Now imagine you have the opportunity to work with a medication for a rare disease. All excited, you fire up your favorite keyword research tools to find that people DO search for Medication X 12 times per month (and for those of you who know the AdWords Keyword Research tool it’s probably more like three searches/month). You then perform a search on the rare disease to see what content is out there—nothing except a Wikipedia article and something from the NIH. Panic sets in, you cry a little in your soup, and you’re now in the fetal position. You realize that content, links, and ranking isn’t going to deliver the traffic and conversion you’re used to. You have to CREATE that marketplace and build awareness of not only the medication, but the disease itself. That’s no small task, but here are three tips to help you on your way:

1. Build your keyword list with paid search

• It’s cheap and it’s effective. If you have little luck when using your usual keyword research tactics, then use paid search. Aim broad with the campaign and use it to identify some mid/long-tail keywords that your keyword research is unable to provide. My recommendation would be:
  • Use a head term (the disease itself), and run it as a modified broad match on Adwords, and broad or phrase match on AdCenter.
  • Make sure that you have 100% impression share.
  • Run search query reports in AdWords and AdCenter.
  • Identify terms that have search volume and add to your keyword list.

2. Widen your sights—think category

• Outreach is a HUGE part of SEO for rare disease therapies. Its job is not only to build links, but to provide content and build awareness of the therapy and, in some cases, the disease. The problem here is that there is usually limited content dedicated to these rare diseases to target. Here are some tactics that I use to build my outreach lists.
  • Use the [related:] operator on Google.
  • If you know at least one site or community built around the targeted disease this operator [related:site.com] will provide you other sites that are topically relevant.
  • Look for category sites
  • If the therapy treats a rare bone disorder, try to identify sites that talk about rare diseases, or bone disorders in general. This approach will widen your set of sites.
  • Use the [related:] operator here, too, once you have identified a few sites
  • Analyze your targeted sites links
  • Once you’ve done the previously mentioned steps, use a tool like Open Site Explorer to identify more topically-relevant sites that link to your targets.

3. Target HCPs

• A common problem with rare diseases is that they are often misdiagnosed. Naturally, targeting HCPs through outreach would be the most effective way to address this predicament. Here is how I would go about doing this:
  • Identify the physician category (e.g. endocrinologist) that would most commonly treat someone with the disorder.
  • Use a tool like FollowerWonk and search for mentions of their specialty (e.g. endocrinologist) in the HCP’s profile.
  • Mine for mentions of their websites/blogs .
  • Validate the site as a target & add to outreach list.

First, let’s take a look at why the search engines should be responsible for having to change the way the results are displayed. No matter what search engine you use, none are proficient at semantic search. For instance, take a look at the result set returned on Hakia for the search query “how can I treat my heartburn?”. As you can see, the intent of my search wasn’t fully understood, and it appears to simply match the terms in my original query. What this means is that text analysis is still a critical factor when determining what pages/sites to include in a result set. Therefore, including targeted disease-state terms in your titles is still going to make a difference in the success of any SEO campaign. Now I know that not including keyword in a title tag isn’t the only reason a site would/wouldn’t rank for a targeted term, but I’m not the only one that knows it matters (just look at #1 under On-Page Factors)! Along with this, at the Social Media hearings that were held recently, Google already stepped forward and showed examples of possible Paid Search ad formats that would be used in order to abide by the FDA’s rulings.

So what have we learned from this example? The engines have the capabilities to alter their results, it’s now just a matter of them doing it.

As we all know, the engines have enhanced results for different verticals. It’s now time to apply those enhanced results styles to pharma. Although a scalable solution that could be supported by all major search would be optimal, for the purposes of this post I will be giving examples that are engine specific. Here are just a few ideas/examples of what the engines currently are doing for other vertical results, and how they could be applied to pharma:

Bing & Document Preview

Bing has a pretty sweet feature called “Document Preview” which allows for a user to gain some understanding as to what a particular result is all about. As you can see in the above example, AJAX is used to display part of the page’s content (ironically enough, the preview above shows the user the Safety Information) when the user hovers over the result. Currently there is only a way to block MSNBOT from adding the document preview via the <meta name=“msnbot”, content=“nopreview”> meta tag. What this leaves open is the ability to implement a directive that tells MSNBOT what content to actually include in the document preview (I’d imagine it would be a microformat / RDFa that was specific to Bing). This would enable a pharma webmaster to mark up the PI, or whatever content is desired to be included that preview.

Microformats & RDFa for Pharma

This is a more scalable solution, that if adopted by all engines risk information could be included in all pharma results. As you may already know, Google and the soon defunct Yahoo! support microformats and RDFa which help them provide enhanced listings for sites in their indices.

Above is an example of a Yelp result that utilizes the hReview-aggregate microformat. This allows Yelp to provide additional information, such as average star and price rating. This sort of enhanced listing would perfect for pharma SEO because of the fact that is could provide a direct link to safety information and it could be supported by all major search engines. A webmaster would simply have to go in mark up the safety information on a page with the correct microformat and they would have an enhanced listing (obviously this is somewhat oversimplifying the process, but you get the picture).

So, what do you think? Do you feel that it is up to the SEO to simply change how their results are displayed in order to comply by future FDA guidance, or should the engines show a little love and make the SERPs a little more pharma friendly?