Off-Page SEO for Healthcare | Why backlinks are important

23rd May 2024
Search engines view backlinks as a sign of trust and authority. Link building refers to the process of encouraging other people to add a link to your website within their own online content, through different tactics such as guest posting, digital PR, product outreach, link placements, and unlinked mentions. This is often referred to as Off-Page SEO. Backlinks offer a useful way for users to navigate between pages on the internet, helping you find additional information outside of the host website.
In this blog, we explore backlinks in more detail and explain how they can improve your SEO and website performance. In healthcare, implementing a backlink-building strategy is crucial for boosting your relevant healthcare information’s ranking on SERPs, (Search Engine Results Pages), building trust, and complying with Google’s YMYL, (Your Money Your Life) guidelines. These guidelines refer to topics and pages that could have real-world effects on users, including healthcare.
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, as reputable websites linking to you act like a vote of confidence.
- Improve traffic to your website, as websites with a strong backlink profile rank higher and attract more organic traffic.
- Establish trust as they essentially serve as endorsements of credibility.
Here is a visual representation of how a backlink can link through to your website using one of our own Varn Health backlinks, achieved by writing helpful content for a healthcare media platform ‘solli’:

Authority & Trust
If you are a business or brand in healthcare and pharma, it’s vital you attain backlinks that are reputable and relevant in your healthcare sector. A high-quality and relevant backlink is a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google and will help prove that your website is sharing important healthcare information to searchers as well as lead to an increase in organic traffic.For example, a link back to your local GP website from the NHS ‘Find a GP’ service would count as a high-quality and relevant backlink.
If you are also using relevant anchor texts like ‘medical professional near Bristol (or [your city]’, Google will see this as your website providing key information for searchers in this location.
What counts as a good backlink?
There are a number of metrics that can be used to understand if a backlink is of 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 developed by Moz that 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 trust flow score between 10 and 50, indicating an average level of trust.
- Relevant anchor text. The anchor text you choose must contain relevant keywords on what you wish to rank for, and relevant to the landing page. 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 in working within a content piece. A variety of anchor texts will help your link placements look natural and target different search queries.
How does healthcare backlink building differ from outreach for other sectors?
So far in this article, we have 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 and consider that are specific to healthcare backlink building.
Unlike link building in say e-commerce, that may focus on a broader audience or promote a campaign to the general media or press, a backlink targeting the pharma industry may be specifically targeting key stakeholders, for instance, healthcare professionals (HCPs) or patient groups. Generating high quality backlinks may therefore be much more targeted and focused around certain searches and 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 strictly informative and educational, and linked to 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 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). However, a more comprehensive, meticulous and in-depth analysis will help ensure the backlinks that you obtain will 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 our deep knowledge of SEO techniques with our extensive experience of medical communications and compliance, helping you to grow your pharma brand and business faster within the compliance framework.