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Food for Thought: How Can Biotech & Medtech Companies Benefit from SEO?

There are a lot of service providers offering Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But what do biotech and medtech companies really need to increase their online visibility? Three things are essential in our view:

First, if someone has heard about your enterprise, he or she should find your company’s name and website among the top three entries of Google’s search engine hit list. Ideally this should also work if the user spells the name wrong.

Second, a user should find your company by typing in a short string of keywords. As an example, an investor, journalist etc. might be interested in looking for biotech companies developing novel antibodies for the treatment of baldness. In this case your company should show up on the first page of Google hits if the user has typed in “biotech” “antibodies” and “baldness” or “novel treatments” and ”baldness”.

Third, your company should show also up in search results covering a broader field. In the example given above, a search engine should retrieve your company’s name and website for “biotech” and “antibodies” and rank them as high as possible.

The rest of SEO is negligible for biotech and medtech companies as they are not selling consumer goods. Did you ever meet a potential collaboration partner who has screened thousands of Google hits related to your company? Probably not. If you are lucky, he may have read about your company in one of the important trade publications and already has you on his radar. If you are not so lucky, he may wonder why he has never read anything about your company in one of those important trade publications – despite your leading-edge technology and thousands of Google hits.

But how to accomplish the three goals mentioned above? There are no tricks involved – feel free to spend a lot of time and money trying to outsmart Google’s algorithms but you will learn that Google adapts faster than a bacterium acquires resistance to penicillin.

SEO success is based on carefully crafted key messages on your company, a bit of HTML editing and constant work to keep your website up-to-date, presenting new and interesting and – above all – relevant content.

The main task is to carefully think about the keywords important for your business. These need to be presented on your website in a way that Google’s earch engine can see and recognize them. This requires basic knowledge of HTML – not a lot more. The most important task is continuous communication – keep the world updated by adding news and novel information and by providing useful links, e.g. to pharma and academic partners, articles, patents, wikipedia entries relevant for your business, official statistics, market data, etc.

Thereby, you will not only ensure that your company shows up in search engine results prominently, but you will also build your company´s reputation among people interested in your field.

If you want to know more, please do not hesitate to contact us.