Tag : life science SEO

What is Generative Engine Optimization and can life science marketers make use of it?

Carlton Hoyt 1:01 pm , November 30, 2024

Everyone knows what search engine optimization (SEO) is, and many companies take great efforts to ensure they show up near the top of organic search results and benefit from the resulting traffic which comes at no unit cost. Traditional organic search results are slowly being replaced, however, with a lot of the focus being shifted to what Google calls a search generative experience (SGE; note that this is synonymous with AI Overview on Google Search, and the SGE is titled AI Overview on the search results page). It is widely accepted that as SGE becomes more prevalent, traffic to websites from legacy organic search results will decrease. This is due to two factors:

Fewer people will click on organic search links – or any links – when SGE is present.
The webpage links referenced in an SGE answer have lower clickthrough than standard organic search links.

*Legacy organic search results are far less prominent on search engine result pages (SERPs) when SGE is present.*

In other words, some searchers will see the answer provided by the AI overview, accept it as accurate and sufficient, and take no further action. These searchers who would have clicked through to something else in the past may simply not click on anything. The bounce rate of SERPs likely increases markedly when SGE is present. SGE also contains its own reference links, which will inevitably cannibalize some legacy organic search traffic. Data from FirstPageSage shows that the result is not dramatic (yet), but just the first link in the AI overview is already garnering 9.4% of clicks. While this compares to 39.8% for a top search position result or 42.9% for a rich snippet result when SGE results are not present, it still has to come from somewhere, and the FirstPageSage data shows SGE is now appearing on 31% of SERPs.

In this post, we’ll address what life science marketers can do, and should be doing, to address the new search paradigm of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

How Generative Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimization Overlap

Luckily for search marketers, GEO and SEO have a lot of overlap. If you are doing well at optimizing for search, you are probably doing a fair job at optimizing for generative engines. A number of key SEO principles apply to GEO:

Perform keyword research to ensure you are addressing popular user queries and develop content targeting those keywords.
The content you create should be helpful, reliable content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (what Google calls E-E-A-T).
Ensure you are signaling the relevance of your content through optimization of on-site and on-page factors (copy, metadata, schema, etc.) for targeted keywords.
Further signal the relevance of your website and content through off-site link building.
Ensure all your content is getting indexed.

Increasing the quantity of content, using clear language, and using technical language when appropriate also improve performance in both generative and organic search results. Other practices to improve the authority of a page or domain such as backlinking almost certainly play a role in GEO as well, as search AIs pick up on these signals (if not directly, then through their own understanding of organic search ranks).

There is further overlap if your goal in creating content is to get it seen by the maximum number of people instead of solely driving traffic to your website. In that case, disseminate your content as much as possible. While AI Overviews are not citing Reddit and other discussion forums as much as they once did, the more places your content lives, the more of a chance you’ll have that the AI will cite one of them, especially if your website itself is not well-optimized.

How GEO and SEO Differ in Practice

Optimizing for GEO is akin to specifically optimizing for rich snippets: there is additional emphasis on the content itself vs. ancillary factors. You need to pay more attention to how you provide information.

A seminal preprint paper by Pranjal Aggarwal et al uploaded to arXiv in late 2023 which coined the term generative engine optimization investigated a number of factors which they believe might help optimize for inclusion in SGE. Note that this paper has yet to pass peer review and was subject to a lot of scrutiny by SEO professionals, most intricately by Tylor Hermanson of Sandbox SEO who gave a number of compelling reasons to believe the data may be overstated, but having read the paper and a number of critiques I still think the paper contains meaningful and actionable lessons. There are two figures in this paper which I believe summarize the most interesting and useful information:

Table 1 shows how different tactics affected results. They used a metric called position-adjusted word count to measure the performance of websites in SGE before and after various GEO methods. I am more interested in this because it is an objective determination as opposed to the subjective impression metric, which basically involves feeding results into GPT-3.5 and seeing what it thinks. We can see from the results that specific types of content addition – adding quotations, statistics, or citations – have a notable impact on the position-adjusted word count for those websites. I point those out specifically not only because they have the greatest impact (along with fluency optimization), but they are not things which would necessarily be considered important if the only consideration for content creation was SEO. All the others which they tested and found to be useful – speaking clearly, fluently, technically, and authoritatively – are things which good SEO copy already needs to do. The inclusion of quotations, statistics, and citations are simply additional content.

The other interesting lesson from this paper is that the most impactful GEO methods differ based on the topic of the content.

While I would like to see this data presented the other way around – what methods are the highest performing for each category – it still makes the point. It also suggests that scientific content may receive disproportionate benefit from fluency optimization and authoritativeness. Again, those are already things which you should be factoring into your copy.

