Industry Specialism
Pharmaceutical SEO
At Assertive we specialise in pharmaceutical & life science SEO. We help online pharmacies and store-front pharmacy chains to improve their organic presence online. Whether you are a pharmaceutical chain with pharmacies scattered across the UK or whether you are specifically an online pharmacy we can help.
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WHAT IS PHARMACEUTICAL SEO
We also work with pharma brands including pharmaceutical & medicine manufacturers, life science, gene & cell therapy brands alongside laboratories, DNA testing brands and more.
Pharmaceutical SEO is the process of optimising the website & strengthening the brand so that it performs better across organic search be it Google, Google’s AI overviews or AI mode, Bing and other search engines such as DuckDuckGo or Brave.
Pharmaceutical SEO often involves full technical SEO resolution + on page optimisation to enhance performance for all page types from medicine pages through to medical product categories so that they appear higher up in Google search results.
Pharma SEO is often a complex interplay of strong technical SEO, high quality medically vetted content alongside high quality link building. Because the niche is generally highly regulated there are a lot of things required around compliance as well as trust.
WHAT WE OFFER
We offer all types of pharma brands a full SEO service including seo auditing, seo strategy, seo retainers & link building/brand building for AI search. We can help with:
We help all types of pharmaceutical brand to rank more prominently in Google search, AI search and in LLMS (large language models) such as chatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and more.
- Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Brand SEO Audits - we can help identify issues with everything from medical products & categories through to pharma research content issues
- Lifescience brand auditing & strategy
- Pharmaceutical research body auditing & strategy
- Pharmaceutical & chemist product & product category SEO
- Weight loss brand SEO (wegovy, mounjaro etc.)
- Chemist & local pharmacy chain local SEO services
- Medical distribution SEO
- Medicines regulatory body SEO
- Full pharmacy SEO services
- Pharmaceutical link building and digital PR services
WHY PHARMA SEO IS DIFFERENT TO SEO FOR OTHER NICHES?
Because medicines & drugs can pose a serious risk to peoples health and wellbeing Google applies heavy scrutiny to ensure that professional businesses are returned and that unscrupulous or unregulated businesses are not.
Unregulated pharmacies selling prescription medication without a prescription could lead to injury or death, therefore ensuring businesses are genuine, trusted and a safe source of medication is crucial for Google.
Google will have a broad plethora of ranking factors / algorithm checks applied specifically to the pharma industry to ensure that genuine businesses rank - therefore, those same criteria make SEO for pharma much more complex and where trust, compliance and regulation are visible, demonstrated and maintained.
Google holds health content also to the same strict standards (YMYL - your money your life and E-E-A-T - experience, expertise, authority and trust. This is because it’s not just medicines that are a risk, bad medical advice is also highly risky therefore Google has to cover this in-depth.
This is why regulatory compliance is explicit, this is why showing all relevant credentials on the site is crucial along with professional medical content vetting, high quality links and more. Whether that’s restricting medical claims, making it clear what medications are prescription only, listing any bodies i.e. ABPI, MHRA Blue Guide, PAGB/GPhC etc.Strict medical and regulatory compliance, highly competitive SERPS + expensive paid CPCs all drive up the cost and competitiveness of pharmaceutical SEO.
SEO FOR PHARMACIES
We help pharmacies across the UK and internationally to perform better organically leading to an increase in revenue / ROI. Our white-hat, high quality SEO can help pharmacies to significantly increase their product offering and service visibility online.
Whether you are an online pharmacy offering prescriptions, medications, NHS services and private consultations or a chain of high street pharmacy/chemists - we can help ensure your brand and website/s are better placed to rank, drive more traffic and ultimately more sales.
For online pharmacies, we help to improve the overall brand / domain strength & we optimise medicine categories and medicinal products so that they appear more prominently in traditional google search results, in product snippets and in AI overviews.
We get more people browsing your medicine categories or to specific medications they are looking for so that they buy and transact directly through your website. Typically for pharmacies we’ll look at:
We cover absolutely every part of the SEO from initial SEO auditing through to SEO implementation on websites (we can work with any CMS or custom build / custom tech stack).
