SEO for the life sciences: 6 actionable steps to take today to improve your search rankings on Google
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SEO for the life sciences should underpin your marketing strategy. Take a look at where your search engine optimisation may be falling short and most importantly the steps you can take to improve your Google search rankings.
Speed up your life science website
If you are storing a large quantity of images on your site – everything from headers to photos of your product can slow your page loading time.
Your images should be no bigger than a few hundred kilobytes. Small images will help to ensure your website loads quickly without leaving your visitors waiting for content. Maximising user experience is a crucial component to ranking highly on Google. Do you need to reduce your image sizes? There are lots of free tools to do this like this one.
Add alt tags to your images
‘Alt tags’ otherwise known as alternative text are small sections of text which feature on a user’s webpage if the image fails to load. This means they’ll still be able to experience some level of your website. After all, user experience is key for SEO.
Pack content with keywords and phrases
Each post and section of content on your website needs to contain the keywords you’re using for SEO. The keywords you use should be words and phrases your target market segment would use to search on Google – ultimately clicking on your life science website because you can help solve their problems.
The right keywords to use are discovered through undertaking keyword research. Try creating a list of relevant keywords to your site. How are these reflected in what people are searching for? If you optimise your website content for, your site can rank higher for those terms.
If you’re not using the correct keywords, Google can’t clearly tell what your website is about – and therefore how to ensure it ranks highly on the right pages.
Fix broken website links
Effective SEO for your life science website relies on visitors having a good experience whilst they’re on your website. Broken website links make for a bad user experience.
When users click on links and reach dead-end 404 errors, they get frustrated and may never return. Broken links devalue your SEO activities as they restrict the flow of users through your site. If users are struggling to navigate your site it won’t rank highly.
SEO for the life sciences relies on building a variety of inbound and outbound links
Effectively driving your website up the Google search rankings relies on creating a selection of links. The first type are your internal links. These should be links that enable website visitors to head over to other parts of your website. This means they can find out more about your brand and what you can offer your target market segments.
The second type are outbound links. These are links to other websites. You could add links to other useful resources for your target market. However it’s crucial to ensure that you’re not sending visitors to competitor websites! If you add these links Google will also see your website as more trustworthy and therefore they’ll be more likely to rank your website higher up the Google search engine rankings.
Grow your back-link list
Back links are where other external websites have a link to your website on. You can create these through writing in depth, authoritative articles on other sites. This will impact your Google rankings more than anything else.
If you are not sure how many back links you have, try this free backlink checker. You can maximise the impact of these back links through developing partnerships with organisations who have a higher domain authority than you currently do. However, it’s important to select your partners carefully to avoid driving traffic to a competitor’s website.