Life Science SEO – Dangerous practice of link buying from .edu domains

Life Science SEO is hard enough without Google penalizing companies for Link Building. Don’t fall prey to the shortcut trap. It may cost you.

In case you haven’t heard Google has bumped Overstock.com down the rankings for supposedly buying links from students and professors at universities that have .edu web-domains. The result on their revenues could be brutal since as you long time readers of this blog know – its all about ranking your products in the first few results.

Life Science SEO – Link Building 101

In case you don’t know what link building is and why its important, here’s a quick primer.

The Secret Product Your Customers Want

How?  They know their audience – really well.

Site Optimization: It’s only the lack of profits that are expensive

by Rusty Bishop

Do you sell reagents to scientists? Do you know that you need to do help your website show up higher in search results, but are afraid it will cost too much or be too hard? We think our new whitepaper can teach you a lot.

The bottom line is you must strengthen your website with the keywords scientists use to describe their needs and combine that with a solid site optimization strategy to keep up with the top suppliers.

In our recent whitepaper, we analyzed the web tactics of suppliers of pre-made antibodies based on their results in search engine (Google) presentation. (Grab a copy for free by subscribing to our newsletter.)

Here’s a bar graph directly from our white paper showing the percentage of times these companies ranked on page 1 of Google Search Results. To produce this figure, we searched for the top 44 antibodies exactly like scientists do in Google. Companies were not penalized for not selling one of the antibodies, so the percentages reflect rankings for antibodies they actually sold.

Figure 1 shows the companies that are succeeding in Google SERP

One of the parallels we drew was a comparison of this graph to the one produced by BioInformatics recently posted on their blog. We have reproduced the image here with a link back to their site for more information.

A couple of things jump out.

• Abcam, Santa Cruz, and Cell Signaling are all in the top 4 on both graphs. Although not definitive in a purely scientific manner, the correlation is compelling. Strengthen your website and you sell more.
• Several companies in the BioInformatics survey hardly sell antibodies. For example, Molecular Probes ranks 5th, but I can’t find a single antibody in their catalog (they do make antibody labeling kits). Promega and GE Healthcare only sell a handful, mostly for protein purification (Anti-His tag).  Perhaps this illustrates a caveat of an online scientist survey.
• Conspicuously absent from our list is R&D, EMD and Millipore.  These companies sell 95% of the antibodies we included in our study.  One could argue that traditional marketing still works in life science.  Why take that chance?

What correlations do you see?  Leave any observations or comment below.

To learn more about how the top companies are fighting this battle, take a minute to register and grab a copy of our article.

How to Get a Copy

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If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox for the download link in our latest newsletter or fill in your name and email and you will automatically be redirected to the download page.

Learn to Speak “Scientist” in 5 Minutes or Less

The Language of Science for Marketers and Sales Staff

by Rusty Bishop

Scientists are a pesky lot.  We come from all parts of the world and focus on the tiniest minutia for years on end. We sleep in the lab and generally ignore everyone around us.  We’ll come to your booth and stand there idly touching your brochures, when what we really want is a very specific product. We’ll agonize over spending a nickel on an antibody that works and drop thousands to fly to a “meeting” in Hawaii.

Most important for the life science Marketer, scientists have a language all to our own. Unfortunately, the language carries a lot of redundant terms and abbreviations.

Consider “protease” or “proteinase”?

Is it “anti-actin” or “actin antibody”?

How about “ChiP” vs “chromatin precipitation”?

“DMPK” or “drug metabolism pharmacokinetics” – It’s endless…

..and the way we use that language is the way you have to market your products, especially online.

How Do You Figure Out the Words Scientists Use to Describe your Products?

Just like a new language – you listen! Or more specifically, you search for the most relevant words online.   Through their search inquiries for products, protocols, publications, and conversations about experiments, scientists are telling you what they want online -in real time and, most important, in large enough volume to be relevant. All you need is a simple keyword search tool and access to a Social Media Monitoring tool to “listen” and improve your marketing message.

Here’s what you are listening for:

Keywords -

1. What are the exact phrases scientists are using to describe my products (vernacular)? Ex - anti-actin or actin antibody?
2. What terms are associated with my products (context)? Ex – actin antibody + western blot
3. What volume (focus)? 10 searches per month or 1o,000?

The 5 Minute Exercise!

So let’s take the above and see what we can learn in 5 minutes.