Practical Steps Life Science Marketers Should Take for GEO

If you are looking to optimize for generative engines, first ensure you are doing everything required for good SEO, as outlined above in the section of how GEO and SEO overlap. That is 80% of the job. To reiterate:

Perform thorough keyword research to address popular and relevant queries
Write in a way which demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT)
Optimize of on-site and on-page factors (copy, metadata, schema, etc.) for targeted keywords to demonstrate relevance
Further demonstrate relevance through off-site link building
Stay on top of Google Search Console and ensure your content is getting indexed
Write more / longer content
Write clearly and use appropriate technical language considering the subject matter

To specifically optimize for generative search beyond normal SEO, make a note to cite your sources and include statistics and / or quotations when possible. That is the lowest-hanging fruit and where most life science marketers will be fine stopping. If you really want to deep dive into generative engine optimization, however, you can use a tool such as Market Brew’s AI Overviews Visualizer to investigate how search engines’ semantic analysis algorithms perform cluster analysis with your website content and see how content is grouped and related.

Since AI overviews decrease overall clickthrough rates, another consideration for some marketers may be getting their content into the AI overviews independent of whether the content is hosted on your website or not. In these situations, you should try to disseminate your content widely across high-reputation sources, particularly Reddit. While it is not cited in SGE as much as it used to be, having your content in multiple places still increases the probability your content will be used.

Product Companies: Don’t Forget Merchant Center Feeds

While our anecdotal data shows that shopping results aren’t yet being included much in the life sciences, they are occasionally included in other industries and it would not be surprising to see them included more frequently in the life sciences in the future. When shown, these shopping results are very prominent, so ensure your Merchant Center feeds are functioning, include as much of your product portfolio as possible, and are well optimized. (Product feed optimization is a topic for another day.)

Summary

If you want to improve the likelihood that your content will appear in AI overviews and those overviews will contain links to your website, start with SEO best practices. That will get you far in both legacy organic search, which still receives most clickthroughs, as well as in SGE. From there, ensure your content which is the target of optimization efforts cites sources and includes statistics and quotations. If you sell products, ensure you are making optimal use of product data feeds.

GEO is neither difficult nor rocket science. By taking a few relatively simple steps, you’ll improve the likelihood of being included in AI overviews.

As this is a complex and novel topic, we’ve included an FAQ below.

"Need to ensure you are found where scientists are looking? Contact BioBM. We stay on top of the trends, tools, and technologies necessary to ensure our clients can reliably be found by their target scientific audiences.

What are you waiting for? Work with BioBM and improve your demand generation."

FAQ

Is employing current SEO best practices sufficient for good ranking in generative search?

Helpful? Yes. Sufficient? It depends.

If your products and services are relatively niche, and the questions you seek to answer with your content are likewise niche, then current SEO best practices may be sufficient. If there is a lot of competition in your field, then you may need to incorporate GEO-specific best practices into your content creation.

You can think of this similarly to how you think about SEO. If you are optimizing for niche or longer-tail terms, you might not need to do as much as you will if competing for more major, high-traffic terms. The more competition, the more you’ll likely need to do to achieve the best results. If your terms are sufficiently competitive that you are not ranking well in organic search, you should definitely not presume that whatever you are doing for SEO will reliably land you in AI overviews.

If my website has high organic search ranks, will it perform well in SGE?

I’m not sure anyone has a clear answer to this, especially since the answer still seems to be changing rapidly. Many of the studies which exist on the topic are almost a year old (an eternity in AI time).

Taking things chronologically:

A January 2024 study by Authoritas using 1,000 terms found that “93.8% of generative links (in this dataset at least) came from sources outside the top-ranking organic domains. With only 4.5% of generative URLs directly matching a page 1 organic URL and only 1.6% showing a different URL from the same organic ranking domain.”
A January 2024 study from seoClarity looked at the top 3 websites suggested by SGE and compared them to just the top 3 organic results on the basis of domain only. In contrast with the Authoritas study, they found that only 31% of SGE results had no domains in common with the top 3 organic results, 44% of SGE results had 1 domain in common, 24% had two domains in common, and 1% had all three domains in common. This suggests much more overlap between generative and legacy organic results, but it should be noted that it was a much smaller study of only 66 keywords.
A January 2024 study from Varn Media, using a similar but less informative metric to Authoritas, they found 55% of SGE results had at least one link which was the same as a top-10 organic result on a given SERP. One result in the top 10 is a low bar. They did not publish the size of their study.
A February 2024 study from SE Ranking which looked at 100,000 keywords found that SGE included at least one link from the top 10 organic search results 85.5% of the time. I don’t like this very low-bar metric, but it’s how they measured.
A slightly more recent Authoritas study from March 2024 using 2,900 branded keywords showed that “62% of generative links […] came from sources outside the top 10 ranking organic domains. With only 20.1% of generative URLs directly matching a page 1 organic URL and only 17.9% showing a different URL from the same organic ranking domain.” Obviously branded terms are a very different beast, and it should be no surprise that SGE still references the brand / product in question when using branded terms.
SE Ranking repeated their 100k keyword study in June 2024 and found similar results to their February study: 84.72% of AI overviews included at least one link from the top 10 organic search results. Again, I don’t love this metric, but the fact that it was virtually unchanged five months after the original study is informative.
Another seoClarity study published in August 2024 found far more overlap between legacy organic results and SGE results. Their analysis of 36,000 keywords found that one or more of the top 10 organic web results appeared in the AI Overview 99.5% of the time and 77% of AI overviews referenced links exclusively from the top 10 organic web results. Furthermore, they found that “80% of the AI Overview results contain a link to one or more of the top 3 ranking results. And when looking at just the top 1 position, the AI Overview contained a link to it almost 50% of the time.”