We handle content auditing, content production, content approval and sign off by a vetted medical professional alongside high quality link building - earning links pharmacies need to rank better.
- Your overall size and coverage as a pharmacy (how many medicine categories and medicines your pharmacy has)
- The quality of your medicine categories i.e. volume of medicines, layout, UX, filtering, descriptions as well as accessibility via internal links, navigation etc
- The quality of your PDPs (product display pages) - so the medicine content is it recycled content from the manufacturer where it’s used on lots of other pharmacy websites
- The utilisation of the navigation and accessibility down from medicine category down to medicines
- Pagination accessibility for medicines beyond the first page
- Filtering of medications and handling of parameterised URLS
- Structured data for the brand, categories, products and medical content authors
- E-E-A-T content checks
- Content quality checks for medicines
- Brand authority checks - brand consistency, compliance, regulatory information
- Domain authority - looking at your pharmacy domains link profile, authority, weighting and link quality
- Local SEO and google my business profiles
- External brand mentions and citations
- Brand search volume, search sentiment, reviews
WHAT WE HELP PHARMACEUTICAL BRANDS TO ACHIEVE
With our professional pharma seo service, we help brands to:
- Increase rankings in Google’s traditional search results
- Increase visibility in Google’s AI overviews
- Get more products shown in Google’s product snippets
- Increase relevant traffic from higher intent keywords related to products or services
- Increase conversions, enquiries and revenue
- Generate more brand awareness
- Strengthen brand authority and visibility in AI search
- Increased mentions in chatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok etc.
WHAT TYPE OF PHARMACEUTICAL BUSINESSES DO WE HELP?
We work with all types of pharmaceutical business including but not limited to:
Research & Development
- Big pharma / originator companies (e.g. developing patented drugs end-to-end)
- Biotech firms (biologics, gene therapy, cell therapy)
- Contract Research Organisations (CROs) - outsourced clinical trials and research
- Drug discovery companies (early-stage molecule development, often licensing out)
Manufacturing
- Generic drug manufacturers
- Biosimilar manufacturers
- Contract Manufacturing Organisations (CMOs) / CDMOs (contract development and manufacturing)
- Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) producers
- Excipient and raw material suppliers
- Sterile/injectable specialists
- Compounding pharmacies (bespoke formulations)
Distribution & Retail
- Pharmaceutical wholesalers and distributors
- Community/retail pharmacies (independent and chains)
- Online pharmacies and telehealth prescribers
- Hospital and specialty pharmacies
- Parallel importers (relevant in UK/EU markets)
Specialised Product Categories
- Over-the-counter (OTC) medicine companies
- Nutraceuticals and supplements
- Veterinary pharmaceuticals
- Vaccines manufacturers
- Medical cannabis producers
- Radiopharmaceuticals (diagnostic/therapeutic isotopes)
- Orphan drug / rare disease specialists
Services & Support
- Regulatory affairs consultancies
- Pharmacovigilance (drug safety monitoring) providers
- Medical communications and market access agencies
- Pharmaceutical logistics / cold chain specialists
- Clinical trial recruitment platforms
- Pharma packaging and labelling companies
- Laboratory testing and quality assurance services
Adjacent/Emerging
- Digital therapeutics and health tech
- Pharmacogenomics / personalised medicine
- Drug repurposing companies
- AI drug discovery platforms
SEO SERVICES WE OFFER
For pharma businesses we offer:
FULL SEO AUDITS:
We conduct professional, bespoke SEO audits that look at a websites organic performance in google search, followed by a full technical SEO audit, a page indexing audit, a content audit, a link audit and finally a brand and user behaviour audit.
We cover everything that’s absolutely crucial for pharmacy & pharma businesses including crawlability, indexability, site architecture, structured data, internal linking, content exercises, core web vitals and more.
All pharma SEO audits are highly detailed, provide insights and clear, actionable recommendations.
SEO RETAINERS:
Post SEO audit, we can run full SEO retainers for pharma clients, this means doing all of the day to day SEO from implementing fixes and running SEO tests through to improving core web vitals, producing new content, earning new links and strengthening the brand.
