Tag : search engine marketing

Supercharge Your Google Ads With Every Possible Extension

Željislav Petrovič 9:29 am , February 19, 2025

Life science companies constantly face numerous challenges in capturing their audience’s attention on crowded search engine result pages (SERPs) with Google Ads. To make their ads stand out and attract their scientific audiences it is essential to present key information in a clear and engaging way. That’s where Google’s ad extensions (now called assets) come in as a game changer. They transform the ads from simple, inconspicuous text into rich, informative experiences by making them more noticeable, valuable, and engaging for the viewer.

By leveraging a variety of ad extensions, you can present all crucial information related to the products or services you promote (from unique product features to product variants/service packages with pricing, physical locations, and more) directly on the search results page. In this post, we’ll explore the different types of ad extensions, their benefits, and the best practices that can help you maximize the impact of your Google search marketing ads and most effectively gain the attention of your life science audience.

The Benefits of Using Ad Extensions in Google Ads

Maximizing the use of ad extensions in Google Ads has multiple benefits for life science marketers, including:

Increased Visibility: Extensions make your ads larger and more prominent on the search results page, capturing more attention from viewers.
Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR): By adding more hyperlinks and valuable information to your ads, extensions provide users with more reasons to click, resulting in a higher CTR.
Enhanced Ad Rank: Ad extensions contribute positively to Google’s Ad Rank formula, leading to improved ad positions and potentially lower costs per click.
Improved Relevance: Extensions allow you to tailor your ads to specific user searches, increasing relevance and engagement.
Better User Experience: By providing quick and easy access to relevant information, extensions improve the user experience and encourage interaction.

Overview of Google Ads Extensions and Their Suitability for Life Science Companies

To help you prioritize which ad extensions will deliver the most impact for your campaigns, we’ve split them into two categories: All-Stars: Must-Have Extensions and Other Extensions to Consider. This will make it easier to focus your efforts on the extensions that will likely yield the best results for you, while keeping additional options in mind to experiment with as needed.

All-Stars: Must-Have Extensions

1. Sitelink Extensions

What It Is: Sitelink extensions are additional links (clickable text assets with headline and description) that appear below your ad, helping users navigate directly to specific pages or sections they may want to browse on your site.
Use Cases: Link to individual product or service pages, collection / category pages, a contact page, quote request page, or page with downloadable content. This allows users to navigate directly to relevant content, decreasing bounce rates while improving engagement and conversion rates.
Who Should Use It: Companies with multiple landing pages that highlight various aspects of their offerings, showcase specific products or services, provide access to valuable resources like case studies and white papers, or allow users to take meaningful action.

*Example of Sitelink extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

2. Callout Extensions

What It Is: Callout extensions are short, non-clickable descriptive text snippets that allow you to highlight the key product/service attributes and benefits within your ad.
Use Cases: You can use callout extensions to emphasize distinctive qualities, such as unique product/service features, certifications, warranties, fast shipping, or the availability of expert support.
Who Should Use It: Companies with differentiating product or service attributes that aren’t easily conveyed in the main ad text should consider using callouts to highlight these strengths.

Example of Callout extensions *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

3. Structured Snippet Extensions

What It Is: Structured Snippet extensions allow you to showcase specific aspects of your products or services in structured text format. Unlike Callout extensions, which highlight key benefits, Structured Snippets present categorized details like product types, or service packages, to clarify the offerings in the ad.
Use Cases: Use structured snippets to list various product types you offer (e.g., “Cell Counters,” “Microplate Readers,” “Triple Quad LC-MS”) or the exact services you provide (e.g., “Cell Line Development,” “In Situ RNA Seq” “Bespoke Oncology Models”).
Who Should Use It: Companies with a broad product line or service catalog that want to showcase a variety of options directly in the ad, making it easy for users to see their range of offerings at a glance.

Example of Structured Snippet extensions *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

4. Call Extensions

What It Is: Call extensions are special assets that display a clickable phone number in your ad, encouraging users to contact your sales or support team directly from the ad.
Use Cases: Sometimes a scientist wants to get straight to the point. Call extensions facilitate direct contact, enabling outreach directly from the ad.
Who Should Use It: Companies with dedicated sales teams who have a consultative sales process.

