Pharmacy Edge by APPA

Pharmacy Edge Magazin

Issue 22 - 2019

Neil Patel

digital marketer and SEO expert

Here’s How to Dominate Google in 2019 Why Should You Listen to Me? I’ve made it my life’s work to figure out how businesses can effectively market their products and services. Part of that mission includes learning how to turn Google into my very best customer acquisition tool. I gladly share my best insights and advice on my blog, YouTube channel, and podcast, which receive millions of reads, views, and listens every month. I’ve also had the opportunity to work directly with Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Viacom, NBC, Zappos, General Motors, and many other major American companies to improve their marketing. I’m not listing these accomplishments to impress you, only to show that I mean business. The reason so many people read my blog and why some of the world’s biggest companies hire me to consult on their marketing is because my advice works! And now I’m going to give you my very best tips for turning Google in your best friend in 2019.

Let’s Talk SEO and Google

oogle continues its long reign as the undisputed ruler of the search engine world, owning 63.1% of all core search queries in the U.S., including a staggering 93% of mobile search queries1. Love it or hate it, Google has the power to put your website in front of scads of potential customers or banish you to the search engine wilderness. It pays to keep on Google’s good side! It may seem like the search engine giant is fickle, but though Google tweaks its algorithm on a near daily basis, the core tenants of SEO best practices continue to pay dividends. Whether you are an independent pharmacy owner or partnered with a global brand like Pfizer, these best practices can still work wonders for your online visibility.

Today, ranking for a relevant keyword on Google can seem like a Herculean task, but that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t too long ago when black hat tactics like stuffing your content full of keywords or hiring link farms actually worked. During the past years, Google’s algorithm has evolved rapidly, and it now incorporates more than 200 unique ranking factors. At the same time, more and more companies – including your competitors – have put more focus and energy into optimizing their website to improve their rankings. As a result, it can often feel extremely difficult to break through and get strong, organic rankings for the keywords that are the most relevant and valuable to your business. I have some good news and bad news. The good: the fundamentals of great SEO still work! If you consistently apply the right techniques, you WILL see results. The bad news: in this competitive environment, ranking high on Google will require a lot of work and a good dollop of patience. Let’s start by reviewing the top three fundamentals of good SEO, and then I’ll share my four best tricks for dramatically improving your SEO results.

Statista, “Share of search queries handled by leading U.S. search engine providers as of October 2018.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-search-engines-in-the-united-states/

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Technical SEO It’s not sexy, but making sure all the technical elements of your page are optimized for Google can do wonders for your rankings. These technical elements include your website’s: • Meta descriptions • Page titles • Site structure • Page load speed • Mobile optimization • Image alt tags • And more I could seriously write an entire article on how to optimize each of these elements, but suffice it to say that each one is important. If your head is spinning, don’t worry! You don’t have to be a technical whiz to get these elements right. Just make sure you hire a knowledgeable developer or SEO firm that can handle this for you.

Content The rumors of content’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, content is still the primary way that Google assesses and indexes your web pages. Yes, eyeballs are stampeding to YouTube and Instagram in droves (which is why these platforms may be worth your attention), but my long-form blog posts are still some of the most popular pages on my website. At the end of the day, there will always be an appetite for great, original content. If you make the effort to write truly relevant content for your audience, Google will reward you with strong rankings. Content is also a great tool to distinguish your brand and even position you or your company as a thought leader.

Backlinks When it comes to developing a backlink strategy for your website, it’s all about quality over quantity. Google doesn’t want to see a thousand spammy websites link to yours. You’ll get far more juice with a handful of backlinks from “high authority” sites, like MayoClinic.org, Health.com and WebMd.com. Building a successful backlink strategy can be timeconsuming, but that work will pay off in spades! Keep reading to learn how to build a better mousetrap so big sites will want to link to you.

My Five Best Tips for Cutting Through the Noise of Today’s Busy Digital Landscape Now that I’ve reminded you of the three most crucial elements to SEO success, how does a pharmaceutical business actually put these pieces together and create a winning SEO strategy? That is a huge question, and we could spend all day in the weeds, fine-tuning every little nut and bolt on your website.

However, I’d rather go for the low-hanging fruit and give you some big-picture tips that will have the biggest positive impact on your Google visibility.

Ranking Isn’t Everything! My first big SEO tip is to change your perspective about what it means to implement a successful SEO plan. Too many companies are obsessed with trying to rank for what are known as “buyer intent keywords,” which are keywords that indicate a customer is ready to buy. These words are usually so competitive that companies often end up spending big piles of time and money without gaining great results. Your real goal is not to get keyword rankings; it’s to get the right kind of traffic at the right time. There is more than one way to do this, and it doesn’t have to involve competing for the most challenging keywords.