The SEO retainers typically cover:
- On site / on page SEO - so tweaking titles, headers, content ordering, header tags
- Content production - producing new medical content, getting approval & sign off
- Content management - managing decaying or stagnant content
- SEO testing - so finding out what is and isn’t working, experimenting and testing
- Link building - earning & building links to strengthen brand authority
- AI visibility building - helping with AI SEO / GEO
SPECIFIC SEO TASKS:
We can also help with specific things such as:
- Pharma brand CMS migrations or changes
- Pharma site re-designs
- Pharma domain name changes or rebranding
2 Audiences, 2 Search Strategies
Pharmaceutical SEO fails when it treats healthcare professionals and patients as one audience. Each audience is likely to search differently, they evaluate content differently, and UK regulations dictate what you can say to each of them. Any SEO strategy that ignores this either likely underperforms or creates compliance risk. We build ours around the split from day 1.
SEO for Healthcare Professionals
HCPs search in clinical language, they're looking for mechanism of action content, prescribing information, clinical trial data, dosing guidance and treatment guidelines, and they expect the depth and referencing standards of a peer-reviewed source, not a marketing page.
Our HCP-focused work targets the terminology prescribers and procurement teams actually use, structured to satisfy both Google's E-E-A-T requirements and the ABPI Code of Practice. That means content built on cited evidence, clear authorship from medically qualified reviewers, and site architecture that keeps HCP-directed material appropriately gated or signposted where required. The result is generally visibility with the audience that influences prescribing and purchasing decisions through a channel they trust.
SEO for Patients and the Public
Patients don't search for "mechanism of action". They search for symptoms, conditions, treatment options and "is X safe". Patient-facing content needs to be accurate, balanced and written in plain language while staying firmly on the right side of the MHRA Blue Guide, which prohibits promoting prescription-only medicines to the public.
For consumer health, OTC and online pharmacy brands, that's a commercial opportunity: educational condition content, product-category pages and health guidance that ranks, builds trust and converts. For prescription-side businesses, it means compliant disease-awareness content that supports informed conversations with clinicians without crossing promotional lines.
Why the Split Matters for Rankings
Google classifies all of this as YMYL content the category held to the highest quality standards in search. Content that muddles clinical and consumer messaging satisfies neither audience, and Google notices. By separating keyword research, content architecture and internal linking for each audience, we build sites where every page has a clear job: the right information, for the right reader, at the right point in their decision.
OUR PROCESS
For any pharma brand looking at transitioning their SEO agency, here’s how we typically work with new clients:
We can and do with with regulatory teams and compliance teams where required.
- You submit an enquiry to us, provide information about your website, any challenges, struggles or issues
- We get in contact to discuss the SEO work and possibly set up a discovery call
- We generate a quotation for SEO including an overview of the work, roadmap, what to expect etc
- If you decide to proceed, we exchange information, NDA’s and getting a discovery session underway (who does what, implementation, reporting, KPISs)
- We begin with an SEO audit to assess current organic state of play, rankings, traffic, gaps, opportunities, SEO issues
- Recommendations are delivered and reviewed, then, subject to implementation criteria either we implement the fixes or work with a developer to get fixes implemented
- We begin the ongoing monthly SEO which will include the things listed above
- We set up regular reporting and report back on performance, changes to visibility, sales, conversions etc.
HOW LONG DOES PHARMA SEO TAKE?
This varies significantly, it really depends on the websites underlying performance, existing site architecture, technical SEO health, domain trust etc. Typically with our clients we recommend an assessment period at around 6 months.
It is ALWAYS in our best interest to get clients sustainable results in the shortest timeframe, some clients see results much faster, again, it all depends on the current organic state.
HOW MUCH DOES PHARMA SEO COST?
The costs will vary depending on your site, brand, what your objectives are and really the budget comes down to what’s needed to help you meet your objectives. Typically pharma SEO campaigns start from £3000 a month and can go as high as £20k a month depending on lots of factors.
Get in contact with us today for a free SEO quotation.
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