The most recent seoClarity study, suggesting a much greater deal of overlap between organic web results and SGE links, tracks with my recent experiences. While I would ordinarily discount my personal experiences as anecdotal, in the face of wildly different and rapidly evolving data I find them to be a useful basis of reference.

How much could my organic search traffic be impacted by SGE?

No one has any reliable metrics for that yet. Right now, I would trust FirstPageSage when they say the impact of SGE is not yet substantial, although I view their classification of it being “minimal” with some skepticism.

A lot of people like to point to a “study” posted in Search Engine Land which found a decline in organic search traffic between 18% and 64%, but it should be noted that this is not a study at all. It is simply a model based almost entirely on assumptions, and therefore should be taken with a huge grain of salt. (Also, 18-64% is a not a narrow enough range to be particularly informative regardless.)

Is SEO still worth doing?

Absolutely, hands down, SEO is still worthwhile. Legacy organic search results still receive the majority of clickthroughs on SERPs. However, as AI continues to improve, you should expect diminishing returns, as more people get their answer from AI and take no further action. It is therefore important that whatever you need to get across is being fetched by AI and displayed in SGE – regardless of whether it leads to a click or not.

I heard there is a hack to get your products cited by generative AI more often. What’s up with that?

A paper by a pair of Harvard researchers originally posted to arXiv in April 2024 titled “Manipulating Large Language Models to Increase Product Visibility” generated a lot of interest by both AI researchers and marketers looking for a cheat code to easily generate demand without any unit cost for that demand. As the paper suggests, they did find that LLMs can be manipulated to inserting specific products when the LLM is providing product recommendations. It is unrealistic that this is going to be applicable by life science marketers, however. It is a trial-and-error method involving high-volume testing of random, nonsensical text sequences added to your product’s metadata. This means that it would be nearly impossible to test on anything other than an open-source LLM which you are running an instance of yourself (and therefore able to force the re-indexing of your own content with extremely high frequency).

Another paper submitted to arXiv in June 2024 by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich titled “Adversarial Search Engine Optimization for Large Language Models” found that LLMs are vulnerable to preference manipulation through:

Prompt injection (literally telling the LLM what to do within the content)
Discreditation (i.e. badmouthing the competition)
Plugin optimization (similar to the above, but guiding the LLMs to connect to a desired API from which it will then obtain information)

While preference manipulation is simpler and feasible to implement, the problem with any overtly black-hat optimization technique remains: by the time the method is found and published, LLM developers are well on their way to fixing it, making it a game of whack-a-mole which could potentially end up in your website finding itself on a blacklist. Remember when Google took action against unnatural link building and had marketers disavow links to their sites? That was not fun for many black-hat search marketers out there. BioBM never recommends black-hat tactics for both their impermanence, likelihood of backfiring, and ethical reasons. There’s plenty of good things you can focus on to enhance your search optimization (and generative engine optimization) while providing a better experience for all internet users.

Don’t Stress About “Nofollow” Backlinks

Carlton Hoyt 12:30 pm , May 30, 2024

TL;DR Summary

Sites can use the HTML tag rel=”nofollow” to instruct search engines not to credit a link with any importance for the purposes of SEO
These instructions don’t carry authority: they are merely suggestions
Search engines, including Google, choose whether to listen to the nofollow suggestion or not
They generally do not listen to the suggestion
If you can generate contextually relevant backlinks from sites which use nofollow tags, go for it! You’ll likely get value from them regardless. Just don’t be spammy.

The History of HTML Link Relationship Tags

As the name implies, a link relationship tag provides context to search engines and other automated crawlers on the nature of the relationship between the source page and the destination page. Some very common ones which marketers may run into are rel=”sponsored”, which denotes links in sponsored content, rel=”ugc” which denotes links in user-generated content, and rel=”nofollow”, which is supposed to tell search engines to completely ignore a link. There are over 100 link relations recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, however, most of which are somewhat arcane and not used by search engines in any way which would be meaningful to marketers.

Link relationship tags, AKA rel tags, came into being in 2005, largely in response to the need for a nofollow tag to combat the excessive blog, comment, and forum spam which was extremely prevalent through the 2000s. Nofollow was proposed by Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger’s Jason Shellen. For a long time, because they didn’t have a better option, Google and other search engines treated nofollow tags as law. Not only would they give no SEO benefit to nofollow links, but for a long time Google wouldn’t even index them.

The Evolution of Nofollow

As blog and comment spam became less of an issue, and as search engines became much more powerful and able to understand context, nofollow and similar relationship tags became less important to the search engines. Google effectively said as much in an announcement on their Search Central Blog on September 10, 2019:

When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms. This has now changed. All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints—along with other signals—as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.

Why not completely ignore such links, as had been the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.

As stated in the post, as of March 1, 2020 Google changed the role of link relationship tags, making them suggestions (or, in Google’s words, “hints”) rather than rules.

