With the summer coming, there will be a lot of seasonal products that people are searching for that pharmacies can provide, to help people enjoy their summer more or deal with its downsides.
On the one hand, pharmacies everywhere will be stocking UV-resistant shades and suncream to ensure folk can get out in the sun without burning and risking their long-term health.
For others, however, summer may bring some more unpleasant aspects. Many people will be sneezing and red-eyed when the pollen count is high unless they have a hayfever remedy, while many won’t venture into the countryside without something to repel biting insects such as the notorious Scottish midge.
Naturally, you will want to feature all of these products and more on your website so that people know they are available to enhance their summers. But how can you be sure that people searching online for such products are likely to come to your site?
This is where search engine optimisation, or SEO, comes in. Keywords are a central part of this, for that is what people will type in, and in this case, they are likely to be simple search terms, such as “factor 50 sun cream” or “midge repellent”.
Consequently, such searches are sure to produce a vast number of results and it is an established fact that most people do not look beyond the first page of search engine results. For your site to appear on page one requires you to get the best SEO for your pharmacy.
Since the keywords will tend to match up, you will need help from experts who understand the impact of other factors in boosting SEO rankings.
For example, it should be that you have images of your products as standard, but images with certain characteristics will improve your SEO score and others lower it.
Among the ways an image can be beneficial is for it to be the right file type for the web (PNG or Jpeg), while it should be compressed to ensure it downloads quickly, otherwise it can slow down your whole page download. You also need to use Alt tags on the image so that search engine crawlers can find it.
To stand out, it should have a file name with keywords added (this boosts your chance of the image coming up when someone does an image search) and should be unique, so it isn’t lost in a sea of identical stock photos.
Another crucial thing to do is ensure your image is mobile-friendly, as the majority of searches are made by phone. Search engines will penalise any failure to do this.
These factors all help make your image an asset, not a liability, and ensure you do not end up – unwisely – relying on keywords alone.
Factors like mobile-friendliness and page upload speed also come under the umbrella of ‘technical SEO’, which is less about your content and more about wider aspects of the site. This also includes elements such as the site structure, which is easier for crawlers to navigate. This should, for instance, avoid ‘orphans’ – pages with no internal links to them.
These are just some of the many factors beyond keywords that make all the difference in getting sites to rise up the rankings to the all-important page one. That’s why you need SEO specialists working on your site to ensure it is among them.