There are some industries out there which display a big gap between their potential to perform in organic search and their actual performance. One such industry is the pharmaceutical industry.  Here, we are referring to those legitimate pharmaceutical companies, which have set aside significant budgets for digital marketing purposes.

While pharmaceutical companies usually blame regulatory restrictions for their poor showing, it is obvious that they do not have a good understanding of digital marketing basics. Another thing, most digital marketing companies do not realise that their clients are not aware about how search engines work. This leads to contracts being drawn up and signed, with both parties feeling happy.

Many times, corporate websites of pharmaceutical companies are treated like standalone offline marketing promotions. When the annual budget is announced, the first idea is to create a new website. Most pharmaceutical companies have separate websites for different audience segments, different types of content (branded or unbranded), and different products. In fact, sometimes, a single product may have around six websites with separate domain names. These sites are unfortunately run on a small digital marketing budget that wouldn’t be enough for even one website in a competitive market.

Instead, a better digital marketing strategy would be to create a maximum of two domains, one for branded content and the other for unbranded content. If the pharmaceutical company wants to target a new marketing segment, they could simply create a micro-site in a new sub-folder.

In the digital marketing sphere, it is obvious that websites with 10 pages will not perform as well as websites with 100 pages. In the pharmaceutical industry, we will rarely witness new pages being added to websites. Instead, every year, the same website is given a different design and new content, which is not very different from the original content. Even though a huge amount of money is spent, search engines rarely see anything different, resulting in stagnation of search engine rankings.

Instead, digital marketing professionals should consider developing a system to archive content. This can be done by moving content to a different folder, adding another navigational level, adding keyword-rich content pages or starting a blog. News and information based websites are experts in archiving online content, and it is time digital marketing specialists began doing the same for pharmaceutical companies too!

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency, and can be contacted on 0845 388 5583 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.