Context Is Key

As search engines continue to become more intelligent and human-like in their understanding of context within content, life science SEO professionals need to pay greater attention to context. A nofollow backlink with just one or two sentences in a comment on a relevant Reddit post may be worth more than an entire guest post on a site with little other content relevant to your field. Focus on doing all the things which you should be doing anyway, regardless of whether the link is nofollow or not:

Post links only in relevant places
Contribute meaningfully to the conversation
Don’t be spammy
Keep your use of links to a minimum
Write naturally and use links naturally. Don’t force it.

Case: Laboratory Supply Network

Laboratory Supply Network started a backlinking campaign with BioBM in August 2023 which relied almost entirely on backlinks in comments from highly reputable websites (including Reddit, ResearchGate, and Quora), all of which use nofollow tags on their links. At the start of the campaign, their key rank statistics were:

Average rank: 26.08
Median rank: 14
% of terms in the top 10: 45.00% (63 out of 140)
% of terms in the top 3: 21.43% (30 out of 140)

Less than 8 months later, in March 2024, we had improve their search rank statistics massively:

Average rank: 17.54
Median rank: 7
% of terms in the top 10: 61.11% (88 out of 144)
% of terms in the top 3: 39.58% (57 out of 144)

Backlinking was not the only thing that Laboratory Supply Network was doing to improve its SEO – it has a longstanding and relatively consistent content generation program, for instance – but the big difference before and after was the backlink campaign (which, again, relied almost entirely on nofollow backlinks!) In the previous year, LSN’s search statistics didn’t improve nearly as much.

Conclusions

Backlinking has long been a key component of a holistic SEO strategy, and it remains just as important as ever. Links are an important signal telling Google and other search engines what content is relevant and important with regards to any particular topic. While many highly reputable sites use rel=”nofollow” to try to discourage link spam, most link spam is more effectively dealt with in other ways, such as manual, automated, or community-driven moderation. Google knows these other moderation tools have become more effective, and therefore allows itself to treat the nofollow tag as more of a hint than a rule. If you are performing SEO for your life science company, don’t avoid sites just because they use nofollow. You can achieve good results in spite of it.

"Looking to improve your search ranks and boost your organic lead generation? Work with BioBM. For over a decade, BioBM has been implementing proven SEO strategies that get our clients get to the top of the search ranks and stay there. Don’t wait. Start the conversation today."

Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 12:30 pm , May 30, 2024

FAQs: Content and SEO’s Low-Hanging Fruit

Carlton Hoyt 8:18 am , April 20, 2017

Creating content in support of your products and services is hard. Finding something to say which is both unique and valuable to the audience is a non-trivial endeavor, however it remains critical for persuading your audience that your product or service is right for them … and persuading search engines that your website is important.

That said, it’s incredible how many brands overlook this one simple, effective, easy-to-create content tool: the FAQ.

You don’t even have to do the thinking for an FAQ. Your customers do it for you. In your day-to-day sales and support operations, customers are asking questions all the time. All you need to do is document them and their answers, put it on your website, and bingo! – You now have an FAQ.

FAQ Best Practices

It’s absolutely possible to make a terrible FAQ, but really easy not to. If you follow these guidelines when creating your FAQ, you’ll be set:

Talk to your sales and / or support teams about the questions that they are getting from customers. If you’re creating an FAQ, you want to be sure it’s answering questions that your customers actually have.
The best FAQ questions are broadly relevant and / or address an important question. If you have a question from a person with a niche application which would only be relevant to a small subset of the audience who is also using your product for that application, it’s probably not worthy of adding to the FAQ. If you have too much clutter, people won’t use it.
It’s really easy to end up with oceans of FAQ content. Your don’t want your FAQ content to fluster your audience because there is too much of it. In addition to being selective with what content makes the grade for your FAQ section, use design tools such as accordions to help minimize the content overload and help ensure that customers are only presented with the FAQ content which is most relevant to them.
Keep FAQ content on the page of the product / service it pertains to whenever possible. Forcing people to navigate away to FAQ content is usually neither a good navigational experience nor the best for SEO.
If you have a long FAQ section, try to keep the most important and / or broadly relevant information towards the top, where it will be more likely to be seen.

To give you a better idea of how you may be able to leverage FAQ content, let’s take a look at a few examples.

FAQ Critiques

Agilent’s website makes ample use of FAQ content, which is great. To give an example, I’ll look at the page for their 280FS AA Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. They have a lot of stuff on this page, but they use a left-hand navigation menu with anchor links to help users find the information they need. In the “Support” section there is an FAQ, along with other categories of content, each of which has an accordion feature.

Agilent’s FAQ has a good amount of content in it, and they make it more manageable by only showing the questions. You have to click the question to see the answer. Unfortunately, when you click the question, you are directed to a page that has only that one question and answer on it, meaning the page is of relatively low value and has taken the user away from the bulk of the information they are seeking, leading to a sub-optimal user experience (you need to wait for the page to load, then click back to get back to where you were). Additionally, having many pages with “thin” content is far less beneficial from an SEO standpoint than having one page with lots of content. If, for instance, they instead had a nested accordion in which the answer dropped down when it was clicked, this would circumvent the need for individual pages for each answer while still showing a relatively manageable amount of information to each user.