Find Alternative Keywords A great example of a buyer intent keyword is “CPAP Machine.” A person who puts this keyword into Google is likely looking to purchase a CPAP machine to assist with sleep apnea. They are a valuable lead, which is why your competitors are willing to spend a lot of time and money to climb to rank well for that keyword. Guess what? There’s a smarter way to snag that potential customer by getting their attention just a little earlier in their buyer’s journey. I love a free tool called Google Correlate, which shows me what related keywords people searched in the days or weeks before they searched for my primary keyword. By figuring out what those keywords are, you can target potential customers in the middle of their buyer’s journey. When it comes times to make a purchase, you’ll be the obvious solution. Many of these correlated keywords could be far less competitive to rank for, because your competitors aren’t looking for them. For example, one correlated word to CPAP is “Gabapentin,” a medication primarily used to control seizures and lower nerve pain. Personally, I would never have connected these two words, but that’s the point! Neither would your competitors. If you can write relevant content about Gabapentin, you may net a lot of future CPAP customers. PHARMACYTIMES.COM

Land and Expand Trying to rank for a new keyword, (especially a buyer intent word), is hard. That’s why I absolutely love the Land and Expand strategy, which lets you rank for new keywords by taking advantage of the work you’ve already done! To perform the Land and Expand, visit your Google Search Console and click “Performance.” You’ll see a handy list of the keywords your site already ranks for. Click on one of your top words, and Google will helpfully show you the pages that rank for that word. Next, take that keyword and put it into my free website traffic tool, Ubersuggest. (Just Google “Ubersuggest.”) One of the many cool things Ubersuggest does is give you a Keyword Ideas Report, which generates a long list of alternative keywords. Review the list and pick a handful that are closely related to the original keyword. Go back to the page on your website that ranks for the keyword and weave in the new alternative keywords. Good SEO practices still apply. Make sure the new keywords fit naturally into the page content. If you do it right, this high-performing page will generate rankings for your new keywords. The Land and Expand strategy is simple to implement, once you get the hang of it, and it can allow you to see a big explosion in your rankings generated by the power of your best performing pages!

Be Bold with Your Brand Establishing a clear brand is simply good marketing, and Google rewards companies that present a strong brand

identity. That means embracing your company’s mission, clearly identifying your target market, and positioning yourself as unique within your industry. How well does this work? In June of 2016, my website garnered 240,839 monthly visitors. Not bad, but there was certainly room for improvement. I made a concentrated effort to emphasize my brand, and by August, my traffic had grown to 454,382 monthly website visitors, an 89% increase in traffic after just two months of work! What does it mean to be bold with your brand? I council my clients to do the opposite of everyone else in their market. Is your industry infamous for bad customer service? Then dedicate your company to offering stellar customer service. This strategy has worked wonders for Zappos! I used this tactic on my own website to achieve great results. I wrote ten times the content my competitors did, including 30,000-word guides that I released for free. I also jumped into the world of video, producing videos of my best marketing advice so that anyone around the world could learn from my experience. Were these tactics time-consuming? Yes. Were they expensive? Yes. Did they work? My blog now receives over three million visitors per month, my YouTube channel gets 10 million views, and the Wall Street Journal named me a top influencer on the web. I’d say those are pretty good results!

Build a Better Mousetrap Link building is both extremely important to raising your website’s rankings and also very time-consuming. My solution is to stop begging for back links and instead create something so big, bold, and amazing that other sites will be trampling each other to link to you. I call this, a mousetrap. Your mousetrap can be anything that offers incredible value for your customers. Think big. Be different. When I was brainstorming my mousetrap, I threw caution to the wind and did something a little crazy. I spent an ungodly sum to create Ubersuggest. This program lets users reverse engineer their competitors’ SEO content marketing and social media marketing strategy and provides a variety of detailed and useful reports. I could easily make $150,000 in monthly subscription fees from Ubersuggest, but instead, I offer for FREE to anyone who visits my site. After marketing Ubersuggest, I’ve earned over 10,000 backlinks, which continue to propel my traffic numbers into the stratosphere. I would have had to pay far more than $150,000 a month to earn that amount of traffic through ads. You may not have the resources to create a whole new software platform from scratch, but there are plenty of great mousetraps you can build that your customers will love and that other sites will be glad to link to!

