Google Launches New “Medication Search” Feature
On June 21st, Google launched a new feature in their search results that could potentially have a significant impact on natural search referrals for pharmaceutical brands in the long term. For the past year, Google has been working on improving the search results for health-related queries, and now they have rolled that out to include medication search queries. Health is by far one of the more prominent categories for which search is leveraged. From my experience, a very high percentage of site traffic to our branded and unbranded pharmaceutical client sites is driven via search (both organic and paid).
What’s the Impact?
For starters, by integrating this new feature into search results, Google believes that it is empowering a better user experience by providing content that users need in a very accessible place. A search for “Lipitor”, for example, displays the below results.
From a pharmaceutical SEO perspective, and more importantly possibly from a pharmaceutical brand strategy perspective, this is not an ideal scenario for the pharma brand. Let’s analyze the results for a Lipitor search displayed in the image above. Prior to yesterday, Lipitor held the #1 spot on Google search results for “Lipitor”. With the new medication search feature rolled out, we are looking at Lipitor now being bumped to the #2 spot. What’s the big deal? Well, the commonly stated statistic is that 46% of all search clicks come from the #1 position, while the #2 result will capture around 12%. For a branded search, which in my experience drives a vast majority of search traffic to the branded site, this could be fairly damaging to pharma brand promotion via SEO.
Let’s say, for example that Lipitor was getting 5,000 clicks to their site when they were in the #1 position on Google. That would mean they received potentially in the range of 11,000 impressions from searches for “lipitor”. By being dumped down to #2, this could result in around 1,300 clicks from that spot, assuming the percentages I just listed are accurate. That’s a drop of 3,700 clicks (which if you are wondering equals a 74% drop in search traffic for the brand search of “lipitor”). Are the results more consumer friendly and beneficial? Possibly, I’m not yet sure. However, this is not exactly a big win for pharmaceutical SEO and pharma brand marketing. The official product site will no longer be the first result a user sees, which to me seems like a not so positive endeavor. If someone searches just for “Lipitor”, I would think usability-wise it would make sense for the official site to be the first clickable result rather than links over to a government site.
I will be watching closely the impact this change has on client traffic from the brand phrase over the next few days/weeks and will follow up if any glaring information jumps out at me. My theory is that referrals from “brand” searches will drop significantly, but time will tell.