Laboratory Supply Network also makes frequent use of FAQs. FAQs are perhaps of even greater value for distributors and resellers since these companies are often starved of unique content. FAQs, product reviews, and other mechanisms for generating unique content can both improve their SEO and differentiate them from competition who may be selling similar (or the same) products. As an example, we’ll use their Q500 FAQ on Homogenizers.net. Laboratory Supply Network puts their FAQs in a separate tab from other information on the product page, helping to prevent clutter. They also have all the FAQ information directly on the product page, which maximizes the SEO benefit. However, within the FAQ tab, there are no aids to help users find the information which may be of value to them. The only way to see which questions are answered is to scroll through them all – and through their answers. This is non-ideal, especially if there are a lot of questions and / or the questions have long answers. While users will scroll, too much scrolling decreases the likelihood that content near the bottom will be seen.

In Conclusion

FAQs add value for your customer and improve the SEO of your website. As with just about any content generation effort, your primary question should be: “can we do this in a manner which is valuable for our audience?” If you have a complex product or service or there is any common uncertainties that customers have about your business, it’s likely that you can both deliver and receive value through an FAQ. Ensure that you’re following best practices, and you’ll maximize its value.

"Looking to create content which has a discernible impact on your business? Looking for practical, realistic means to improve your search marketing? BioBM helps life science companies with almost any marketing needs. Contact us today and learn how we can help build your company into a powerhouse brand with rapidly growing revenues."

Content Marketing / Search Marketing 8:18 am , April 20, 2017

What Google RankBrain Means for SEO

Carlton Hoyt 1:03 pm , April 22, 2016

There’s been a ton of buzz in SEO circles about Google’s new RankBrain algorithm. This is very understandable for two reasons. First, it’s a nerd’s dream. It’s an artificial intelligence-based algorithm, and anything with AI in it is buzzy and awesome. Secondly, and more importantly, Google has stated that RankBrain is already the third most important ranking factor behind content and links.

To really understand what RankBrain means for life science SEOers, let’s zoom out a bit and understand what RankBrain is and what it does.

What Is RankBrain?

Put simply, Google RankBrain is a machine learning artificial intelligence system designed to help process search results in order to provide more relevant results to searchers. Specifically, RankBrain is intended to help Google return more relevant results for terms and phrases it’s never heard before. This was particularly important as the internet ever increasingly quickly spews forth new vocabulary and people speak in a stream-of-consciousness type manner into their phones.

Put somewhat more technically, RankBrain converts all language into vectors, with any given vector’s position and direction representing its conceptual meaning. Semantically related terms have vectors which are positioned close to each other and, similarly, groups of related terms (vectors) are positioned closely to other groups of vectors which have close semantic meaning. Through some crazy mathematics and / or magic which I’m sure would be beyond me even if I did have access to the details of it, this ever-changing map of vectors enables Google to make a best guess with regards to terms or phrases it does not know. However, it also [presumably] allows it to better map known concepts to each other as well.

How to Optimize for RankBrain

If this isn’t the first article you’ve read on how – specifically – you should optimize for RankBrain, then let me apologize on behalf of whatever other advice you may have received. The correct answer is: you do nothing. Continue to be a person, and do the rest of your job like a person. The “like a person” part is important.

Since the beginning of search engines, people have been trying to game the system. It’s been a decades-long battle between website owners, who want to convince search engines that their websites are important, and the search engines themselves who want to return the most relevant results to searchers. Initially, search engines were fairly rudimentary and it was easy to convince them your website was more important than it actually was. As time went on, search engines took away more and more tricks. By and large, search engines have won – it’s now extremely difficult to game the system. However, that doesn’t mean that the ranking systems were perfect. RankBrain is simply a response to allow it to better adapt to the actual people doing the searching. In other words, it’s attempting to make Google’s search algorithm a little bit more human. It’s becoming less important to obsess about every word you use since Google is starting to place less importance on the term itself and more importance on the meaning. After all, that’s what people are really looking for. They don’t want results that just have the words they used. They want results that will provide the meaning they seek.

This doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. It’s not. All this means is that you shouldn’t be trying to fool anyone. The best way to increase your website’s value to search engines is, by and large, to increase your website’s value to your target audience. Have great content that makes people want to share it? That’ll be good for SEO. Have a well laid out and easily navigable site? That’ll be good for SEO. Is your website highly relevant to the people you’re looking to target? That’ll be good for SEO as well. Of course there’s always some technical factors that people still manage to overlook – for instance, ensuring your title attribute is relevant and meaningful and that your page load times are decent – but at the end of the day if you’re making a site that’s great for your target audience, it’ll probably end up having fairly good SEO as well.

Don’t Forget to Use Words

I personally find this to be the most amusing piece of advice that I find myself giving over and over again: don’t forget to use words. Seriously, you can have the flashiest website, all the video content in the world, giant shiny infographics, and a totally cool podcast, and all those things are great. You know what none of them have? Words – the text kind. Think of it this way:

What do people type / speak into search engines? Words.
What do search engines’ web crawlers read? Words.
What form the bulk of the results that search engines return? Words.

While the above is admittedly an oversimplification, it’s still 90% true. Words are still very important. It still comes down to the content.