1. Open up a Google Search Bar. Enter your product term – I’m entering “PCR machine”.  (Total time - 15 secs)

2. Note what Google returns for results. You’re looking for synonyms. Hmm, Thermal Cycler is the first hit.  Jot that down. (Total time - 45 secs)

3. Open your favorite Keyword Search Tool. Mine happens to be Google’s. (Total time – 55 secs)

4. Enter your product term – “PCR machine”. Analyze the data to see how many searches are conducted using the phrase – Google tells me there are 9,900 global monthly searches for “PCR machine”. (Total time - 1:30 minutes)

5.  Enter the other term “Thermal Cycler” – 22,900 global monthly searches. Not sure about you,  but I like to fish in a pond that has more fish. I now know that the majority of scientists online call a PCR machine a Thermal Cycler. (Total time - 2:00 minutes)

6. Analyze associated words in the list and build context  - gradient, troubleshooting, mulitplex, quantitative, buffer, etc. Note how the terms are used – “pcr troubleshooting” (Total time - 3:00 minutes).

7. Finally, compile the list into an excel sheet with primary terms and second terms. (Total time - 5:00 minutes).

Armed with this information you are ready for Step 2 – Discover what scientists want by speaking the language…

… and that’s the topic of our next post.

The author doesn’t do PCR anymore, but he sure did use a lot of Thermal Cyclers in the lab!  You can catch the next article by following the Red Funnel on Twitter or by subscribing to our newsletter.

Did you grab your .co yet?

Time to grab your .co extension

by Rusty Bishop

July 20th marked the public release of a new web extension for businesses, the .co.

No, thats not a typo its .co not .com.

If you are an established company building a microsite or a new CRO that doesn’t want to use some crazy acronym now is the time to act.

For example as of this writing, Westernblot.co is still available for $30!

To put it in perspective there are 9 million websites registered with .com extensions and as of this morning there are only 330,000 .co extensions.

More reasons to get a .co

1. Prevent competitors from pulling traffic from you by registering your business name.

2. More doors equals more opportunities.  Add a new portal to your website.  How about invitrogenantibodies.co with a 301 redirect to the Invitrogen antibody page?  The possibilities for SEO and Search presentation are endless!

The price is small!

Happy selling.

Rusty is passionate about sellingtoscientists.co! Get his advice regularly by Twitter here. Also, become a fan.

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

by Rusty Bishop

I previously wrote about how your website is like your face. It was a good article, but the statement was a little naive.

Now that we’ve reviewed over 30 websites with our QuickCheck Service, I’d like to modify that statement to more accurately reflect reality.

Every page of your website is your face

That’s right every page.

Think about the time you went to highly regarded restaurant with beautiful architecture, modern signs, and great food only to see tablecloths with food stains and frayed cloth napkins.  What did you remember?

The food stained cloth!

Why? Because it showed the restaurant didn’t care enough to clean the tablecloths or buy fresh ones. People notice when things are a bit out of place or don’t fit the picture. Its an intuitive response.

When you told your friends about the restaraunt, I bet you said, ” The food was great, but the tablecloths were dirty.”

Every page of your website speaks about how much your company cares in the same way.

In the modern web of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search, any page of your site can be directly landed on from the outside by a visitor looking for something they typed into the search bar. You need to be ready. From About Us, to Products, to Company Calendars, to Company News – the pages need to say,  ”Our service/product is the best and we love our customers. We want customers to love doing business with our company.”

Life science companies selling to scientists are a business-to-business dynamic. As such, the expectations are even higher for your products and website. A product purchase is an investment that has a direct impact on the success of a scientist’s research. Buying the wrong one from the wrong company can costs months of scientist’s life.

The reality is that most companies spend thousands of dollars on graphic design for their homepage, then neglect to update their calendar or their blog.  In fact, I’ve now seen 2 companies that haven’t updated their calendar of events since 2008! Its the dirty table cloth issue!

Scientists are just like everyone else.

We suffer the same biases as all humans.  Just like the dirty table cloth, no amount of product “data” makes up for the fact your site search engine doesn’t work properly and visitors can’t find your products easily.

We don’t remember your great graphics, your carefully crafted content, your sales offers.  Nope just that we couldn’t find your products on your website.  Case closed, Im moving on to a competitor’s site and products.

What you can do about it

Its time to take action. If your company’s website is getting complaints, take action yourself today.

Try one of these today:
1. Update your site with the right information. Whether it’s the latest trade show information, press releases or new product manuals, update them.

2. Solicit feedback from your customers about your site. Send them to your boss or post them by the water cooler late at night if you need to be anonymous.
 If your company won’t read them, send them to me and I will post them here anonymously for you. The internet gets the word out faster than you can imagine.

3. Get ideas – what consumer sites and business sites do you like? Pinpoint why you like them. Easy, fun, colorful, find-ability, clever, creative?
Take action and become indispensable! Your job depends on it.

What’s a Search Presentation Snippet and Why it’s Important for your Site

Google Is Your Homepage – Part 2 -”The Snippet Text”

by Rusty Bishop,PhD

Search Presentation is the way your relevant page links appear to searchers in Organic Search results. In normal person speak, those are all the links that Google serves up in “blue, black, and green” when you search, not the ads that you never click.