Example of Call extension *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

These are the extensions that should be prioritized in your Google Ads campaigns, as they significantly enhance the relevance, engagement, and performance of your ads.

Other Extensions to Consider

1. Location Extensions

What It Is: Location extensions allow you to display your physical business address, a map link, and distance (if applicable) to your location from the searcher’s location in the search results, which helps potential customers to easily find and visit your physical location.
Use Cases: When you serve customers in specific locations, you can use this type of extension to show your business locations on the map..
Who Should Use It: Companies that have brick-and-mortar locations that clients may visit (such as company headquarters, laboratories, research facilities, or regional distributors) can use this extension to demonstrate convenience and reassurance of local availability while improving ad relevance. For companies which only deal with customers remotely, this is less relevant.

Example of Location extension for a provider of lab instrument services

2. Image Extensions

What It Is: Image extensions allow you to add visually compelling images to your ads, which can significantly enhance the appearance of your ads and make them more engaging.
Use Cases: You can use image extensions to visually showcase your products, team, facilities, software/app in action, or feature scientific images related to your scientific specialty.
Who Should Use It: Companies that have a strong collection of images related to their products / services and want to provide potential clients with a quick visual preview of their offerings in the ads.

Example of Image extension for *a distributor of lab homogenizers*

3. Lead Form Extensions

What It Is: Lead form extensions allow users to submit their information and sign up for something you offer directly through the ad without leaving the search results page.
Use Cases: Capture leads directly on the search results page using Google Ads’ built-in forms, allowing users to request more information, sign up for demos, or access downloadable content like whitepapers, application notes, or brochures.
Who Should Use It: Companies focused on lead generation, whether by providing high-value downloadable resources, offering product demos or simply making it easier for potential customers to get in touch.

*Example of Lead Form extension for a supplier of cell imaging systems*

4. Price Extensions

What It Is: Price extensions allow you to showcase a list of products or services with pricing right below your ad, giving potential customers instant visibility into the price of your offerings.
Use Cases: Provide potential customers with a quick cost estimate of your offerings by displaying the exact prices of individual featured products and product variants or starting prices of specific product types, product lines, and service packages within your ad.
Who Should Use It: Companies with standardized product/service prices, especially those that list a wide range of products or service packages on their website and do direct sales through the site.

Example of Price extensions for *a distributor of lab homogenizers*

5. Promotion Extensions

What It Is: Promotion extensions allow you to highlight special offers, discounts, or limited-time deals directly in your ad, making it easier for potential customers to see and take advantage of your promotions.
Use Cases: These extensions can be used to highlight promotional offers with monetary or percentage-based discounts alongside your ad, and attract users looking for special deals.
Who Should Use It: Companies that sell tangible products, software/app subscriptions, or service packages online and run promotions with limited-time discounts.

Example of Promotion extensions *for a distributor of lab homogenizers*

6. App Extensions

What It Is: App extensions allow you to embed a direct link for downloading your mobile app into the ad, making it easy for users to install and access your app without the need to visit your site first.
Use Cases: If you offer mobile apps (such as LIMS, ELNs, reference management apps, or other apps that support research work), you can use this extension to promote your app within the ad and drive downloads for your app.
Who Should Use It: Companies offering iOS or Android apps designed for scientists, especially those offering subscription-based apps or free apps that provide them with downstream marketing opportunities.

*Example of App extension for a vendor of* Android/iOS app

Best Practices for Using Ad Extensions in Life Science Campaigns

To maximize your ad extensions’ potential, make sure to follow these best practices:

1. Choose the Extensions Based on Your Campaign Goal

Not all ad extensions will be relevant to your campaign and business type. For instance, if you’re promoting an automated cell counter and your campaign objective is lead generation, callout extensions can highlight key features like high accuracy and speed, while a lead form extension can help capture leads from researchers interested in learning more. Make sure to align extensions with your objectives, whether it is generating leads, driving sales, or increasing website visits.

