SEO is essential for the life sciences
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that’s appeared as long as the internet has existed. Even in the early days, users strove t to have their websites easily accessible and visible to the world. What’s changed, however, is the number of users trying to establish their presence online.Â
As of September 2024, the internet is home to over 1.1 billion websites.
That’s almost one-fifth of the world’s population.
What’s even crazier is that for any given search, 95% of the web traffic goes to the first three links that sit at the top of any online search engine.
You might think that SEO optimization is too difficult to get started with.
In line with that belief, many people who get started with SEO optimization fall for the easy fix. Many self-made SEO experts will make misleading and frankly untrue statements about how easy SEO can be. Following such advice has caused many companies to waste funds, lose opportunities, and swell with frustration.
You're not alone: my SEO setbacks
It’s natural to fall for these misconceptions if you’re a scientist who just started out as a life sciences marketer. I, too, fell for it when I transitioned away from life sciences research and became a life sciences content marketer. Setting up a website took a lot more work than I thought. Getting to the first page of a Google search about life sciences marketing didn’t happen overnight. And I wasn’t immediately getting lots of web traffic like I expected. The quick fixes I did in responses to the lack of results actually caused me to take several steps back as I worked on my sales and digital marketing skills.
Eventually, I bounced back. I learned from top voices, agencies, and online sources (you can access them here!) on how to do SEO. I read through several books on making my website more accessible. And I worked through online tutorials from established sources on how to turn my website into a lead generator.Â
Soon, the results emerged.Â
I saw my yearly web traffic double year on year. More of my clicks were coming from organic search. And more websites were adding links to GenoWrite’s pages. Altogether, the experiences from falling for the misconceptions helped GenoWrite establish its online presence for life science marketers worldwide.Â
The thing is, I don’t want to see you reinventing the wheel.
So, in this blog, I’ll be covering five of the most common misconceptions about SEO. By learning from my mistakes, you, as a scientist, can begin optimizing your website for online searches without the delays caused by making the mistakes I made.
The five common misconceptions
The tips listed here aren’t meant to be comprehensive. Rather, they’re starting points for you to consider the ways you can tweak your website. Over the next few months, GenoWrite will add more articles on how to implement SEO into your websites. Once you follow these articles, you will see more business leads and generate more prospects that become partners and clients. From there, the sky’s the limit for the science behind your discoveries and technologies!Â
Misconception 1: You only need to work on SEO once to produce immediate results
Truth: Not having a concerted plan to generate clicks to your site will lead to disaster.
SEO is not a magic bullet that gets you clicks immediately. SEO requires months, maybe years, to implement. Regardless of how long it takes, you need to develop a robust business plan that aligns with where you are in your product development journey. For instance, you won’t be advertising a therapeutic that’s passed clinical trials if you’re still in the preclinical stage. Â
Misconception 2: If you improve one aspect of SEO, you will start ranking in no time
Truth: You must consider and integrate changes to several aspects of your website to improve SEO.
Just editing a website page to add more keywords isn’t enough. Just making your website faster alone won’t be enough, either. You must consider all the shortcomings within your website and address them one by one. What changes you implement also depend on what you offer to your audience and what they would seek from you. A company with expertise on culturing iPSCs may integrate keywords on how introducing growth factors or selecting the correct culture growth condition before showing how you can circumvent those requirements with your product.
Misconception 3: If you write anything on your website, you will start ranking immediately
Truth: Low-volume keywords let you establish your niche.
Many life sciences and biotech founders come from an academic background. As they build their website, they also bring their technical jargon with them, creating content that only fellow academics would understand. This approach may work for academic researchers, but other audiences may have other priorities that your copy must consider to rank in SEO.
Consider the investor, for example. They may not fully grasp the complex jargon and datasets that you present. Patients in need of new therapeutics want to hear more about clinical outcomes than the sordid details behind the mechanism of action. Pharma executives may prioritize how your workflow saves them time and money wile improving their bottom line.
