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
Complex scientific research comes with many misconceptions. We’ve seen the consequences of failing to understand the nuances of science throughout history as well. Although it’s not a life and death situation, failing to understand how SEO works can kill a company’s online presence before it gets a chance to take off.
As I worked on GenoWrite’s website, I adopted five misconceptions that kept my website’s traffic and audience engagement low. While many of these misunderstandings apply across many industries, these ones especially apply when marketing in the life sciences. Being aware of these misconceptions will help you go a long way to developing SEO strategies that work in the life sciences. So let’s dive in:
- Misconception 1: SEO is a thing you work on once, producing 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 all 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.Â
- Misconception 3: If you write anything on your website, you will start ranking in no time.
- Truth: You must consider how your audience will react to your copy. 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 works in academia, but you won’t attract investors who can fund your business. You won’t attract patients who you’re serving with your therapeutic. And you won’t attract viewers to your press releases.
- Misconception 4: No one will find keywords related to the life sciences.
- Truth: Low-volume keywords let you establish your niche. Low-volume keywords may seem worthless compared to those that produce a lot of traffic. However, if your customers are looking for diagnostics providers related to your disease of specialty, they will find you even at low volume. It’s because you’re one of few companies to provide that solution. You can also seek opportunities to capitalize in your SEO should your topic ever become trending in the popular conscience.
- Misconception 5: My company is too small to participate in SEO.
- Truth: Any company of any size can leverage SEO to increase online visibility. You just have to take the SEO process step by step. Whether you do it yourself or have someone helping you, the key is to commit to making the changes step by step. Over time, you will increase your web traffic and move closer towards accomplishing your marketing and sales targets.
Addressing SEO misconceptions in the life sciences
Knowing about the misconceptions behind SEO utilization is not enough if you want your website to grow the way you want. 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 here are universal.
- 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 keywords your customers will search for. If your content resonates with their needs, you’ll top the Google ranks for the most important keywords.
- Start by making 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.
- Address 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.
- Don’t neglect your mobile websites: 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.
- 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.
- You don’t need a flashy website: Comparison is the thief of joy. The flashiest of websites may be difficult to load for low-end computers. Websites filled with buzzwords are equivalent to sites stuffed with keywords. Both may look appealing, but neither will give you the results you seek with search engines. That’s because your rank on Google depends largely on whether your users spend time on and engage with your website.
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