2. Use Extensions That Are Concise and Compelling

Scientists often scan information quickly, so it’s crucial to use ad extensions that are direct, clear, and impactful. Instead of long, generic phrases, focus on specific, concise, benefit-driven messaging. For example, rather than “Advanced Cell Counting Technology,” try “Fast & Accurate Cell Counting”’ to immediately convey value. Keep language precise and focused on what will resonate with your audience.

3. Tailor Extensions to Your Target Audience

Different audience segments within life sciences have different intentions and respond to different messaging. For example, if you’re targeting an audience with more scientific queries, sitelink extensions could lead to a white paper showcasing your technology, while for an audience with more commercial queries, they could lead to a case study showing improved results or cost savings. By aligning extensions with keyword intent, you can ensure your ads deliver the most relevant content to each audience segment.

4. Keep Extensions Fresh and Up To Date

Outdated extensions can lead to poor user experiences, negatively impacting ad performance and overall results. Make sure to regularly review and update all extensions you use, especially price extensions that should display valid product prices, promotion extensions that should reflect current special offers and discounts, and sitelink extensions that should direct people to up-to-date pages with useful resources.

5. Monitor Performance and Measure the Success of Extensions

Just like ad copy and keywords, ad extensions should be periodically evaluated for effectiveness. Use Google Ads performance reports to track and see which extensions drive the most clicks and conversions and which extensions do not generate any results. For example, if a callout extensions about key product features have a low engagement rate, consider testing different wording or replacing it with a more relevant extension. If your performance reports show that certain price or sitelink extensions drive meaningful results, try creating more extensions like these.

6. A/B Test Different Extensions and Messaging

Not all extensions will perform equally well in every campaign. To optimize performance and get the most from your ad extensions, continuously experiment with different extension types and messaging. For instance, test variations of callout extensions to see which callouts work best for your audience, or compare lead form extensions with sitelink extensions to determine which drives more conversions. Continuous testing and refining of your extensions will help you maximize ad visibility and engagement.

Following these practices will ensure you get the most out of your ad extensions. The ad relevance will be drastically improved, and you will see better engagement rates and more conversions coming from your campaigns.

Conclusion

Ad extensions provide a powerful way for life science marketers to enhance their Google Ads, providing more value to viewers, improving engagement, and ultimately driving more qualified leads or sales. After leveraging various extension types that are suitable for the products or services you promote and aligned with campaign goals, you will create a richer, more informative and engaging ad experience that resonates with audiences from the life science industry. Ready to supercharge your Google Ads campaigns with ad extensions? Contact BioBM for a customized Google Ads strategy tailored to the unique needs of your business.

Don’t Optimize for Quality Score in Google Ads

Carlton Hoyt 9:51 am , March 27, 2024

Sometimes you just have to let Google be Google.

Large, complex algorithms which pump out high volumes of decisions based in part on non-quantifiable inputs are almost inherently going to get things wrong sometimes. We see this as users of Google Search all the time: even when you provide detailed search queries, the top result might not be the best and not all of the top results might be highly relevant. It happens. We move on. That doesn’t mean the system is bad; it’s just imperfect.

Quality score in Google Ads has similar problems. It’s constantly making an incredibly high volume of decisions, and somewhere in the secret sauce of its algos it makes some questionable decisions.

Yes, Google Ads decided that a CTR of almost 50% was “below average”. This is not surprising.

If your quality score is low, there may be things you can do about it. Perhaps your ads aren’t as relevant to the search terms as they could be. Check the search terms that your ads are showing for. Does you ad copy closely align with those terms? Perhaps your landing page isn’t providing the experience Google wants. Is it quick to load? Mobile friendly? Relevant? Check PageSpeed Insights to see if there are things you can do to improve your landing page. Maybe your CTR actually isn’t all that high. Are you making good use of all the ad extensions?

But sometimes, as we see above, Google just thinks something is wrong when to our subjective, albeit professional, human experience everything seems just fine. That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Ultimately, you shouldn’t be optimizing for quality score. It is a metric, not a KPI. You should be optimizing for things like conversions, cost per action (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS), all of which you should be able to optimize effectively even if your quality score seems sub-optimal.

