Case Study: Leading Pharmaceutical Products and Services Company
Situation
This leading global, research-driven pharmaceutical products and services company discovers, develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of healthcare products. They created a website to provide visitors with important information about one of their cholesterol-reducing drugs that included safety guidelines, prescribing instructions and facts about the medication.
As the site was presented to the iProspect team, it offered prescribing information, patient product information and one press release. Shortly thereafter, a health care provider section and consumer content was added, bringing the total page count to about 50.
The client's goals for their search engine marketing campaign were to maximize the website’s visibility across the major search properties and develop brand awareness.
Challenges
Pharmaceutical companies must be extremely careful about the specific information they present on their websites. A product site cannot be launched until final approval by the FDA is given. This can hamper search engine marketing efforts because there is a limit to the content and keywords that can appear within the site. All content that is to be viewed by the public, (e.g. everything from visible copy to title tags, directory listings and link targets) has to be reviewed and subsequently approved by the FDA. Furthermore, all content must be communicated in a “consumer-friendly” language. This creates an additional challenge for pharmaceutical marketers because problems arise if a site is to be quickly redesigned and launched.
In addition to complying with FDA regulations, the site faced other obstacles. Much of it was designed with Flash technology. Most search engines cannot read and index pages that utilize Flash because the content is embedded within Flash files instead of within HTML code. Although this client did create alternative HTML pages for each page that contained Flash, they were not linked to from any other pages.
Finally, in the initial design of the site, an entire section contained a mandatory cookie. This also hinders search engine visibility in that spider-based properties cannot index pages that require a cookie. As a result, only half of the site had the ability to become accessible within the major search properties.
Solution
iProspect worked with the client to build an internal linking structure so that the static HTML pages (that were built to mirror the Flash pages) would receive a number of relevant links from pages within the client site. Additionally, iProspect recommended and implemented relevant content endorsement™ strategy for the static Web pages so that they could be linked to from other relevant websites. The iProspect team obtained links from related medical resource sites and also established a search directory strategy for both niche and major portals. This process included a thorough analysis of all cholesterol and health related directory categories, the development of keyword-rich titles and page descriptions that met FDA policies, and manual submissions for directory editor review.
iProspect also recommended the addition of static, informational content to the website. This helped reduce the problem that many pages were hidden behind cookies and other visibility-hindering technologies. The content additions also assisted in attaining directory listings and allowed the client to target additional, target keyword phrases. All techniques and tactics employed by iProspect, including the development of meta data for each static page of the site, worked in concert with FDA regulations.
Results
Traffic from search has increased by over 16,000 visitors per month since the start of the search engine marketing campaign with iProspect.
The number of keywords generating rankings for the client’s website has increased by 33%.
81% of the site’s rankings are visible on the first page of search results.
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