The Covario SEO Audit Score Industry Rankings. The Pharmaceutical Industry

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1 The Covario SEO Audit Score Industry Rankings The Pharmaceutical Industry

2 Direct-to-consumer advertising is the fastest-growing form of marketing in the pharmaceutical industry. Outpacing the growth of marketing to doctors and even research and development over the past decade, consumer marketing spend by the industry rose from $580 million in 1996 to more than $4 billion in However, promotion to doctors is still the dominant marketing strategy in terms of the percentage of total marketing spend. Only an estimated 5% of big pharma s consumer marketing spend is allocated to online advertising. But this proportion is poised to change substantially because of the confluence of two drivers: Surveys report that approximately 60% of adults search for health information on the Internet. Drug manufacturers have a habit of waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to institute explicit marketing guidelines before allocating significant spend to a new channel. Direct-to-consumer advertising in broadcast media proceeded tentatively until the FDA issued guidance documents in In 2010, the FDA launched the Bad Ad Program, which includes guidelines for Internet advertising. 1 We wanted to find out how the top pharma advertisers are deploying their online budgets in the current environment of relatively low investment in online marketing channels. Taking these findings and combining them with a discussion on the direct-to-consumer marketing approach that pharma has taken in broadcast media, we intend to extrapolate how the industry might allocate further online funding to increase return on marketing investment. To accomplish this, we used advertiser performance in organic search or search engine optimization i.e., SEO Health as the leading indicator of overall online media performance. The editorial listings that show up in the results pages of the major search engines possess equal parts brand-advertising and direct-marketing power. Thus online dynamics of the entire purchase funnel can be surveyed. Moreover, organic search represents a form of earned media favorable publicity gained through informational, educational and/or promotional activities other than paid advertising. So we are able to see how advertisers investments in their websites are paying off through the search engine rankings that they earn based on their websites SEO Health. Leading Indicators of SEO Health We use our proprietary Covario SEO Audit Score the foundation of the Covario Organic Search Insight solution to measure the SEO Health of key landing pages for the largest pharmaceutical advertisers. These landing pages are associated with the category-defining keywords for the pharmaceutical industry, as measured by Google s keyword estimates in its Keyword Tool. The Covario SEO Audit score allows us to infer the adherence to SEO best practices of all pages associated to an advertiser s portfolio of profitable keywords by measuring the SEO Health of category-defining landing pages. The Covario SEO Audit Score is a scoring system, where 100 is Excellent and 0 is Poor. It uses more than 60 different on-page and off-page SEO factors to measure a website s adherence to SEO best practices. These factors are categorized within the relevant subcomponents of the overall SEO Audit Score as follows: Content Audit Score: On-page factors that represent having the optimized keywords in key places on the pages Title tags, Meta tags, in the URLs, etc. Link Audit Score: The amount and quality of links, both external and internal, that connect to the landing pages and which the search engines deem as relevant in their analysis of the importance of a page for ranking. Technical Audit Score: The ability for the search engines to crawl pages and quickly load them. 1 Sources Julie M. Donohue, Ph.D., Marisa Cevasco, B.A., and Meredith B. Rosenthal, Ph.D.; A Decade of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs The New England Journal of Medicine; August 16, 2007; URL: Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D.; and Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H.; Pharmaceutical Marketing and the New Social Media The New England Journal of Medicine; November 25, 2010; URL: Bryan A Liang, MD, PhD, JD; Timothy K Mackey, MAS; Prevalence and Global Health Implications of Social Media in Direct-to-Consumer Drug Advertising Journal of Medical Internet Research; August 31, 2011; URL: 2

3 The analysis was conducted in September It is based on the U.S. websites of the top advertisers in the pharmaceutical industry. The Pharma Top SEO Sites These websites are the best at SEO amongst all the pharma advertisers that we analyzed for the keyword pharmaceutical. 1. Pfizer 2. Merck 3. Astrazeneca 4. Johnson & Johnson 5. Bayer Eli Lilly Novartis (tie) Why Pharmaceutical To select the category-defining keyword that we used to measure the SEO Health of the top pharma advertisers, we first came up with a list of words that best define the industry. We then used the Google Keyword Tool to prioritize the keywords based on search volume. The initial list was comprised of the following keywords: Medicine Drugs Healthcare Pharmaceutical Then we looked at the search engine results for each of the keywords to identify two things: 1) Where within the results each of the advertiser websites rank; and 2) The URLs of the landing pages associated with the keyword. What we found was that none of the advertisers ranked in the top-100 listings for the highest-volume keywords: drugs and medicine. As for healthcare, which was nearly as popular, only Bayer cracked the top 100 (barely). It makes sense that the top pharma advertisers are good at optimizing for the keyword pharmaceutical. It s the basic descriptor that defines an industry in which the majority of marketing dollars are targeted at practitioners (i.e., doctors). Using SEO programs to maintain and build brand awareness amongst the people who prescribe pharmaceuticals to the ultimate buyers (i.e., patients) should get priority. But let s look at this from the lens of direct-to-consumer advertising. Even though the keyword pharmaceutical commands 7 million monthly searches on Google, this figure is nearly four-times less than for the words medicine and drugs, and more than two-times less than for the word healthcare. It s a safe bet that most people in the U.S. can t even spell pharmaceutical, but the 60% of adults who conduct online searches for healthcare issues are the same potential patients whom pharma advertisers target with TV commercials so that their products are top-of-mind when a doctor gives a diagnosis. And based on search volume, it s an even safer bet that these people know how to spell medicine, drugs, and healthcare. When pharma advertisers start allocating a larger percentage of marketing budgets to online media, they can leverage organic search as a highly effective, cost-efficient branding channel that complements consumer-targeted paid media by optimizing for the keywords that represent consumer demand. 3

