An anonymous pharma friend recently asked me to do a simple analysis. He asked, “how do we rank in search engine results for our important keywords?” Answer: terrible. I was pretty surprised by my basic analysis and really didn’t understand how a site so rich in content (and built at such great expense) could perform so poorly in this important metric. Question is…why should you care about search?

A couple facts to get started: 80% of all online sessions begin with search. Google has a 63.7% share of all searches. The point? Most people find things online by sitting down and using a search engine. It’s the first thing that happens 80% of the time. Two thirds of the time, these people are using Google. That means that just over 50% of the time when someone starts an online session, they open to Google and search. In other words, if your site isn’t showing up on Google search, it may as well not exist. Moreover, it had better appear pretty high up in the results.

(Note: I know that I’m about to simplify some search engine principles here, so for all you professional search marketing folks, give me a little slack. This isn’t an SEO blog, but do leave your comments if anything is grossly inaccurate. That said…)

It turns out that the top three listings on a search engine results page (SERP) account for 62.6% of all clicks. That is, about two thirds of the time, people look no further than the first three listings before clicking. So, clearly that’s the place to be. To give some added detail to this, you’ve got to be in the top two in order to really be seen. The number three result gets only an 8.44% click through rate compared to  a 42.3% click through rate for the number one listing. After number three, the numbers drop dramatically. Result number 11, the first result on page two of your search results, has a click through rate of 0.66%. Number 21 (top of page 3): 0.29%. Number 31 (top of page 4): 0.12%. Number 41 (top of page 5): 0.07%. I think you get the point. If you’re off the first page, you pretty much don’t exist.

Now, consider your average pharma brand manager who may not know all the details about search marketing and certainly wouldn’t know these numbers. When her agency comes and tells her that the site shows up as the number 11 result for one of their important keywords, she’s probably pretty satisfied. For all the billions of pages out there, our site is showing up pretty high where it counts. No one tells her that this means that this means we get a measly 0.66% click through rate.

I think I’ve made my point. People are using search engines (particularly Google) as their first stop online. You’ve got to be on the first page (results 1-10) to be seen. The results on page one get ~90% of all clicks. Got it.

So, how do pharma companies do against this?  I took a look at the top five selling, branded, prescription drugs for 2007 to see how they handle this. The drugs were (in order of sales) Lipitor, Plavix, Advair, Enbrel, and Nexium. (If you’ve got 2008 data, let me know).

We currently don’t work with any of these brands, so I’m not privy to their website keyword strategies. So, I had to use some judgment as to what keywords they’d most likely want to own. To determine this, I went to each of the brand’s website’s source codes and found their meta keywords. It’s a line that looks like this (from this blog, for example):

<meta name=”keywords” content=”e-marketing, marketing, healthcare, advertising, digital, internet, pharma, pharmaceuticals, health care” />

Now, a bunch of people are really upset right now. They are yelling that Google (and most other search engines) don’t consider meta keywords for search rankings. I know this. What I’m saying is that these keywords have to be important otherwise these companies wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of including them in the website’s code. True? Perhaps there are other keywords in addition to these, but I think it’s safe to say that these are important.

Methods: I used a tool available from SEO Book to rank everything on May 5, 2009 at the same time. In addition, to the Google rankings, I’ve also included the Yahoo! and MSN Live rankings. These are US-based versions of the search engines, results may differ in other countries. Keywords were taken from the meta keywords code for each site, except for Enbrel. There were no meta keywords, so I selected several keywords based on what I saw on the homepage. I also added each brand’s generic name when it was not included in the meta keyword list. The main website URL was used to come up with the rankings. The number represent the search rank of each term. A dash (-) indicates that the main website URL does not rank in the top 500 listings.

So, how did the brands do?

Lipitor

Plavix

Advair

Enbrel

Nexium

I’m going to focus on Google for my analysis of this. Here are a few observations:

• All brands hold the number one ranking for their brand name. Good.
• None of the brands hold the number one position for the generic name of their brand. Enbrel does the best with a #3 ranking for “etanercept”. Advair does the worst, as it doesn’t even rank in the top 500 for either of the ingredients in the product.
• Condition-specific (e.g., heartburn relief) keyword performance is poor across the board. Lipitor.com is the 63rd listing on Google for “high cholesterol.” Advair.com is the 198th listing for “asthma.”
• “Treatment-related (e.g., acid reflux treatment) searches are perform slightly better with several results at least in the top 50 (but still getting less than 0.001% of all clicks for the specific search term.

Why is all this important? I think we can all agree that additional traffic to your site, especially among people searching about your disease state and solutions for their diseases (e.g., acid reflux treatment), is a good thing. I’m not saying traffic for traffic’s sake, but improving with the right people is critical. Simply improving for one key search term can make all the difference.

Here’s an example:

There are 1,500,000 searches for “asthma” each month on Google (use their estimator tool to see for yourself). Advair.com gets approximately 105,000 visitors in March according to Compete. Currently, Advair.com gets no visitors (or virtually none) from the keyword “asthma.” Their site doesn’t show up until the 20th search result page. When was the last time you looked this deep for something? So, what if Advair managed to move itself to the first page of Google results for “asthma.” What impact would that have?

The 10th listing (last result on page one) gets approximately 3% of clicks. 3% of 1,500,000 searches per month for “asthma” equals 45,000 clicks (i.e., visitors). This would instantly translate to a 42% increase in monthly traffic for Advair.com. What if they became the number one listing? That would mean an additional 630,000 visitors per month, a six-fold increase.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily even possible. The number one listing for “asthma” in Google is for Wikipedia, which will be impossible to displace. Many of the sites on the first page of results will also be hard to displace, but it might be possible. So, is it worth the investment?

I think there’s no question that many of the positions for these keywords can be improved. They all won’t make it to the number one result or even on the first page, but they can all improve. The closer to the first page the better. Here’s how to consider whether an investment in this might make sense. If you buy keywords, simply consider the cost to buy these clicks/visitors versus getting the same amount for free. I checked the costs and expected clicks for “asthma” specifically. Paying the maximum amount for this keyword in Google Adwords will likely cost ~$2.25 per click. Google estimates that you’ll get a maximum of 14,000 clicks per month. Cost…$31,500 a month…forever, or at least as long as you want this number of clicks. Here’s the ROI part…14,000 clicks is 0.009% of the total search volume for “asthma” per month (1,500,000). Instead of buying clicks, instead you invest to move your site up to just the 41st search results for “asthma” (top of the 5th page). This would result in 0.07% click through, which means 105,000 clicks per month. In other words, you can get almost 8x the number of clicks by getting your page up to the 41st search result versus paying for the clicks. Once you’re at this position, your ongoing cost is virtually zero assuming you continue to maintain your site. The yearly cost to buy the 14,000 clicks per month (which Google says is the maximum you can hope to get) is $378,000.

The question is: can you optimize your site by developing more content, improving your code to make it easier for search engines to index, and by deploying a solid linking strategy for less than $378,000. I’d really hope so. If you need help, contact me.

Sorry for all the math today, but I often get tired of hearing that digital programs can’t really show an ROI. So, all the people that say this forced the rest of us to sit through a math lesson. Thanks…

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. How Pharma Should Use Search Engine Marketing
2. 8 Tips to Help You Own YouTube’s Search Results
3. How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)