugely impact their experience.

Technical SEO Will Optimise Your Content

Ensuring your healthcare content has been optimised from a technical perspective is crucial. This will include making sure your headings are properly defined in the page code (e.g. H1, H2), optimising your images with descriptive alt text, implementing a clear site structure with internal linking and maintaining a clean URL structure. As a result, you can improve both user experience and search engine crawlability and indexing

Technical SEO Delivers Local SEO Results

We often see that localised content is a recurring area of concern and consideration for pharmaceutical brands. Technical SEO includes adopting strategies such as optimising your Google My Business profile, managing online reviews, and ensuring accurate NAP—Name, Address, Phone Number—information, which will enhance your local online visibility. If you’re interested in learning more about local SEO we recently shared a helpful article about local SEO for pharma and healthcare websites.

Technical SEO Fixes Errors

Conducting Technical SEO Audits regularly, will help you identify and fix issues such as broken links, crawl errors, duplicate content, and indexation problems. Healthcare websites can often have large amounts of content and complex structures, which means conducting a website audit regularly is essential for maintaining your website’s health, ensuring your content is discoverable by search engines, and correctly setting up any gated content. 

How will a Technical SEO Audit uncover SEO opportunities?

We often begin a website project with our healthcare clients by conducting a Technical SEO Audit of their website.

This involves a detailed examination of multiple aspects of a website that will impact its search engine visibility and performance. Our audits are always tailored to the specific needs and goals of our healthcare client’s website. We will examine a website’s content and coding as well as conduct a thorough examination of the competitive landscape. This holistic approach helps identify both internal and external factors impacting SEO performance. The objective of the audit is to find areas where improvements can be made to attract more organic (unpaid) traffic from the search engines.

In these audits, we deliver prioritised recommendations, ranking them in order of importance to help you focus your resources on fixing the most impactful SEO issues first. The findings and recommendations from our audits are used to create a long-term plan for improving and maintaining the website’s search engine visibility. This strategic approach ensures sustainable growth in organic traffic over time.

Investing in Technical SEO is now a necessity for healthcare and pharma businesses. Contact our expert team to discuss how we can help drive growth through innovative Technical SEO solutions that will be tailored to your specific needs.