4 Trends The Covario SEO Audit Scores for the advertisers in this industry are clustered very close together there exists only a 13% difference between the top and bottom SEO Audit Score. The scores also are relatively low compared to other industries we have studied. This suggests that pharmaceutical companies that apply a concerted effort to SEO can distinguish themselves quickly within the competitive landscape. Technical Audit Scores are high across the board. Pharmaceutical companies seem to have placed a premium on being adept at having their websites crawled easily and respond quickly to search engine crawlers, which translates to a better brand and user experience for website visitors. Content Factors The table below shows the average Google rank for various Content Audit Scores recorded for pharmaceutical advertisers. Content Audit Score Average Google Rank Over Under Those websites that have Content Audit Scores above 50 had an average Google organic rank of 21. The Content Audit Scores for the rest of the websites ranged from 30 to 50, with an average Google organic rank of 70. There is some correlation between having good content and organic rank. However, two of the advertisers that show up in the top-10 Google listings for the category-defining keyword were in the middle part of the under-50 crowd. This finding aligns with our recent analysis on the factors that drive search engine relevance and the changes in importance of these factors. Being good at content is a requirement for search engine relevance, but overall it holds less stature as a differentiating factor than it once held. Having said that, the differentiating effects of specific SEO factors is relative to the level of competition. Amongst this competitive set, the biggest difference in point values exists in the Content Audit Score a full 30% separates the highest and lowest audit scores. Combined with Technical Audit Score parity and low Link Audit Scores across the board, being good at content separates the winners from the losers. Once this separation is created, it can have a lasting effect, as the competition must traverse a labyrinth of lengthy review processes necessitated by the strict regulations of the pharmaceutical industry in order to implement content optimizations. Link Factors The table below shows the correlation between Link Audit Score, average position in the Google search results, and the average number of inbound links per segment. Link Audit Score Average Google Rank Average Inbound Links Over ,000 Under ,600 4

5 As mentioned earlier, Link Audit Scores are low amongst all the pharmaceutical advertisers that we analyzed. Because of this, small differences in linking ability can drive ranking performance. Even though the separation between the top tier from the bottom tier is slim, there is a significant drop-off between the two tiers. Landing pages with Link Audit Scores over 15 and possessing an average of 28,000 inbound links can be almost guaranteed a first-page showing, whereas landing pages with Link Audit Scores under 15 and possessing an average of 9600 inbound links won t show up until the seventh page of the search results. If a pharma advertiser invested in link building, it could own the search results for an extended period of time. The Rest Below are the remaining advertiser websites ordered by their respective SEO Audit Scores. 6. GlaxoSmithKline 7. Abbot Laboratories 8. Bristol Meyers Squibb Allergan (tie) 9. Amgen Biogen Idec (tie) 10. Mylan 11. Gilead Genzyme (tie) Conclusion To the extent that big pharma has invested heavily in direct-to-consumer marketing, it has been largely through traditional broadcast media. This approach has built brand awareness amongst the general populace of the companies and the products that they market. Only a small percentage of pharma marketing spend goes toward online media. Through the lens of SEO, it seems that most of that is targeted at practitioners. Drug manufacturers have a habit of waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to institute explicit marketing guidelines before allocating substantial investment to a new medium. Now that these guidelines are on the verge of being provided, pharma advertisers must devise digital strategies that leverage new media with at least the same effectiveness as they have traditional media. The top-performing advertisers in this study already use organic search effectively to target their primary brand advocates: doctors. As a direct-to-consumer marketing channel, organic search delivers a much more targeted audience than traditional media because it is a pull mechanism only the people searching on relevant keywords are served ads. Just as important is organic search s branding ability to provide similar reach as some traditional broadcast outlets. The best thing is, consumers have already told pharma advertisers how best to reach them. It s spelled-out in the search query stream. 5

6 Methodology industry report seo audit score industry rankings How We Chose the Top Advertisers per Industry We took the Fortune 500 list and selected the advertisers within the pharmaceutical industry. We also took Advertising Age magazine s two lists of the top global and national advertisers per industry, as measured by annual advertising spend, in order to include big ad spenders that may not have made the Fortune 500 list. How We Chose Keywords and Landing Pages We used the Google Keyword Tool to choose the keyword(s) with the highest volume within the Fortune 500 category associated to the advertiser s website. The landing pages we analyzed were the ones that ranked in the top-100 Google search results for the category keyword. We chose the category keyword for which the majority of the advertisers show up in the top-100 Google results. If none of the pages in an advertiser s website showed up at least in the top 100, we analyzed the home page. About Covario Covario is the nation s largest independent provider of search marketing services and SaaS-based SEO software systems. Headquartered in San Diego, the firm offers global enterprise solutions and agency services for paid and organic search, social media marketing, display advertising, and cross-media attribution analysis. The company s growing customer base includes world leaders in technology, consumer electronics, retail, ecommerce, financial services, media, entertainment, publishing, and consumer packaged goods. More information about Covario is available at Valley Centre Drive, Ste 500, San Diego, CA covario.com 2011 Covario, Inc. All rights reserved. Covario and the Covario logo are trademarks of Covario, Inc. in the U.S. and various countries