In the Google-driven internet, it is critical that your Search Presentation contains appealing, information-rich text to attract visitors to your site.

I recently wrote about the three parts of the Search Presentation. Let’s quickly review based on the example below.

1. Page Title

2.Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Importance of the Snippets – Think Abstract

Studies show that many searchers rapidly scan snippets looking for key information (Google actually published 1 sec as the average time) about the relevancy of your offering.

The snippet is a great place to capture visitors with targeted key phrases and information that explains exactly what the visitor can expect to find when they choose your webpage.

In science terms, consider it the Abstract of your product or service page. For those not familiar, take a look at any scientific manuscript, the Abstracts are the first content you see.

Like any good Abstract, the snippet should contain easily readable text that entices the searcher to click through to your site.

Most companies we see in our QuickChecks fail to capitalize on the snippet opportunity. So let’s fix it!

Where does the Search Snippet Come From?

Snippets mostly come from two places on your webpage.

1. The meta description – in your site’s code, but only seen in Search Presentation

2. The page content – in your site’s content, can be shown in Search Presentation

In both cases, the text is copied by a search spider and indexed along with the page.

When someone enters a search string, Google presents the text usually containing one or more terms from the search in the snippet (see the example above my search terms are in bold in the snippet).

Why is the Snippet Broken or Showing Non-Sense Text?

Google and other engines will give preference to the meta description only when it contains terms entered in the search by the searcher.

Otherwise, Google will show random snippets of text from the page it “thinks” is relevant to the search in an attempt to query this searcher.

The meta description and snippet are limited to 157 characters.

For this reason, you see broken text strings like the above example ending in “…” when the words in a searchers query are contained in different parts of your content or you write meta descriptions longer than 157 characters.

How Do I get Google to Show What I Want?

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

I like to imagine the Google Organic Results are saying – “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Our job as marketers then is to help search engines associate our products with what our customers might enter into their search query.

For example, if your product is an antibody, an academic scientist might enter western blot or anti-mouse along with a specific protein name.  Those terms can be added into the meta description underlying your product page to grab the attention of the searcher.

I might restate the above as – - By anticipating what terms scientists might search for to find your product you can provide attractive words to entice clicks to your page.

Of course you won’t get them all in 157 characters, so you have to target correctly based on research and market segmentation.

Sounds like work, huh?

It is work, but if you do it correctly you will get more relevant click throughs from Organic Searchers that drives more sales and leads.

Once again-

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

They want people to keep using their search engine.

The more that people use their search engine, the more money they make.

It’s also how you make money, because Google is Your Homepage!

In our next article, we’ll show you how we work with our clients to write great meta descriptions to attract scientists.

Google is Your Homepage – Fix your Search Presentation

Google is your homepage.

by Rusty Bishop

Google is your homepage. Of that there is little doubt.

Mark and I have now analyzed over 20 life science websites from design to content to code to product search rank through our free QuickCheck Service.

Several companies have granted us full Analytics access in order to serve them better.  In every case, Google sends the most visitors to these sites. In fact, its not even close.

This means your customers are searching Google to find your products, not your homepage, not Science magazine’s full page ads.

If you want to prove it to yourself, just ask your webmaster to print out or show you the Traffic Sources Readout from your analytics program (I’m digging into Webtrends right now, crazy!). If I’m wrong then your company is named Facebook.com or something is really wrong, e.g. you have no traffic.

What Google Is Your Homepage Means

Most scientists are not familiar with all your products even if they are very familiar with your brand. Researchers ready to buy are searching for very specific products and services for a specific diagnostic or experiment.

If Google really is the vehicle by which >70% of site visits come from, you must carefully plan every page to present key information when a scientist see’s your offering in the organic results.

If they can’t determine from the presentation of your offering in Google’s Search Results, why would they click through to you?

What You Can Control

You absolutely have control over what Google and other search engines present to potential customers. Web marketers call this Search Presentation.

There are three elements that appear in Search Presentation. I’m sure your familiar with them, you just don’t know it.

1. Page Title

2. Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Each one of these are entirely within your control to dictate what is seen by searchers.

Take the example above, where I searched for “multiparametric immunoassays systems”.  Which gave me Biomerioux’s VIDAS instrument. Let’s break it down.

1. Page Title – “VIDAS/minVIDAS:Healthcare”.

The title tag helps searchers make a more informed decision about the results they click on. A descriptive title tag can help pop out a result better for searchers.

Constructing Great Title Tags

You have 60 characters to write a great title tag, that means you gotta seriously think about the keywords. Google suggests you imagine the Title tag is the only thing you have to tell searchers what the page is about.

So what’s this page about?  Vidas is an automated, multiparametric immunoassay system for clinical diagnostics.  That’s 83 characters with spaces so we’re close.