"Is your company winning the battle for attention? If not, you need BioBM more than you think. Sure, we can help you with search marketing, but the battle for attention is much more than that. SEO is only one part. BioBM crafts captivation strategies that don’t just increase the number of eyeballs you get from search, but holistically build a captivated audience that demonstrates loyalty to your brand. Don’t just make a splash. Start a movement. Contact BioBM to get started."

Blog / Search Marketing 1:03 pm , April 22, 2016

SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changed

Carlton Hoyt 12:10 pm , August 4, 2014

It’s no secret that the SEO world has changed. Ever since Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes, and the subsequent updates to them, prior best practices fell apart. There’s no doubt about that. Things that were once highly effective tools of SEO, like link wheels, are no longer relevant. Because of the ever-decreasing ways in which a marketer can manipulate search engine ranks, there has been an increasing chorus of people proclaiming the “death” of SEO.

Some Self-Serving Claims

It’s been a long-running trend to proclaim the death of SEO. Here’s a nice little article from 2007 which lists other, older articles proclaiming the death of SEO. The claim that SEO is dead is not a new one.

These claims tend to come from two kinds of people: SEO-ers who’ve jumped ship and are trying to get people to follow them, or from people who work on elements of marketing that could be considered strategic alternatives to SEO. Once upon a time, a lot of these voices were from people doing search advertising. Now they’re mostly from content marketers.

Is content marketing important for SEO? Sure it is. Is it more important for SEO than it used to be? In most cases, yes. Is it a replacement for SEO? Not a chance.

The New Age of SEO

Let’s be clear on something: SEO is not dead. SEO will quite possibly never be dead so long as search engines as we know them remain widely used tools.

SEO has been an ever-changing field since the beginning. Remember “keyword jamming”? Remember those websites that were padded with “invisible” text at the bottom of the pages back in the 90s? Remember the link farms of the 2000s? … The most effective tactics have always changed as Google and other search engines have evolved, and I would be very surprised if that fact doesn’t remain true for a long time to come. The only thing about SEO that is infallibly true is the value of those highly coveted top organic search ranks.

The job of the SEOer has not changed. The SEOer is not suddenly a content marketer. The SEOer’s toolbox, however, has changed.

Many technical factors surrounding SEO are still important. Site performance is still very important and something that can be directly controlled. Clickthrough is still very important and is something which is readily influenced. Ensure that any page that you would want to use as a landing page has the appropriate metadata such that your site’s appearance in search results attracts searchers. Making use of Google Authorship and tagging content accordingly can have a profound effect, especially for companies which generate a lot of high-quality content. Additionally, SEOers need to ensure the website’s entry points should be controlled.

Keyword research is still important. The results of this keyword research are then fed to content development teams to help guide the content focus towards things that people are looking for. SEOers then need to ensure that the content is appropriately optimized, or that the content development teams know enough about SEO to create well-optimized content themselves.

Content marketing is very important for most organizations, but it’s still just one piece of SEO. Having an SEO strategy which focuses solely on content will put you at a strategic disadvantage versus those companies with a more holistic approach.

"Looking to improve your inbound marketing? BioBM’s marketing team doesn’t evangelize any aspect of marketing; we take a holistic approach to identify and execute on the areas of greatest potential impact for your life science organization. Want to learn more? Contact us today."

Blog / Search Marketing 12:10 pm , August 4, 2014

Content First, SEO Second

Carlton Hoyt 12:03 pm , June 24, 2014

By now, any decent SEO-er knows that the old way of performing SEO – basically, manipulating ranks through inorganic backlinks – is worthless. Google caught on and killed it. As of Panda 4.0, there are extremely limited ways in which someone can fool the rankings system, and doing so will only hurt you in the long run. That being the case, more SEO experts are turning to content development to improve SEO. In a sense, this is good – content development is a legitimate way of trying to improve rankings. However, as SEO-ers start to think about content, we need to remember that the content itself needs to be prioritized above SEO at all times. In other words, life science marketers cannot let the quality of their content slip due to the desire to focus on SEO.

Remember that the purpose of using content for SEO is to have your content seen by your target audience. Your audience, when consuming that content, is going to judge you by its quality. If you’re churning out low-quality content for SEO purposes you may get a lot of eyeballs, but you’re going to be turning off your audience due to the low value of the content which they’re landing on. This can be especially damaging if the audience doesn’t have prior experience with your company. Instead of trying to develop content strictly for SEO, take the high-quality content that’s being developed as part of your content marketing strategy and optimize it!

There are a number of things that you can do to improve the SEO of your high-quality content. For example:

Think about how your audience would ask questions related to the topic at hand. Is there any particular phrasing that they would use? If so, try to incorporate that phrasing into your content to improve the match for relevant “long-tail” search terms.
Make appropriate use of heading tags.
Ensure your page titles and URLs are optimized and relevant. Some content management systems default to generic nomenclature for URLs and titles, using things like an arbitrary numbering system or the date instead of a rich description. Ensure your settings use the title of your content (or at least part of it) in the page title and URL.
Improve the clickthrough rate of digital content by using a descriptive meta description tag
Improve the CTR of your digital content even more by using Google Authorship and ensuring you have a good headshot in your linked Google+ account. This can have a huge impact – I’ve seen various case studies claiming that pages with authorship attribution and a headshot displayed in the search results see between 20% and 150% increases in clickthrough. Eye-tracking data is just as compelling: searchers will pay more attention to author-attributed pages than higher-ranking videos with larger images.

