SEO services for healthcare and medical brands

Expert search marketing services to help your healthcare website gain visibility and market share online

What is medical SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to actions taken both on and off your healthcare website to increase its visibility within search engines. This includes appearing within Google and Bing’s search results pages as well as social media platforms including YouTube,  for content across your website.

Recently, AI-powered search results have become increasingly prominent, with our whitepaper highlighting that 50% of healthcare professionals are planning to incorporate AI within their practice in the future. Varn Health’s tailored SEO strategies work to boost your healthcare and pharma website’s visibility including emerging platforms like SearchGPT and AI Overviews.

How does healthcare SEO help medical websites?

Why does SEO matter for the medical profession? Search is often the first step in a healthcare journey with 59% of online users in the UK searching for symptoms online, and 88.5% of Healthcare professionals searching for highly specific search queries, often involving drug interactions or research studies. If your healthcare or pharma brand isn’t visible in those moments, your audience may never discover your content, products, or services.

Implementing healthcare SEO strategies connects your website’s content with specific user intent. Particularly within healthcare, achieving this is critical as a patient or a healthcare professional making the wrong decision due to false information can have adverse consequences.

Optimising your healthcare or pharma website through technical and on-page SEO strategies ensures your website is fully accessible by Google and provides genuinely clear, useful content that matches user intent. On the other hand, off-page SEO builds authority through external mentions and links to your medical website, another key factor that increases its rankings within search results.

A combination of these SEO pillars maximises your visibility with Google and AI-powered search engines, boosting website traffic and sales.

Why search matters

The role of SEO in healthcare is now vital

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77 %

of people use search engines to start their patient journey

84 %

of physicians search for condition-related keywords

62 %

of physicians abandon mobile websites if not optimised for smartphones

Download our whitepaper
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Interested in SEO services for your healthcare and pharma website?

We’re a top healthcare SEO agency

With over 15 years of experience in SEO and data, our expert search marketing team blends creativity, innovation and data expertise to create medical SEO strategies tailored to your website.

We pride ourselves on leveraging ongoing changes in the search landscape, whether it’s Google’s guidelines or AI-powered search results, to accelerate your healthcare website’s growth, generating leads and boosting website traffic.

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Who are our medical SEO services for?

Our healthcare SEO services are tailored for any business in the healthcare industry, including medical practitioners and clinics, healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Our clients care about:

  • Being found by HCPs and patients across emerging platforms
  • Building trust and discoverability for regulated and consumer-facing health content
  • Making sense of data to improve engagement, content performance and ROI
  • Staying ahead of digital health disruption, from AI search to platform shifts

Our dedicated SEO Innovation Team ensures your brand is found where consumers are actively searching, while our data and analytics expertise enables precise performance tracking leading to insightful data driven decision making.

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We combine expertise scaling six key disciplines to deliver effective healthcare SEO strategies & results

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Train & upskill your team in healthcare SEO

As the healthcare digital landscape continuously evolves, and particularly as we see the increasing impact of AI-powered search capabilities, it is important to stay ahead of how search may impact your healthcare business. At Varn Health, we have curated bespoke training courses to keep you and your team up to date in the latest in healthcare search marketing thinking, whilst also building knowledge, skillsets and confidence in the discipline of SEO.

Whether you’d like to better understand and analyse your data and how to effectively report on the insights that data can uncover, or explore how to create impactful healthcare content for the appropriate keywords, our SEO training courses can help. For example, we’ve created training sessions to help content teams explore best practice for SEO medical copywriting, which in turn has helped to enhance internal resource capabilities.

Our award winning results

We have worked with respected businesses across the healthcare industry for over 15 years.

We were very honoured to receive a PM Society Gold Award for our SEO project in collaboration with our client, Roche. The winning project exemplifies Varn Health’s technical SEO expertise and in-depth knowledge of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. In collaboration with Roche, we successfully amalgamated multiple micro-websites into a single central domain—Medically, a global healthcare professional resource (excluding the US). This complex SEO challenge aimed to protect existing rankings and website traffic, improve organic search visibility and ensure seamless content migration.

View more of our results

A timeframe for the results of Medical SEO

SEO is a long-term strategy; although you start to see results after 3 to 4 months, you can only see a real impact at the 6 to 12-month mark after implementing SEO changes and improvements to a website. An SEO strategy requires continuous improvements over a long period to view noticeable results.

Our 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.

Varn Health SEO and data team
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Do you need SEO expertise to get your healthcare website visible online?