"Want to boost your ROAS? Talk to BioBM. We’ll implement optimized Google Ads campaigns (and other campaigns!) that help meet your revenue and ROI goals, all without the inflated monthly fees charged by most agencies. In other words, we’ll deliver metrics that matter. Let’s get started."

Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 9:51 am , March 27, 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

Intent to Purchase

Carlton Hoyt 8:04 am , June 28, 2013

We’re avid fans of search marketing for demand generation-focused campaigns (both search engine marketing and search engine optimization). Even as other platforms begin to offer enhanced levels of targeting to match the capabilities of search engine marketing, and even in situations where one can identify specific customers (through data mining, for instance), we believe that for most life science companies SEM & SEO offers superior value for demand generation. Why? When properly targeted, searchers have the greatest amount of commercial intent. In other words, they are more likely to be looking for information to help them make a purchase than are scientists targeted via other channels.

As a bit of a case study, I’ll use a recent scenario. I was discussing marketing with the owner of a small life science company who does a reasonable amount of sales through e-commerce. He was complaining about the cost of CPC advertising on Google AdWords. The company does a lot of blogging, and the blogs were disseminated quite broadly to many large life science-focused groups on LinkedIn. He bragged that the traffic resulting from blogging was extremely inexpensive (the effective CPC was probably 5% – 10% of the CPC through AdWords), the unique viewers per month was very high for a company of its size and traffic was still increasing at a good clip (most traffic was a result of the blog). Sales, however, weren’t where he felt they should be.

This case illustrates two points. 1) unique visitors is a vanity metric – it doesn’t mean anything unless you can convert those visitors to sales at a satisfactory rate. 2) Not all marketing channels will produce viewers with the same commercial intent. In fact, the intent to make a purchase can vary wildly across channels. Simply reaching your target market with just about any message is usually good for the purpose of awareness (although awareness is useless if the audience doesn’t have a reason to remember you and you don’t regularly re-engage them) but for demand generation you need to reach the audiences that have the intent to purchase a product, and specifically a product such as yours. Targeting anyone in your target market often doesn’t do the trick, especially if your target market isn’t extremely well defined.

If you think about what customers do when they are considering a purchase, it makes sense that search is the medium of choice for demand generation campaigns. They either a) have a brand in mind already and go directly to that brand, eschewing shopping around, b) ask a colleague for a recommendation or c) look for information through search engines. These three behaviors encompass almost every scientist when considering a purchase. There is only one of those things that you can have a significant effect on in the short-term and that is making sure you show up where they search. You can try to create a positive and memorable overall brand experience to influence the brand preferences of the scientist and his / her colleagues, but that isn’t something that can be done over the short term and often requires that customers have a significant degree of experience with your company in the first place (hence why attempts to generate demand via brand-building alone are something of a catch-22).

Small life science companies often don’t have the finances or time to wait around for campaigns to pay off in the long-term. Most need to see an ROI in the short-term to stay afloat. To generate those shorter-term revenues your campaigns need to focus on the places where you can target not just your target market, but the members of your target market with commercial intent.

"Looking to increase your advertising ROI? Do you want to know the messages and channels that will allow you to most efficiently drive demand? Contact BioBM. Our experienced life science marketing managers will help your company create and deploy campaigns to build demand for your products and grow your revenues."

Blog / Demand Generation 8:04 am , June 28, 2013

When Search Ads Don’t Work Pt.2

Carlton Hoyt 5:46 pm , May 14, 2013

About a month and a half ago we wrote an article about times when search advertising isn’t worthwhile, focusing on the results of a study by eBay Research Labs. However, that study highlights just two specific instances when search advertising isn’t profitable; there are many more instances when search advertising would not be able to play an effective role in demand generation for life science marketers, and we discuss these here.