Search Engine Land, “Google’s Aug. 1 core algorithm update: Who did it impact, and how much?” https://searchengineland.com/googles-august-first-core-algorithm-update-who-did-it-impact-and-how-much-303538

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Google’s “Medic” Update In August of 2018, you may have noticed a big dip or rise in your site’s Google ratings. This was likely due to Google’s “Medic” update, which it released on August 1st. In brief, the Medic update affected many websites, but seemed to especially target what are known as “Your Money, Your Life” sites. This category includes sites that offer medical and health information. For example, sites like Goodrx.com and Patient.info both lost over 40% of their traffic in the week after the update2. What can you do if the Google Medic update negatively affected your site? Unfortunately, nothing specific. The algorithm is the algorithm. The best way to climb back up Google’s rankings is to focus on implementing tried and true SEO strategies. In other words, follow the advice I’m giving you in this article!

Even More SEO Strategies Earlier in this article, I gave you my top five best strategies to dramatically elevate your website’s standing in Google. By now, you should know that I believe in going above and beyond, which is why I want to give you even more strategies to keep your momentum going! Here’s five more things you can do:

Re-Align Your Existing Content I’m going to assume you already understand who your target audience is and what you want the content on your website to achieve. With those two things in mind, take a full inventory of the existing content on your website, and ask yourself one important question: “Does this content achieve my goal?” Be honest. If the answer is no, then don’t spend time and effort generating new content while your old content drags you down. Re-align your existing content. This may mean re-writing your website content, revising blog posts, or pulling down videos and infographs that don’t serve your purpose. Be merciless. If certain content isn’t bringing the right audience to your website, it isn’t doing you any favors. It’s got to go!

websites. The most crucial is Google My Business. Other great sites for your listing include: • Yelp • Yellow Pages • FourSquare • Bing Places for Business (I know this article is all about Google optimization, but I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t encourage you to grab some visibility from the second most trafficked US search engine.)

Optimize for the Tasks Customers Want to Accomplish Your potential customers want to do something. Figure out what this is, but don’t just fixate on the obvious answer. For example, the majority of pharmacy customers probably want to order a prescription or a refill online, but other may wish to transfer their prescriptions or switch pharmacies. By considering all the reasons a customer may want to reach out, you can create unique content on your website to assist them. Build Trust Through Reviews Many of your customers will prefer to do their homework on you before buying your products or using your services. This is why reviews and testimonials are so important, especially on third party sites, like Yelp, Angie’s List, and the Better Business Bureau. Whenever possible, encourage your current customers to leave reviews, but make sure you stay within the legal guidelines of each review site. For example, rewarding customers for leaving positive reviews is a big no-no.

Think Like Your Customer Keywords, keywords, keywords. You hear about them all the time in relation to SEO, but how do you know which

Keep It Local If you serve a specific town, city, region, or state, make sure all your website optimization is localized. There are many things you can do to optimize your website for your specific area. The easiest thing to do is to simply incorporate local keywords into your technical website information and the content on your website. Include your city or region in your page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and more. Don’t just stop with the name of your town. Think of other ways people may search for you. Oftentimes they use zip codes, the name of their neighborhood, or even an area’s regional nickname, like “North County San Diego.” You also want to make sure you appear on major local listings, which often beat out even the most optimized

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keywords are right for your business? This may seem like an obvious question, but oftentimes it isn’t. The best keywords ARE NOT the words you use to describe your business, products, or services. It is the keywords YOUR CUSTOMERS use to find you. Oftentimes, I discover that my clients are fighting furiously to rank for highly technical jargon that their customers would never type into a search engine. For instance, most people I know wouldn’t go through the trouble of typing “Continuous positive airway pressure therapy” into a search engine. They may type “CPAP machine, San Diego,” or “How to fix sleep apnea.” As you brainstorm keywords, take off your corporate hat and put on your customer hat and determine what words a normal, everyday customer would use to find you. Still not sure what keywords to target? Talk to your customers! Another option is to use the Ubersuggest Keyword Suggestion Report to generate lots of new keyword ideas.

