Community Pharmacy SEO vs PPC: What you need to know

Being visible online has become non-negotiable for community pharmacists.

As pharmacists continue to take on more clinical work and national services, there is huge opportunity to be found by patients and customers looking for a wider range of health products and services.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) are two sides of the same pharmacy marketing coin.

Both are popular ways of getting traffic to your pharmacy’s website, they just go about it in different ways. Which one you choose will depend on your overall goals, and budget.

In this blog, we go through the differences, pros, and cons of PPC and SEO for community pharmacies looking to improve their marketing.

What is SEO?

SEO involves getting organic traffic to your website by ranking highly for search terms your customers and patients use when doing research.

Successful SEO has a few components:

Keyword research

Keyword research is just about understanding what your patients and customers search for on a search engine like Google.

An example of keywords your patients might use include:
“Where to get a flu jab.”
“How to stop smoking.”
“Where can I pick up my prescription?”

There are free keyword research tools you can use to find relevant keywords and search terms.

Or paid for tools can offer more advanced features and help you do competitor research to find more opportunities.

Once you know your keywords, you can start creating content.

On-Page SEO

Imagine you’re a patient searching for stop smoking advice.

What kind of content would you want to find when you search online?

That’s on-page SEO.

To succeed with on-page SEO you need to create relevant, authoritative content that will educate your readers and encourage them to use your service.

Part of on-page SEO is understanding the importance of “search intent”.

Search intent simply means understanding what the most relevant content is in response to a query.

Someone searching for “stop smoking advice” isn’t necessarily looking for a service, but could be looking for an educational guide on the steps they can take to quit.

On the other hand, someone searching “stop smoking service” is likely looking for details and contact information for an actual service they can contact for help.

Understanding search intent is essential when it comes to creating your content because whatever content most closely matches the intent, is more likely to rank.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO involves a few different tactics.

It can include things like asking customers for Google reviews. Creating a Google My Business profile to help with Local SEO. Or it could involve being listed in directories.

Link-building is another big part of off-page SEO.

This involves earning a link from another website to your own, and is a signal to Google that your website is a trusted source of information.

There are a number of ways to generate links to your community pharmacy website.

Local news websites, local health partners or other organisations might be willing to link to you as a trusted community service.

You could also volunteer to write educational articles for relevant trade magazines in exchange for a link.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is like the foundation of your house.

It’s about doing the basics behind the scenes so search engines can find, crawl and index your website and pages on search results.

Without good technical SEO, search engines might have trouble reading and indexing your content - which means your website and content will never be found.

Why should you do SEO?

It’s cheaper traffic

Although you do have to price in the time and effort to create content, once your content ranks well enough to bring in traffic, that traffic is free because you’re not paying for the high position.

So in the long-run, SEO can be a cost-effective way of getting traffic to your website.

SEO traffic lasts longer

If you can rank highly in Google, you’ll get a consistent level of traffic for as long as you maintain your position.

And typically speaking, once you rank within the top positions, you’ll usually stay there provided your content stays updated and relevant.

Even if you stop publishing blogs or other content for a period, you won’t instantly see a drop off in traffic.

You can rank for a broad range of keywords

You’re not just limited to keywords related to your products or services.

You can also target “informational” keywords that your patients or customers will use during their research.

These searches won’t necessarily bring in paying customers immediately.

But it does mean you’ll get in front of them sooner and increase your chances of turning them into customers later on.

Why wouldn’t you use SEO?

While SEO is a great tactic for generating consistent traffic to your website, it might not always be the best choice.

SEO can take longer

SEO doesn’t work overnight and it can take months before you start to rank for any keywords and see results from your efforts.

If you want to start seeing traffic to your site immediately, SEO might not be the best tactic.

Keywords can be competitive

Competition for keywords can be fierce, with competitiveness based on the authority of the websites trying to rank for them.

If, for instance, you’re going up against national brands you’ll likely find keyword competitiveness is high - meaning it’s harder to rank for them and get traffic.

That’s not to say you’ll never rank for those difficult keywords, but it will take a lot of time and effort.

SEO takes commitment to content

Google takes the authority of a website into account when deciding what content to rank.

In SEO speak, authority boils down to:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Creating content that consistently meets these requirements takes time and dedication.

So if your time is limited or you’re not willing to commit for the long-term, it might not be for you.

What is PPC?

PPC is the pay to play version of SEO. It involves bidding to appear at the top of search engines for particular keywords, and paying whenever you get a click.

Similar to SEO, PPC revolves around finding relevant keywords your patients and customers are searching for.

Then you’ll need to create adverts that appear in the search positions encouraging people to click through to your website.

Where you rank in the ad section depends on how much you’re willing to pay for a click.

Why would you do PPC?

PPC can be more targeted

One of the great things about PPC is you can filter who can see your ads based on specific criteria - like location.

This means you can be more targeted in who sees your ad and who can click through to your website.

PPC produces instant results

Because your position in search is based on how much you're willing to pay, you can appear at the top of search results for your chosen keywords as soon as you start your campaign - providing you’re willing to bid high enough.

You can experiment

Because PPC works quickly, it creates the potential to quickly run experiments to see what type of content works best to get clicks and customers.

You can - for example - set up A/B tests using different advertising copy, pictures or links and use the results to improve campaigns.

Why wouldn’t you use PPC?

While PPC works to get fast results, it does have some downsides.

Keywords can be expensive

Like SEO, PPC can involve you going after competitive keywords.

The more competitive the keywords you want to bid on, the more expensive it is, and PPC can get very expensive very quickly.

PPC can be expensive long-term

Because you’re paying for your position in search rankings, the second you stop paying, you lose your position.

This means to consistently appear for search terms with PPC, you have to be willing to pay for it.

You might not get an instant ROI

Although the results are instant with PPC from a search position perspective, it’s not necessarily the case when it comes to ROI.

You’ll need to assign budget to your campaigns before you’ve ever made a sale, and the first few weeks and months can involve constant iterations of your ad to improve it.

It’s entirely possible that you’ll lose money in the early days of PPC before you start to see any positive results.

Learn how to create effective marketing campaigns for your pharmacy

Community pharmacists need to have skills in digital marketing to take advantage of the opportunities they’re now presented with.

If you want to know which tactics will deliver the best results with the least amount of effort, download our Ultimate Guide to Pharmacy Marketing.