Publicis Health Media
What began as task-oriented SEO tactics blossomed into an award winning strategic framework that reinvented content in a highly regulated industry.
How operational efficiency can impact strategy
What began as a simple tactic - offering keyword driven recommendations to on-page and meta content for healthcare and pharmaceutical websites - was never going to be enough. We had a brilliant team of content and technical strategists and the approach would never be enough to sate our thirst for more.
So we came up with a framework to automate keyword research.
We designed common categories (that we had already been using but never centralized) as a repeatable grouping for keywords. Then, using a simple vlookup format, we created a tool to drop in conditions, brand names, and other pattern-based keyword modifiers. After that, we used the SEMRush API (this was shortly following Google blackboxed monthly search volume) to develop our source of truth.
The output made a task that took about a week take about 2 hours.
Operational efficiency.
What you do with the time you are given
Once we had automated our keyword research away, we struck out in other directions to make the recommendations we made with that research more impactful. At the time (and still to this day!) SEO was frequently viewed as little more than a tactic. But what the automation of our keyword research did wasn’t just give us more time - it gave us the room to push the boundaries of what our clients thought SEO could do.
We gave our keyword research to our paid search teams (and vice versa) who could then rapidly populate their campaigns with our terms while we could increase the effectiveness of our automation tool. This decreased client CPC through Quality Score increases and drove down overall costs as pages ranked better and users clicked on organic links anyway.
We worked with social teams to integrate sentiment analysis into our keyword outputs.
We worked with programmatic teams to make display ads more impactful.
We worked with regulatory teams to modify their rules of engagement so our content worked within their framework as well as working with their customers.
And most importantly, we packaged all of this up to create our award-winning Ecosystem analysis. This output, which played no small part in securing us AOR for J&J and other heavy-hitter pharma companies, was a crowing achievement of our team.
Creating the Healthcare / Pharma Ecosystem
What we realized as we combined all of the disparate elements of our research into a single documented output is that we were on the verge of creating a complete picture of the digital experience a person experiencing a condition would go through. They would experience symptoms and search them. They would look for treatment without knowing brand names. They would know commercials and not brand names (these were pharma brands after all.)
By creating a single research document to outfit our entire agency with the tools they needed to go to market we had designed a first-of-it’s-kind digital strategy for the healthcare space.
Every client wanted it. We won RFPs because of it. We partnered with creative agencies to integrate it into their on and offline collateral. We even did got budget for content creation on our own - a first for our “SEO team” and for the agency writ large.
But most importantly, we gave people experiencing an illness the answers they needed to make informed decisions about their treatment options.
Partnering with, Rather Than Battling, Regulatory
Regulatory is often seen as a wet-blanket team, smothering the fun of creative and sucking the joy out of work. But when it comes to pharma - they really do need to ensure specific language, framing, and creative guidelines to meet the very specific requirements set out by the FDA for the safety of consumers. So what do you do with a limiting function on a team hustling for growth? Work with it.
Knowing that we would never be able to skirt the strict regulatory guidelines (nor would it be safe or ethical to do so!) we created an internal team to work with them. The FDA never outlined strategies for organic search - only ads. So for the most part, we adhered to the regulatory guidelines for ad copy - which served an entirely different function than copy for a website or meta content.
Working with regulatory we were able to carve out unique guidelines which lawyers agreed were acceptable and we agreed would serve the needs of consumers. Our concerns were mutual - are we providing users with the most useful information as they seek to learn more about a treatment.
We began by working with them on using common terms for unbranded treatments - blood thinner vs anticoagulant, for example.