If necessity dictates that you need to create content strictly for SEO purposes, especially if it would fall outside the bounds of your content strategy, ask yourself the following questions to ensure that you don’t churn out junk content:

Does our target audience have a need to know about this topic?
Can we create content which would genuinely fill that knowledge gap?
Would our target audience expect us to provide this type of content? If not, would they find it odd that we are? … I think of this as the realtor / lawnmower conundrum. Your realtor, knowing that you just bought a house, would be in a great position to sell you a lawnmower. They even know what kind of lawn you have. However, you would likely be put off if your realtor tried to sell you a lawnmower.

While the tools at one’s disposal to positively affect search engine ranks are more limited than they used to be, SEO is still important. As SEO tactics take a more content-centric approach, it’s important you don’t churn out low-value content. Your content strategy should be focused on the content. Working SEO into your content strategy will have a far more positive long-term effect than trying to take to shape content around an SEO strategy.

"In their quest to determine who to give their business to, your customers are judging you every step of the way. Providing value to them through great content is a critical way to earn their trust and respect, giving your life science company an edge on the competition. If you are looking for superior content strategies which will create competitive advantage for your company, contact BioBM. We’ll ensure your company is providing value to your customers which pays you back in increased business. And we’ll make sure it gets seen while we’re at it."

Blog / Content Marketing / Search Marketing 12:03 pm , June 24, 2014

Social Media Optimization

Carlton Hoyt 9:50 am , July 11, 2013

A lot of life science companies create social media accounts for the wrong reasons. Some do it strictly for demand generation (bad idea – scientific products are not impulse buys), some do it because they feel like they should, and some do it because they have some unrealistic expectation that social will make them the next big thing (not to ruin your dream, but your chances of your content – whatever it may be – going viral are very slim). While we’ve always been proponents of social media marketing so long as expectations are realistic and the focus is on brand-building, there is an increasingly important reason to engage in social media: SEO.

As search engines, and in particular Google, have aimed to find ways to improve search results, they are effectively crowdsourcing their rankings by relying more heavily on social media. In what I believe to be a clear indicator of the increasing importance of social media in SEO, a recently released study by SearchMetrics correlated 44 factors to Google Rank and found that social signals correlate with Google rank better than any other type of factor. In fact, the seven social factors investigated all ranked in the top eight Spearman Correlation scores. Keeping in mind that the SearchMetrics study is a correlation study and not a causation study, due to the complexity and opacity of search engine algorithms, determination of causation in search engine rankings is effectively impossible so correlation is as good a measure as we’re going to get. Despite that Matt Cutts himself stated in an interview that “Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover [how relevant something is]”, there is little doubt that social has become very important in search engine rankings and will continue to become more important in the future.

Does this mean every company should be active in social media? Certainly not. First of all, SEO itself is not important to every company (although it is important to most) so jumping on the social media bandwagon isn’t necessarily important even within this context. Secondly, you have to have the resources and dedication to do it right. Having an unused, abandoned or spammy social account, or even one simply devoid of meaningful content, can hurt your brand. Social media is mostly about content, so if you don’t have anything of value to say then don’t bother. This isn’t to say that you need to devote large amounts of resources to social media.

If you do want to engage in social media for SEO (or “social media optimization”), the rules to follow are mostly the same as for social media in general but with a few exceptions. Most notably, while you can help build your brand by sharing the content of others, social media optimization is much more effective when you post your own content as the ultimate target of the social sharing will be your own site. You will need at least a partial focus on content creation.

Search marketing is arguably the most powerful tool for most life science companies to generate demand, and search engine optimization is a key part of that. In the rapidly evolving search engine algorithms, social media is playing an increasingly important role. Companies relying on search to generate demand should be looking to social media optimization to make sure that they can get to the top of the rankings and stay there.

"Looking to improve your search rankings through social media optimization, or just build your brand through an increased social following? Contact BioBM. Our life science digital marketing experts are ready to help your company meet its potential. Let’s have a conversation and learn how to get there."

Blog / Search Marketing / Social Media 9:50 am , July 11, 2013

New SEO Paper Published

biobm 6:46 pm , May 30, 2013

BioBM Consulting has published a new paper on search engine optimization entitled “9 Things Every Life Science Marketer Should Know About SEO … and How Smaller Companies Can Achieve Big Search Engine Ranks.” This white paper discusses nine aspects of SEO which we believe every life science marketer should be familiar with. Additionally, at the end of the paper is bonus content on how smaller or younger companies can compete with the big guys and achieve breakthrough SEO results. Considering that almost every life scientist utilizes internet search at some point in their buying journeys, this is critical knowledge for any life science marketer.