How about – “Vidas-Automated Mulitparametic Clinical Immunoassay System”

That’s a pretty solid page Title. It contains keywords that describe the product and it pre-qualifies searchers that are interested in Clinical products.

How do I change the Page Title?

This is a pretty common question from marketers and sales.  The page title is part of the code that underlies every page on your website.

To see the page title, you browse to your product page , then select View > Source from your browser’s tool bar.

The page title will be designated with the code <title>Your Title</title>.  If you’re having difficulty finding it just perform a find on the source code (Command F) and search “title” that should bring it up for you.

In the above example, Biomerioux’s title code is on line 154 – <title>VIDAS®/miniVIDAS®: Healthcare</title>.

To change, you need to add the new text you want into your source code via the backend or server and you’re done.  Or just ask your webmaster to take care of it, since that’s what you pay them for!

In the next article, I’ll dig into methodology for crafting the meta description for a scientist Searcher Presentation. So please bookmark us or subscribe to learn more.

Building trust through social media for scientists

by Rusty Bishop

I just finished reading Meg Whitman’s (former CEO Ebay) autobiography, “The Power of Many.” One thing that really hit home with me, was how she described the deep trust that ebay developed with sellers and buyers through their online forum on their website and via third party forums.

Even as a tiny company they worked hard to build this trust by answering questions, testing ideas on clients, troubleshooting issues, and even admitting when they had made mistakes.

Through trust with their customers, they built the monster that is ebay.

Here’s a virtually free way to gain the trust of scientists via Social Media without manning a corporate blog or onsite user forum of your own. And you get to help people along the way!

Step One – Build Credibility by Caring

At Scientist Solutions, I spent a lot of time helping scientists with their experiments (1000 plus posts and responses).

One question I answered over and over again was about isolating primary hepatocytes for which I had published several manuscripts and posted the protocol on Scientists Solutions Protocol Finder. This post is hugely popular and still lives on the first page of Google Organic Results for “isolating primary hepatocytes” search string over 1 year later.

From my answers and concern with others problems, I built a reputation as being the master of “hepatocyte isolation”. And I still have lots of scientists contact me with comments, tweaks, and suggestions. Thats powerful trust!

ROI of Scientific Forums = Trust and Profits

16 months on page one of Organic results!

Consider 3 things

• The post above is on the first page of Google for profitable long-tail search.

• It cost nothing but a little time to achieve that ranking, goodwill, and reputation.
• I still have lots of scientists contact me about this procedure

What more could you want as a small company, product manager, or marketer?

First page organic, free, years of returns.

I bet you can’t get that with a full page advertisement in Science or putting your name on the bags at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.

What not to do

Keep in mind you are building trust.  Spamming these forums with buy my product rhetoric will get you in trouble fast. Blatant ads will be deleted.

Want to find some forum posts to show off your companies expertise and gain the trust of scientists?  Try our Science Social Media Tool its free and easy.

Want help?  Just comment below and we’ll do our best.

Example of Proper Image Text for Scientist Searchers

This post is in response to a comment string from a previous article on scientific alt text.  It illustrates an example of building website content from the scientific visitor perspective.

Jon commented – Here are the alt tags I used …you are welcome to use them as examples etc. (perhaps these will go in the what-not-to-do section…which is fine, but teach me how to improve them). – webpage – morpholino optimization

First image, figure 1 panel 1
alt=”Figure showing target regions used in a Morpholino oligo-walking experiment through a region of RNA secondary structure in a hepatitis B virus leader sequence.”

This is a great start. But its a little long (5-7 words is best) and the context of the page is missing. I took a look at the page on morpholino optimization on your site and in the code I noticed there are potential issues with the title tag that can help us get this correct.

Remember  – the title tag is the most important for describing the image.

For example, the first image is titled – “optimal_target_1.gif.”, it could be improved with a better description such as “morpholino_optimization.gif” or “morpholino_silencing_efficiency.gif.”

Next use the alt tag to put the image into context of the page.

In this example, I might suggest- “Choosing morpholinos based on RNA secondary structure“.

Keep it brief as some browsers will break alt text.

The idea is to consider the context a scientist interested in your product (morpholinos) would be searching in google. They might be interested in “best practices for morpholino design” or “optimization of morpholinos” or “targeting morpholinos to RNA or secondary structure or hairpins“. You might also get “how to design morpholinos” type searches.

Now as you go down the page, image text should flow logically with context they meant to illustrate.

Second image, figure 1 panel 2

New Title = antisense_activty.gif, New alt text = “mRNA target position determines morpholino silence activity.”

Third image, figure 2 -

New Title = morpholino_target.gif, New alt text = “best target choice for a Morpholino oligo AUG start codon”

Each time considering what a scientist might be searching for.

Hope that helps

We are in the middle of assisting a large science company re-writing all the content, code and image text with scientific keyword association illustrated above. It seems tedious, but it is critical with all the competition out there.