SEO services for pharma brands

Optimising pharma brands for SEO and AI search within compliance frameworks

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Helping pharmaceutical brands stay visible, compliant and competitive in search

Search plays a critical role in how healthcare professionals (HCPs), researchers, and patients discover and engage with pharmaceutical content. However, SEO for the pharmaceutical industry is unlike any other sector, with strict regulatory guidelines, complex medical content and long sales cycles. This means that traditional digital marketing strategies simply don’t work.

With the rise of AI-powered search, it is no longer enough to optimise for Google alone. AI search models, answer engines, and voice assistants are changing how healthcare content is discovered and consumed. Pharmaceutical brands must now ensure their content is search-optimised, compliant and structured for AI-driven discoverability or ‘Generative Engine Optimisation’ known as GEO, as well as the search engines.

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How Varn Health help pharma & biotech brands get visible

At Varn Health, we are experts in pharma SEO, data analytics, and AI search. We help pharmaceutical, biotech and life sciences brands get visible in a search, ensuring that their content ranks well while understanding how to effectively meet regulatory requirements.

Whether you need to enhance HCP engagement, improve patient access to trusted medical information, or support your in-house digital team, we provide strategic SEO solutions tailored for the pharmaceutical sector.

Understanding regulatory-compliant SEO for pharma

Pharma SEO must balance search visibility with strict compliance requirements. Unlike consumer industries, pharmaceutical brands must ensure that all content adheres to medical regulations, advertising restrictions, and region-specific guidelines. This means that keyword targeting, content structuring, and metadata must be handled appropriately to avoid regulatory risks, while maintaining high visibility in search results.

At Varn Health, we understand the complexities of these regulatory frameworks and work closely with internal pharma teams to help your brand achieve compliance while maximising its organic search presence.

We work collaboratively with your legal and medical affairs teams to ensure that all optimisations meet industry standards, so your pharma brand can maintain both trust and discoverability.

Compliance focused SEO services from Varn Health

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AI optimised search strategies for pharma

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AI optimised search strategies for pharma

Search is evolving, and pharma brands must adapt to AI-powered discovery. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, and new AI-driven answer engines are changing how medical professionals and patients find information. Traditional keyword strategies are no longer enough and your content must be structured, machine-readable, and optimised for LLM’s (Large Language Models) and AI algorithms.
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Technical SEO & search intelligence

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Technical SEO & search intelligence

Technical SEO is fundamental for pharmaceutical websites, ensuring that content is accessible, discoverable, and fully optimised for search engines. A poorly structured website, slow load times, or inefficient indexing can significantly impact a brand’s search visibility; especially in the highly competitive pharma sector.
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Data driven SEO & performance tracking for pharma

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Data driven SEO & performance tracking for pharma

SEO in the pharmaceutical industry must be data-driven, measurable, and aligned with business objectives. At Varn Health, we don’t just optimise for rankings, we use advanced analytics and reporting to provide deep insights into HCP and patient search behaviour, content performance, and ROI tracking.
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Paid media & off-page SEO for pharma

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Paid media & off-page SEO for pharma

Reaching and engaging healthcare audiences requires more than just visibility — it demands strategy, trust, and compliance. At Varn Health, we run precision-targeted paid campaigns and build high-quality backlink profiles to drive awareness, authority, and results. Our team understands the regulatory landscape, helping campaigns and off-page activity to be both impactful and compliant.
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How we can help pharma brands

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Creating AI-focused SEO strategies to help pharmaceutical brands stay ahead:
  • Structuring content for AI search engines and answer engines to ensure accurate, high-quality pharma content ranks in AI-generated results.
  • Enhancing visibility across voice search, AI assistants, and emerging digital health platforms.
  • Implementing schema markup, structured data, and advanced metadata to help search engines understand and surface content correctly.
  • Our dedicated Innovation Team actively research and share GEO and AI-driven search insights, to help pharma brands remain visible.
Technical-seo-audits
Technical SEO solutions for pharmaceutical brands for visibility and performance:
  • Optimising website architecture and internal linking to improve crawlability and search performance.
  • Ensuring fast page speeds, mobile responsiveness, and Core Web Vitals compliance for enhanced user experience.
  • Implementing structured data markup to help search engines understand complex pharmaceutical content.
  • We ensure that pharma websites are technically robust and AI-ready.
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A data-led SEO approach to help Pharma brands make smart data led decisions:
  • Custom dashboards that provide clear, real-time insights into search trends, keyword performance, and audience engagement.
  • Competitor analysis and benchmarking to identify gaps and opportunities in the market.
  • Conversion tracking and impact measurement, ensuring that SEO efforts contribute to meaningful business growth.
  • By combining search intelligence with advanced analytics, we help pharmaceutical brands make smarter, data-backed marketing decisions.
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Paid media and off-page SEO for pharmaceutical brands to drive reach, trust, and engagement:
  • Running highly targeted paid search and display campaigns to reach patients and HCPs at the right time.
  • Maximising media budgets while aligning with industry regulations and approval processes.
  • Securing high-quality backlinks and digital PR to boost authority and search rankings.
  • We help pharma brands build trust and engagement always with compliance in mind.
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Do you need SEO expertise to get visible online?