This white paper is freely available to all those in the life science tools & services industry. To learn more about the new report, to preview it, or to request a copy, please visit: https://biobm.com/idea-farm/reports-papers/

News 6:46 pm , May 30, 2013

Single-Page Websites & SEO

Carlton Hoyt 10:54 am , April 26, 2013

One of the newer trends in website design, which has actually existed for quite a while but is just now becoming more popular and easy to implement, are single-page websites where the content is accessed via anchor links which trigger dynamic scrolling. (In case you’re not sure what I’m talking about you can find a whole website of examples here.) While single-page design can add a lot of character to a life science website and be visually captivating without sacrificing user flow, a single page website almost always sacrifices SEO.

The reason is quite simple: Fewer pages means fewer URLs, fewer page titles, and fewer high-on-page header tags. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Muller explained on the Google Webmaster Central forum:

Quote from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Muller

I’d generally recommend a more traditional site format. It’s complicated for search engines to understand a “one-page” site like that, given that there is so much information on a single page. It’s much easier for our algorithms to focus on individual pages with content that matches the same context. Additionally […], it could be extremely confusing to the user to see basically an empty page when they expect to find content based on a search that they’ve made.

John raises another excellent search-related point that addresses a UX flaw in single-page websites. Even if you do manage to optimize for content that is farther down the page, Google doesn’t index anchor links. Therefore, the search results could indicate the page being relevant to the search due to content well below the fold, but a user who clicks the link will land at the top of the page and not at the relevant content.

Does this mean you can’t use all those nifty scrolling effects on your site? Not at all. It’s possible to use the same type of single-page design and the same effects while still having multiple pages – for example by using a static nav bar header with “real” links as opposed to anchor links but making on-page content accessible via anchor tangs with dynamic scrolling. Another solution is to use landing pages to target additional keywords then link back into the dynamically scrolling page(s) – or just capture leads right on the page by leveraging more highly targeted content, which is the purpose of most landing pages. Landing pages are generally not well cross-linked with other site content and are outside the normal site hierarchical structure, however, and therefore often require additional off-site SEO effort to achieve a high rank for competitive terms.

Ultimately, if you want scientists to be able to easily find your products via search engines, it’s probably best to have a traditional site format.

"Want to ensure that your products are found when customers are searching for them? Contact BioBM and ask us about the demonstrable results we have achieved for life science companies. Whether you are looking to develop a new website and want to ensure that it is optimized or you want to optimize your current site, BioBM can get results."

Blog / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 10:54 am , April 26, 2013

SEO: Optimizing Clickthrough

Carlton Hoyt 10:13 am , February 7, 2013

You’ve seemingly done everything right – you have lots of high-quality backlinks pointing to the relevant page and the page has an optimized title, URL, and header tags. You have well-optimized content and lots of it, and your domain and site have “aged”. You’ve avoided any “black hat” tricks that could get you penalized. So why aren’t your search engine rankings where they should be? It’s not an uncommon problem, and there’s generally only two answers: 1) You’ve underestimated your competition, or 2) Your clickthrough is poor.

If you know a few things about SEO, you probably heard a lot of talk about backlinks and content / page optimization, but those are by no means the only important factors in SEO. Your search results also need to appeal to the scientists that are doing the searching. Think about it: Google is in the business of helping internet users find the content that they’re looking for. People use Google more than other search engines primarily because of the quality of the search results. If a result isn’t being clicked on, then that indicates that it’s less relevant than other results. If it’s less relevant, then it’s in the search engines’ best interest to return a different result for that query that is more relevant and the experience is better for the users.

If you keep a close eye on your Google rankings, for example, you probably noticed that your rankings for some terms will occasionally bounce around a bit. That’s usually Google performing clickthrough testing – seeing if another result would be of more interest to the users.

Optimizing Clickthrough

So what is the life science marketer to do? A few things. First, pay attention to your meta description attribute. While this attribute is not included in Google’s algorithms that determine search ranking, this attribute is generally what will display as the descriptive text under the link in the search results and therefore effects clickthrough. Be sure that’s relevant and interesting. Including language used in the search term will help as well. Secondly, think about what searchers for that term will be looking for and what the page you’re optimizing is offering. Are searchers going to be interested in cell-based assay products but your highest-ranking result is a blog post? Conversely, may they be interested in informational content about pre-clinical toxicology but your result offers it as a service? Perhaps they are looking for stem cell culture protocols but your result is for a white paper. Regardless of the exact reason, you could be significantly impacting your clickthrough if your optimized result is not what the searchers are looking for.

Measuring Clickthrough

Unfortunately, you cannot measure clickthrough in Google Analytics since there is no information provided about impressions. You can, however, use Google Webmaster Tools. The “Search Queries” menu will show you the ballpark number of impressions for any given search term, the average position in search results for that term, and the amount of clicks those impressions led to as well as the CTR (provided you have more than 10 clicks for the given term). Keep in mind that unlike Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools only retains data from the past 90 days, so if you want to keep track of clickthrough long-term you’ll want to export it.

You can do everything right – have high-quality links, well-optimized content, etc. – but if your clickthrough is poor your SEO will suffer. Life science marketers who measure and optimize for clickthrough will be rewarded with higher search rankings.

"If search engine optimization is a big mystery to you, or if your SEO efforts simply aren’t yielding the results you hoped, contact BioBM. Our Life Science SEO services have driven rankings and traffic for many companies across the life sciences. See what our clients are saying about us."

Blog / Search Marketing 10:13 am , February 7, 2013