But Does It Really Work? A Quick Case Study I’m not going to lie. Each Google SEO strategy I’ve described in this article requires considerable time, effort, and patience to implement and maintain. (To be fair, I warned you about that at the beginning of this article.) So, is it all worth it? Let’s look at a case study from one of my clients. A regional urgent care provider in New York saw their rankings tank as a result of Google’s Medic update in August of last year. Instead of wallowing in their “bad luck,” they tasked my company, NP Digital, with rehabbing their rankings. In a nutshell, here’s what we did: • Reoptimized all their core (important) pages, fixing their technical SEO • Created long-form educational content that supported the core pages that we released each week • Implemented a localized social media campaign, including a Facebook ad campaign • Earned valuable backlinks by writing guest blogs for high authority publishers in the urgent care space How’d it all turn out? Here are our results: • Returning and new users increased by 75% year-overyear • Organic traffic is trending up significantly • The client’s site hit page one of Google for 48 highpriority keywords Not bad at all!

How to Budget for Search Engine Optimization I’ve offered a lot of great SEO strategies in this article, but let’s talk money and resources. Yours are limited, as they 2

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are for every company. How do you allocate your marketing dollars and your even more valuable time? If I could offer you any parting advice, it’s this:

Spend More on SEO My research indicates that the time and effort you spend on SEO will give you a much greater return on investment over time than shoveling truckloads of money at Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or any other “Pay to Play” platform. It may take a while for your SEO tactics to bloom, but once they work their way to top rankings, they’ll keep your traffic high without artificial infusions of money.

Spend Within Reason Don’t bankrupt your company or even dedicate all your marketing to SEO. There is a place for paid advertising, which I regularly use for my own sites. I want you to spend MORE on SEO, not everything. Budget your time, money, and resources appropriately.

Avoid the Sexy (Expensive) Marketing Channels Everyone and their sister seems to be throwing their advertising dollars at Instagram or Pinterest or whatever new platform just popped up and opened for business. Just because something is new and sexy doesn’t mean it deserves your marketing dollars and time! Review every new platform carefully and don’t forget to stick with the strategies that are currently working well for you, including Google optimization.

Test, Test, Test Not every SEO tactic I suggested in this article will work for every company. Also, you may not have the funds or bandwidth to try everything suggested here. Instead, test four or five different strategies and see which ones give you the best results over time. Dump the strategies that don’t work and test out new ones. Your marketing strategy should never be static.

It’s Time to Put These Suggestions into Action Winning the Google ranking game isn’t getting any easier. In fact, it’s getting more difficult for the health and medical industries. That’s not an excuse to give up and resign yourself to a lifetime of buying Google ads. Instead, it just means you’ll need to work harder and smarter. In this article, I’ve given you real, solid SEO strategies that have worked for me and my clients. Just remember – be patient! While competitive, the search engine optimization universe offers many possibilities and many prizes. Those who are willing to put in the work and implement the core concepts of good SEO will be rewarded with increased visibility, traffic, and conversions. Now get to work!

Is your pharmacy looking for an effective and efficient pharmaceutical purchasing strategy that will conform to health care reforms and new hospital and health systems? If you answered yes, then join APPA,

membership is FREE!

10 Great reasons to be a member 1. Connection: You are connected to a larger group banded together to produce positive results for the pharmaceutical industry in the United States.

2. Annual Conference: Our annual conference provides quality education and networking for pharmaceutical professionals, and you receive a SIGNIFICANT discount by being a member. You can contribute to the content, help plan the conference or attend to enhance your professional development.

3. Public Policy / Advocacy: You can contribute to the strong advocacy program centered on assuring that public health voices are being heard. The Legislative Committee prepares legislative updates/ alerts, and keeps track of pharmaceutical issues under consideration by the State Legislature.

4. Free Informational Services:

practices and solutions to enhance your current job, find opportunities for career enhancement, etc. Networking events range from annual conferences to regional meetings.

6. Affiliation: You will have affiliation with YOUR professional association and over 1,200 pharmaceutical professionals in the nation.

7. Discounts on Educational Offerings: You receive reduced registration fees on APPA sponsored continuing education events.

8. Leadership Opportunities: You are provided opportunities to learn and practice leadership and meeting management skills that you may need for your resume, professional growth or self-promotion. Opportunities are available through the Advisory Board, committees and special projects.

APPA keeps members in touch with each other and current issues through the association’s web site, blog channel, and email updates of emerging issues relevant to pharmaceuticals. You remain informed about pharmaceuticals in a way that saves you time.

9. Recognition:

5. Networking:

Being part of a larger community, we hope you feel empowered to get involved in issues that affect your personal and professional communities and your quality of life.

You have many opportunities to network with pharmaceutical professionals by building your contacts, sharing ideas, best

You have the opportunity to be recognized for your hard work or recognize your colleagues for their achievements in pharmaceuticals.

10. Empowerment:

Join now at www.joinappa.com