Why pharma brands choose Varn Health

With over 15 years of experience in regulated industries, Varn Health understands the unique challenges of pharma SEO. Our team of SEO specialists, data analysts, and AI search experts ensures that every strategy is tailored to the complexities of the pharmaceutical sector.

Award winning SEO strategies for Roche

Winning Gold at the PM Society Digital Awards for our collaboration with Roche is a testament to our expertise in pharmaceutical SEO. We have successfully partnered with leading global pharma brands, delivering high-performance SEO strategies that not only drive targeted traffic but also enhance engagement, improve HCP and patient discoverability, and generate measurable conversions.

Our track record in working alongside internal regulatory teams whilst implementing data-driven SEO strategies, ensures our pharmaceutical clients achieve sustained search visibility and competitive advantage.

Some of our happy pharma clients
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"Varn Health's SEO team has been a great sparring partner to achieve our global SEO vision and is also just a blast to work with. I really value and can rely on their deep know-how of both the pharmaceutical industry and SEO. Thanks to their flexibility as well as their proactive out of the box approaches, no challenge has been insurmountable. I look forward to every interaction with them and can wholeheartedly recommend working with them.”

Kevin Näf-Gohl

Channel Experience Strategy Lead (Web & SEO), Roche

"We had an urgent need to get a digital marketing campaign live and quickly. The Varn Health team guided us through the process from start to finish, advising us to ensure the project and supporting activities had longevity and met our customers' needs and business KPIs. We are still working with them 3 years later!"

Shelley Anderson

International Marketing Director (Oncology Rare Diseases) Kyowa Kirin

“Varn Health's proven expertise in SEO and search marketing will be essential in meeting the needs of our audience in an increasingly digital healthcare landscape. Varn Health is working with multiple brand teams within Alliance, not just to improve visibility but also to guide us through the ever-changing world of SEO.”

Sean Craig

Global Digital Marketing Manager, Alliance

FAQS
  • Increased online visibility of your healthcare or pharma website.
  • Builds trust, credibility, and authority through a strong online presence.
  • Reach a wider audience through various SEO tactics such as keyword research, content optimisations, and schema markup.
  • Improving patient and HCP user experience as they find your healthcare and pharma product or service.
    Get ahead of your competitors in the highly competitive and regulated medical, pharma, and healthcare sectors. Contact us today to find out how Varn Health can help you develop an SEO strategy.

This depends on what pillar of SEO is being focused on:

  1. Technical SEO: Upon conducting a technical SEO audit, our specialist team points out technical issues within your healthcare website. For example, unoptimised information within your infographics may be inaccessible to Google, which can be fixed by adding schema markup and alt text.
  2. On-Page SEO: our initial research and technical SEO audit informs our on-page strategy. An example of this would be conducting keyword research to discover what terms patients and HCPs are using to search for queries, and then naturally implementing those terms via content creation and optimisation.
  • Off-Page SEO: If we are working on an off-page strategy, an example would be to share your research study with relevant authors looking to cite a credible study within their article.
  • AI & Innovation: our dedicated AI & Innovation team looks to optimise your medical website for AI-powered features such as AI overviews and SearchGPT. This may look like using semantic SEO techniques and structured data to ensure your content is recognised by AI and writing digestible, in-depth content that AI favours when displaying search results.

There are a few quick changes you can make to your healthcare website to improve your SEO and search rankings.

  • Encourage patients to review you on Google Business or social media – Positive reviews play a crucial role in building trust and credibility for healthcare providers. A top SEO tip for healthcare is to encourage patients to leave reviews on platforms like Google Business, Facebook, or specialised healthcare review sites, significantly enhancing your online reputation. Not only do reviews influence potential patients’ decisions, but they also contribute to your website’s visibility in search engine results.
  • Optimise your HTML tags – HTML tags, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and heading tags, are vital elements for technical SEO. Title tags provide concise descriptions of each web page’s content and appear as clickable headlines in search results. Meta descriptions offer summaries that can entice users to click through to your website. By effectively optimising these tags with relevant keywords and compelling descriptions, you can improve your website’s visibility.
  • Check your site’s technical health – Technical issues can hinder your website’s performance in search engine rankings. Conducting regular audits to identify and address technical issues will serve as a medical marketer’s guide to website conversion optimisation. is a crucial part of a medical SEO tip to maintain optimal healthcare website performance. This includes ensuring that your website loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, has secure HTTPS encryption, and is free of broken links or crawl errors.

This depends on your business goals, the SEO service our healthcare SEO experts believe would be most suitable after initial research, and the expertise of the agency. The cost of a one time SEO project ranges from £3,000 to £30,000, with hourly rates ranging from £120 to £200, depending on the SEO consultant’s experience. Depending on how small or large the scope of work is, SEO projects may cost between £3,000 and £30,000 per month.

Whilst you can see results after 3 to 4 months, you begin to see a real impact after about 6 to 12 months after implementing SEO changes to a website. SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that requires progressive actions over time, and may take several months to yield noticeable results. However, once the primary website pages begin nearing the top of the SERPs in Google’s search results, this is when we see a definitive increase in KPI’s and website traffic.

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