The most obvious example is when your product isn’t simply something that scientists aren’t looking for. This is most common with services and software, but sometimes occurs with other products as well, especially those which are non-essential to life science research. You can attempt to expand your targeting to include ancillary terms (for example, if you manufacture an accessory to a product then you might advertise for the terms related to the main product). However, this often leads to a low clickthrough rate, which both increases cost-per-click and decreases the frequency that your ads will be shown, which may lead to lackluster campaign performance. Additionally, if search volume for a given term is too low, most SEM platforms (AdWords, Bing Ads, etc.) simply won’t show any ads.

Another example is when the people doing the searching aren’t the people you need to sell to. For example, in the situation of suppliers of very high-end equipment, most of the search traffic may come from lab techs but the decision-makers may be director-level individuals. It may be that this ultimately doesn’t matter – it may still be worthwhile to advertise even if only 1 out of 100 clicks is relevant – but this can dramatically increase the cost per conversion, which is a much more meaningful metric by which to measure ROI.

Chemical / biochemical companies often face a unique problem with search marketing. Depending on the substances they sell, they need to take care to not be flagged as an “online pharmacy” by ad platforms, which can result in account suspension.

Additionally, for low-cost items it is often the case that search engine marketing isn’t profitable on the initial sale, especially for distributors and for manufacturers of lower-value products who often operate on fairly thin margins to begin with. In order for SEM to have a good return in these situations, it is imperative that life science suppliers continue to re-engage with customers in order to drive repeat sales.

As we said previously, search engine marketing is a fantastic tool and can work wonders for lead generation but we should not blindly expect results from it. Regardless of the situation, SEM should be carefully monitored and coupled with appropriate analytics and CRM such that results can be measured, informed decisions can be made, and campaigns can be improved over time.

"Want to more effectively reach your target market? Talk to BioBM. Our life science advertising management services will help you identify the most effective channels, create compelling advertisements, and ensure the effectiveness of your campaigns over time with optimization and analytics. Contact us for more information."

Blog / Search Marketing 5:46 pm , May 14, 2013

When Search Ads Don’t Work

Carlton Hoyt 3:58 pm , March 29, 2013

Regardless of who you are or what you’re looking for, one of the most common ways to look for products and services is the mighty internet. An unpublished BioBM study found that among life science researchers, 45% will turn to search engines first when looking for a product or service – roughly the same amount as will ask a colleague first – and almost all scientists will perform an internet search at some point in their buying journey. Given the near-ubiquitous prevalence of search as a tool to find products and services, search engine marketing just seems to make logical sense. If you have a product, and someone is looking for that product, then put up an ad, they’ll click on it, and bingo – for a few bucks you’ve targeted a highly relevant member of your target market who is even looking for product information right now! Simple, right? Not always…

There are, in fact, multiple scenarios in which search engine marketing can fail. One of those reasons, however, is a bit more difficult to detect and can actually cost you a lot of money.

eBay Research Labs recently published a study where they set out to determine if brand keyword search ads, in other words keywords that contain the brand name of the company, were worthwhile. Unsurprisingly, they found that such advertising was not effective; in these circumstances people were using Google as a navigational tool and when paid search was turned off, and therefore paid traffic dropped to zero, their organic traffic increased by roughly the same amount.

The much more interesting question that they asked was: “What would happen if we simply turned search advertising off altogether?” The answer to this may seem obvious. If someone searches for “used Gibson Les Paul” (an example they use in the paper) a number of guitar resellers appear in organic search prior to eBay. As this is also the case for many other product-specific terms, eBay’s search ads help direct traffic to eBay when they would otherwise be directed to other sellers / resellers, and thereby increasing eBay’s business. It seems to make logical sense.

eBay wasn’t satisfied with that assumption, however, so they took a sampling of United States geographies and turned off all search ads, leaving search ads in the rest of the country on as a control. What happened to their sales? Largely, nothing. Looking at the sales and advertising data in conjunction with customer data, they found that search advertising is only cost-effective on the least active customers; those whose last eBay purchase was not recent and who made few purchases in the past year. However, eBay is a very popular company and those infrequent purchasers constituted a small percentage of searchers. Therefore, when cost effectiveness was calculated, search advertising had an astonishing -75% ROI. In other words, for every dollar they spent in search advertising, they got back only 25 cents!