Misconception 4: No one will find keywords related to the life sciences
Truth: Low-volume searches help you get closer to your target audience’s pain points and considerations
Low-volume keywords may not have the search volume of other keywords. However, low-volume keywords have low competition. That means you won’t need to invest nearly as much ad spend to get on the front page. It also means that producing strong content that gets cited will help you fortify your place in online search engines. The best part about targeting low-volume keywords is that if you know your target audience well enough, you can create content that connects directly with the questions you can solve.Â
Misconception 5: My company is too small to improve SEO
Truth: Any company of any size can leverage SEO to increase online visibility
Appearing on the first page of a search engine’s results can be done, regardless of your company’s size. Consider how people establish their authority on a topic. A mixture of authority and regularity goes a long way to building your reputation. It’s the same with content creation. If you can establish a routine to publish content, even monthly, you can begin demonstrating to search engines that you’ll have useful content that people will view.
Misconception 6: Copy-pasting AI-generated content will help with ranking in online search
Truth: AI-generated content is facing strong penalization on online search engines
The use of LLM-based chat bots is an easy path for generating content. But that’s all it is. Because AI-generated content has peaked. Lily Ray’s piece on AI-generated content tells it all:Â online content creation has produced “Mount AI”. It’s a mountain you can find on any web analytics tool. At the peak of organic traffic, the novelty of producing AI-generated content gave way to strong penalties against scaling content production with AI tools. These penalties have tanked organic engagement with content strictly produced with AI tools.
Addressing SEO misconceptions in the life sciences
The misconceptions behind optimizing for SEO are rife across industries, including the life sciences. SEO is not a magic bullet that will suddenly bring you your clients, partners, and investors on a silver platter. It requires work, but it can be done.Â
To prod you in the right direction, we list some tips that you can implement to get SEO working for you. Whether you’re studying infectious disease, developing a new biologic, or commercializing a supplement, the tips we provide you below apply to any subsector.Â
- You don’t need a flashy website:
Tip 1: Hone your niche
Let’s assume you’re a biotech company specializing in infectious disease diagnostics. If you’re writing a piece introducing a disease, your article will most likely not appear on the front pages at all. That’s because everyone will seek the information from a government agency or a medical organization. You’ll instead want to know the kinds of questions that your highly specialized audience will search for. These can act as your keywords to optimize for in online search. If your content resonates with their needs, you’ll reach the top for searches that bring you customers. Â
Tip 2: Make your website accessible
Build your website so customers can access your content and the contact us page with as few scrolls and clicks as possible. For instance, the GenoWrite website has a button that lets you book a call through our booking page. You can also reduce your webpage’s loading times in various ways, such as reducing the number of redirects and compressing image files so they don’t take as long to load.
Tip 3: Address outstanding website errors
Google crawlers evaluate whether your webpages are functioning as they should. If you have 404s for key webpages, those pages will not be indexed. In other words, those pages won’t show up on a web search.
Tip 4: Make your website mobile friendly
Over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Make sure that your website is easy to load for phones and other such devices. Try to keep the same theme between your mobile and desktop websites, but do realize that this isn’t necessary so long as your websites are easy to load and navigate.
Tip 5: Use long-tailed keywords
Long-tailed keywords refer to any search phrase that’s at least three words long. They aren’t just any set of words, however. These keywords are meant to reflect user intent. For instance, people who look up protein synthesis can search for its mechanisms, evolutionary differences, or cell-free protein synthesis. The key is to prepare phrases that highlight which aspect of protein synthesis you’re associated with most.
Tip 6: Focus on content, not flashiness
I’ve spoken with scientists and business founders who complain about the flashy animations on their websites. They may like how nice it looks, but being forced to sit through it for eight seconds without a skip button is lost time. It’s enough to draw users away from the website because it’s such a long wait to enter. I’ve also heard users complain about their devices not being able to load those animations cleanly.
The most animated websites may look really nice and draw eyes to it. But if it’s difficult to load for low-end computers, website session lengths will decrease. Shorter website sessions mean that users are not reading your content as much. That leads to lower search rankings.
Optimize for SEO with our keyword search guide
GenoWrite has created a keyword research guide that will guide life science enterprises on how to start appearing at the front pages of online search engines. Life science founders who have a preliminary understanding of their target audience will benefit from implementing the resources and suggestions provided in this guide. If you would like to get started with ranking on Google, read the guide by clicking on the link below.
