Off-page SEO in healthcare are tactics that happen off your website, rather than on it. Backlinks are one of the strongest off-page SEO signals, showing search engines that trusted sites reference your content. In healthcare, earning quality backlinks improves rankings, AI visibility, and credibility while supporting Google’s YMYL standards. In this blog, we explore backlinks in more detail and explain how they can improve your SEO and website performance.
First, what are backlinks and why do they matter?
A backlink is anywhere on an external website that links back to your site, and Google uses them as votes of confidence on the quality of a web page. Backlink building is a key strategy in digital PR, where specialists analyse and improve your backlinks to increase performance across digital channels.
Below is an example of a backlink, which is one our own Varn Health backlinks. We achieved this backlink by writing helpful content for a healthcare media platform ‘solli’:
And why do they matter? Backlinks for medical and healthcare businesses can help to:
- Influence your visibility and ranking in search engine results
- Improve your authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines and patients alike
- Improve traffic to your website, as websites with a strong backlink profile rank higher and attract more organic traffic
- Establish authority and trust, which are two key E-E-A-T signals that YMYL websites (including healthcare) must demonstrate
Backlinks play a critical role in boosting your Domain Authority score, too. This is a scoring system that predicts how likely your site is to rank on search engine results pages. Interestingly, Semrush published recent data showing that domains with high authority scores are also more likely to be featured in AI-generated answers. With AI search increasingly becoming a destination for health queries, this is a key consideration for health and pharma brands.
In health sectors, authority and trust come first
If you’re a business or brand in health and pharma, it’s essential to earn reputable, sector-relevant backlinks. Not just for SEO, but for compliance and ethics too. The focus is on quality, not quantity – healthcare backlinks need to come from authoritative, trustworthy and compliant sources. A good example would be a link back to your local GP website from the NHS ‘Find a GP’ service.
The next step would be to add relevant anchor text, such as ‘medical professional near Bristol’. This further reinforces your expertise and relevance for users searching based on location.
What counts as a good backlink?
Several metrics indicate if a backlink is high quality or not, which works alongside the principle of quality links over quantity. Some of these include:
- Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score. It predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score of 20 and above is a good starting point because these scores can grow over time. An older website is more likely to develop a higher Domain Authority score.
- Trust and Citation Flow. These metrics are owned by Majestic, and can help factor in what makes a website high quality. Citation Flow refers to the popularity of a link in a site without considering the quality of the link. A website with a lot of links pointing to it will be influential and will get a good citation flow. Trust Flow on the other hand, looks at the trustworthiness of a website based purely on its quality. A good ratio is to aim for a score between 10 and 50, indicating an average level of trust.
- Relevant anchor text. The anchor text you choose must contain keywords relevant to the landing page. Ideally these are also ones you want to rank for. It’s also important to select a variety of anchor texts such as partial and exact match. Exact match keywords are more precise and target a specific search query, while partial match keywords are more flexible. A variety of anchor texts will help your link placements look natural and target different search queries.
Does backlink strategy differ for increasing AI visibility?
AI visibility refers to how likely your brand is to be accurately featured and cited in AI search and overviews. Semrush carried out an interesting study in October 2025, looking at how backlinks influence this visibility.
They took a sample of websites and looked at their domain visibility across five different AI search platforms. Then, they compared these data with key backlink signals. Their main takeaways were:
- Backlinks influence AI visibility, but the effect only becomes significant once your domain reaches a minimum authority threshold
- High-quality backlinks are more important than quantity
- NoFollow and follow links are equally important as each other
Additionally, research from Ahrefs suggests that brand mentions hold 3x more weight in AI citations than backlinks. (A brand mention is when someone simply mentions your brand, product or services without a link). And the highest correlation with AI visibility overall was a mix of backlinks and brand mentions.
Overall, this suggests a good strategy for increasing AI visibility using backlinks requires long-term investment. This should favour high-quality backlinks, be supplemented with brand mentions, and aim to break through the minimum authority threshold over time. Luckily, this broadly aligns with best practices for traditional search too – so you don’t necessarily need to focus on one or the other.
If you’re interested in using backlinks to increase AI visibility specifically, head to our blog about SearchGPT tactics for healthcare backlinks.
How does healthcare backlink building differ from outreach for other sectors?
So far, we’ve explored the vital importance of building credibility when it comes to pharma and healthcare backlink building. However, there are also additional elements to be aware of that are specific to healthcare backlink building.
It differs from link building in, say, e-commerce, that focuses on a broader audience or promote a campaign to the general media or press. A backlink for the pharma industry may specifically targetkey stakeholders, such as healthcare professionals (HCPs) or patient groups. Generating high-quality backlinks may therefore be much more focused on specific healthcare queries.
In addition, as marketing for prescription drugs is strictly regulated, any content discussing medicines or information on specific diseases (including backlinks) needs to be for informative and educational purposes only. These backlinks should exclusively come from approved authoritative sources, which will need to be prioritised alongside SEO best practices.
How can I check my current backlink profile?
At Varn Health, our expert Off-Page SEO team can analyse your current backlink profile and create a healthcare backlink strategy to help increase your profile for target landing pages. There are ways of checking your backlink profile for free (with tools such as Google Search Console). But a more comprehensive, meticulous and in-depth analysis will make sure the backlinks that you obtain deliver an SEO benefit. For example, the backlink would include a ‘dofollow’ tag.
‘Dofollow’ links are optimal links that bring authority and SEO benefits. In contrast, ‘nofollow’ links include a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them. The ‘nofollow’ tag tells search engines to ignore the link when the website is crawled. A healthy backlink profile should have a mix of both ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links.
Expert off-page SEO support
If you have any questions about off-page SEO for your pharmaceutical or healthcare website, or would like to speak to us regarding your current backlink profile, contact Varn Health for specialist advice.
Varn Health is a SEO agency with a unique combination of medical industry expertise & exceptional SEO capabilities. We combine deep knowledge of SEO techniques with extensive experience of medical communications, helping you to grow faster within the compliance framework.