Most life science companies, however, as with most companies in general, do not have the kind of brand recognition that eBay does. You probably don’t have to remind scientists that Sigma sells chemicals or that Illumina sells sequencers, but these are the exceptions rather than the rules. So what’s the takeaway for smaller companies? First, while search engine marketing is a fantastic tool and can work wonders for sales or lead generation, we shouldn’t simply expect it to do so. Secondly, testing and analytics are extremely important – not just for search marketing but any advertising campaign and most marketing endeavors. While it may be more difficult to draw accurate conclusions from smaller sample sizes, most of the experiments that eBay ran to test their hypotheses could be done by any company.

"Tired of wondering about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? Then it’s time for less guessing and more results. Customized marketing analytics from BioBM will help your life science company determine what efforts are yielding results, where your money is being wasted, and where you should invest for a higher ROI. We’ll look critically at all of your marketing efforts to help increase sales while decreasing costs. It can be done. Contact us for more information."

Blog / Search Marketing 3:58 pm , March 29, 2013

Search for Distributors

Carlton Hoyt 3:35 pm , October 17, 2011

I was having a conversation about web design and search engine optimization with a life science tools distributor recently, and he asked me how to target a website to a particular region? This got me thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for distributors.

One of the limitations of search is that it is difficult to organically target a website to a region, at least in the life sciences. Search engines recognize some searches as inherently local. Search for “pizza” in Google for example and it will read your IP to determine your location and return local results. Search for electrophoresis gel boxes or Ras1 antibodies, however, and that location-specific context isn’t there. Therefore the simple answer to his question: “How do you target a website for a particular region [using SEO]?” – is that you don’t.

The next logical question: is SEO important to distributors? Often, but not always. If you can do a better job of optimizing for relevant terms than your life science supplier(s), then yes, you should optimize for those terms. It would be far better for a potential customer to find you than find a competing manufacturer or distributor. Likewise, if your country or region’s language(s) are different the language that your suppliers’ websites are written in, then SEO may be important as well since your customers may search in your local language (although newer technical and scientific terms are often the same across languages). If you do not have exclusive distribution rights and are effectively competing with other distributors in overlapping regions, then SEO may be very important. However, if your suppliers are well SEO-optimized, if you have exclusive distribution rights, and if your region speaks the same language as your suppliers’ websites are written in, then SEO is not of particularly great importance. In this scenario, which is actually quite common, you should be able to rely on your suppliers to pass along leads to you and in most situations they should have a listing of distributors directly on their website.

Unlike search engine optimization, search engine marketing can very easily be targeted to a particular region. SEM also allows companies to buy a top spot in the search results even if they are not doing so organically. Distributors often ignore SEM, leaving it to their suppliers, but there is no practical reason to do so. Even if you and your supplier are effectively advertising for the same product, having two listings in the paid advertisements only increases the odds that a searching scientist will click on one of them. If your suppliers are not performing SEM, and especially if their search engine rankings are not very high, you should be using SEM to target scientists in your region and get a placement near the top of the search results. So long as SEM campaigns are well-managed, they should be creating a good ROI and be well worth it for distributors.

With about half of life scientists stating that they look for product information on Google before anything else, a strong search presence is not only important to the sales of any life science tools company, but can deliver a great ROI. When deciding on how much resources to devote to search, distributors have different factors to consider than do suppliers. A strong SEO / SEM presence by suppliers can reduce the importance of SEO / SEM for distributors when compared to other marketing channels, but too many scientists use search to find products for it not to be at least a strong consideration in any distributor’s marketing strategy.

"These days, search is a critical component of life science marketing. If your company wants to boost its search rankings or use highly efficient SEM to capture that 50% of scientists who turn to search first, talk to us at BioBM. We’re here not only to help you get more relevant visitors to your website, but to help you do so efficiently and to make sure those visitors get converted into sales. Want to learn more? Contact us today."

Blog / Search Marketing 3:35 pm , October 17, 2011