2 key SEO strategies behind PharmEasy's 33M traffic/month 🤯
Learn how PharmEasy is dominating the health niche in India with SEO.
Hey, Rafiqul here. Welcome to the #110th episode of SEO Growth Notes (previously known as Content Marketing VIP), which delivers actionable insights, SEO case studies & free resources.
First time here? Read past episodes.
The healthcare and medicine niche is competitive not just because of the competitors but also because of Google’s strict guidelines for YMYL (Your-Money-Your-Life) sites.
PharmEasy is beating the competition by creating content at scale and also focusing on EAT information.
Let’s see each of the SEO and design primary strategies that helped them drive almost 10 million qualified traffic every month.
1/ Creating Glossary Pages For Medicines And Molecules
Creating glossary pages can be a great strategy, especially for the health industry, where people are not aware of complex medical terms and medicine names.
Key benefits of building glossary pages are:
Educating the audience at the awareness stage
Driving a good amount of organic visits
Linking glossary pages to the money pages or business offerings.
Building topical authority as Google wants to understand the expertise/authority of the website.
“Google wants to build a knowledge base of concepts to better understand things like what different businesses or entities are ‘Known for’.”
– Bill Slawski, SEO Expert
Let’s have a look at the glossary pages of PharmEasy →
As you can see, PharmEasy has created thousands of pages targeting different medicine names.
As a result, they are driving 6.4 million+ organic traffic to these medicine glossary pages.
But the benefit is not just about getting traffic and brand awareness. This also helps PharmEasy in converting readers into medicine buyers.
Here are the CRO strategies for medicine glossary pages:
1- The above-the-fold section is optimized for product selling by adding the ‘add to cart button.’
2- Great way of adding internal links in such a way that a reader is likely to check out other medicines from the store. When clicked, this section will lead the user to the eCommerce store of PharmEasy.
Therefore a good strategy is to turn the top of the funnel traffic to the money pages.
3- Again, adding relevant products or medicines helps in internal linking and increasing average order value.
Here’s a catch.
When to scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find informational content about the medicine name. That includes:
Uses of medicines
Side effects
Precautions and warnings
And related FAQs
If you’re unsure about the best CRO practices for click conversion, you can hire a trusted CRO agency for a detailed conversion rate optimization audit.
Here’s a screenshot:
The key reason for adding informational content to the medicine glossary page is to match the search intent.
Not everyone wants to buy the product when searching for medicine names. And in this way, PharmEasy not just improves the conversions but also matches the search intent.
Hence, a better chance of ranking for these queries.
One more element that improves the EAT of these pages is the ‘content details‘ section, where PharmEasy showcases the expertise of the author and the reviewer.
Likewise, they have built giant content assets for ‘molecules‘ names.
2/ Targeting Geo-Specific Locations At Scale
Some of the common queries while buying medicine online are:
Online medicine delivery in [place]
Online medicine in [place], etc
Imagine how many specific pages you’ll need to create to target these types of queries for almost every major location in India.
This is exactly what PharmEasy has done. They have created 7k+ pages for different locations.
Let’s have a look at the geo-specific page directory:
In fact, they have created 7k+ geo-specific pages in less than 3 months by automating the page creation.
Here’s how:
They have smartly used templates to create all of these pages. The content is almost similar for all of these pages except the location name. It’s also called programmatic SEO
See the below examples of using the template for title and meta description for all the pages:
Not only that, but the on-page is also similar except for the location name. However, it’s not always recommended to create near-duplicate pages at scale.
The best part about this strategy is the internal linking.
They have added nearby places to each page, which helps build a solid internal linking structure and improve dwell time.
Here’s how:
Another thing to mention is the above-the-fold optimization of these geo-specific pages.
This is similar to the medicine glossary pages where the above-the-fold is optimized for conversion.
Action items
STEP 1. Product Led SEO Approach
Instead of focusing too much on keyword research and SEO tactics just to beat the algorithm, focus on making a great product that solves users’ problems.
In this case, PharmEasy has turned its SEO strategy into a product-led SEO approach where its product (order medicine online, book lab tests, glossary pages of molecules, etc.) is the primary source of traffic.
“Instead of using SEO to market your product, the product should become the SEO driver.” – Eli Schwartz (Author of Product-Led SEO).
Find a way to meaningfully integrate your product offerings into the content.
For example, PharmEasy could easily create medicine glossary pages (including definitions, related terms, etc.) like others.
However they choose to align their offerings (to sell medicines online) with the content.
In fact, the majority of their traffic comes from these pages.
The key benefits?
Increase brand value. You may also measure the SEO performance by the growth of branded search terms.
STEP 2. Create Content At Scale Using Programmatic SEO
There is a good chance of scaling the content creation process when it comes to product or eCommerce.
For example, if you’re selling corporate gifts, you may create pages for the followings:
Corporate gifts under 100/ 500/ 1000/ 15000/ etc.
Corporate gifts in Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, etc
This is why wildcard keyword research is a great way to find ideas to scale the process.
Here’s an example:
With this process, you’ll get a ton of templated content ideas.
But scaling the content creation becomes harder if you are not implementing programmatic SEO (The approach of automating the content creation process at scale).
Below, I’ve shared references from where you can learn more about programmatic SEO.
STEP 3. Build Geo-Specific Pages
Geo-specific service/ landing pages not only work for eCommerce or product-led businesses but also help in service businesses.
Look for local search queries people are searching for in your country. Especially if you have offline offices in multiple places or your service area is large enough, you may consider creating geo-specific pages.
That’s all, guys.
See you next week :)