MetaSEO™: Pharmaceuticals 2024
MetaSEO™: Pharmaceuticals
The words "SEO" and "pharmaceuticals" don't often appear in the same sentence. With Proclinical releasing data on who are the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world for 2024 (revenue for pharmaceutical sales only), we set out to establish how well these top pharma companies have optimised their websites for search. We decided to look at a number of different metrics from key SEO providers, hence our "MetaSEO Score™" was born. Below are the Q3 2024 results.
E-E-A-T
Are you hungry? Because if you want to do well in SEO you need to E-A-T. Or E-E-A-T ("double-E-A-T") as it is now known as.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness - these are the key factors Google uses to determine if their search algorithm is providing helpful, relevant, and reliable information to users who search using their engine.
E-A-T gained an extra E at the end of 2022 for "experience". Does the website demonstrate that its content was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a location, or communicating a person's first-hand experience on the topic at hand?
Healthcare is considered a 'Your Money Your Life' (YMYL) topic and is especially impacted by the E-E-A-T framework. Therefore it is important that healthcare websites are showcasing experience, providing information that makes it clear they have medical expertise, are considered a go-to, authoritative and trustworthy source of information.
Authority & Spam
Here we looked at Moz's key metrics Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA of the homepage). We often work on a link building strategy that aims to improve our client's Domain Authority.
Pfizer.com comes out on top with a DA of 81 and PA of 70, followed by jnj.com also with a DA of 81 but a PA of 68. In most need of improving the quantity and quality of backlinks is abbvie.com (DA 67, PA 62) and BMS (DA 67, PA 63).
We also looked at Moz's spam score which is based on sites with similar features found to be penalised or banned by Google. We've reversed Moz's score to give a % out of 100, meaning a higher number here is better.
Perhaps due to the many fake sites out there about a particular ED product, pfizer.com had the worst spam score of 91 (a Moz score of 9%). Pfizer could improve their score by researching and disavowing any suspicious looking backlinks. Looking most trustworthy are both jnj.com and gsk.com on 99, followed by merck.com, novartis.com and sanofi.com all on 98.
Trust Flow & Citation Flow
Here we looked at Majestic's popular metrics. The first, Trust Flow, is a ranking signal that promotes QUALITY content and is the result of ranking and rating billions of points of data.
Pfizer.com, novartis.com and gsk.com achieved the highest Trust Flow scores of 77, 76 and 75 respectively.
Sanofi.com has a Trust Flow of just 53, astrazeneca.com is not much better at 57, while abbbvie.com sits on 63. These companies need to work better at producing good quality content as well as using effective digital PR in order to ensure the content is seen and linked to by other influential sites.
Citation Flow is a score which reflects the QUANTITY of links that point to any given website. However, it goes beyond the number of backlinks to look at the broader link network, such as the sites linking to the sites that link to you and the sites that link to them, and so on.
As we saw with Trust Flow, pfizer.com, gsk.com and novartis.com appear on top when it comes to Citation Flow with scores of 58, 57 and 56 respectively.
Astrazeneca.com sits alone in the 40's with a Citation Flow of just 46.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
A score of 90 or above is considered good. 50 to 89 is a score that needs improvement, and below 50 is considered poor.
We've focused on mobile scores only as they are less forgiving. In addition, we find that the vast majority of websites we manage have more mobile traffic than desktop, so optimising for mobile-first makes the most sense.
We've ignored the SEO score given by PSI in this analysis, as it only checks to "ensure that your page is following basic search engine optimisation advice". We got a better idea on SEO performance from the other metrics we looked at.
Mobile Performance was rather poor across the board, with only merck.com gaining a somewhat respectable 61. BMS need to look at image optimisation to improve their extremely low score of just 7.
Accessibility is a hot topic in the world of user experience (UX) design at the moment. Here, astrazeneca.com scored our first 100 of our analysis so far. All other companies were in the 90's with the exception of gsk.com on 89 and abbvie.com on 83. Of all industries, healthcare should be making accessibility a priority.
Best Practices is an evaluation of whether or not the website adheres to guidelines regarding trust and safety, JavaScript, images, source maps and more. All but 3 sites gained 96+. Pfizer.com and sanofi.com scored 79 with gsk.com on bottom with just 75.
MetaSEO™ Scores
We ran other SEO audits from popular tools such as Semrush and, along with those metrics discussed above, have put together a MetaSEO™ score for each website that represents their overall SEO performance.
Three sites came out on top:
merck.com on 78
jnj.com on 77
novartis.com on 76
In the midfield we have:
astrazeneca.com & roche.com on 73
pfizer.com on 72
gsk.com on 71
sanofi.com on 70
On the bottom we are left with abbvie.com and bms.com both on 69.
We really enjoyed this analysis and it's interesting to see that in the end the scores are rather close with just 9 points separating top from bottom. We considered going deeper to see if there is a correlation on revenue with better SEO! But that's perhaps for another day.
Domain Authority, Trust Flow, and Mobile Performance appear to be the main areas that created distance between the companies, with Best Practices being quick wins for pfizer.com, sanofi.com and gsk.com.
Congratulations to Merck!
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