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

The article is available to our subscribers for free download.  Just follow a few simple steps to confirm your email address so our email provider knows that you requested it and it’s not spam. Once you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to download your free copy.

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.

Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Suppliers to the Top, a study by Red Funnel

Web Tactics of the Top Antibody Suppliers

by Rusty Bishop

A few weeks back, I wrote an article about the “Top Antibody Supplier” study that was released by BioInformatics, LLC.  I got some great comments from readers Jack and Mark about Abcam, one of the top suppliers. Everyone seemed to be in awe of Abcam’s web presence. It was noted that they do an excellent job of appearing in the top Google Search Results.

We decided to use our knowledge and tool set to determine whether there was a correlation between the Top Companies in the Bioinformatics survey and those that appeared most often in Google Search Results (SERP) when scientists searched.

Correlation

After just a few searches for common gene-specific antibodies like actin, p53, and caspases, we began to see a trend that certain companies (Abcam, Santa Cruz, Cell Signaling) were almost always on the first page.  The very same companies that were on top of the Bioinformatics survey.

So we decided to put the Red Funnel research team into action to dig deeper and determine what separates these few companies consistently from the rest from a search/optimization perspective.

Results

The result is our first white paper – Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Vendors to the Top. Which is available for free to our subscribers.

Here’s some examples of the results in the report

• 385,000 annual searches for the top 44 gene specific antibodies entered into Google last year.
• 19 suppliers appeared on the first page of Google results in total for the top 44 antibodies.
• 4 important site code optimizations of the top ranking suppliers were uncovered.
• 100% correlation to page one ranking for one of the factors we examined.

Although the results are directed to marketers for antibodies, we believe they are applicable to those marketing any life science products online to scientists. These principles hold true whether you are selling kits, antibodies, or microscopes.

How the study was conducted

Red Funnel used tools freely available to the public online and…

1. Determined the most searched specific antibodies by scientists in Google.
2. Determined the “best phrase” used by scientists most often in their Google Search bars. For example – “actin antibody” vs “anti-actin”.  For more on this see ‘Learning to Speak Scientist.‘.
3. Determined which companies rank on the first page of Google for the top antibodies.
4. Examined 30 different suppliers to determine whether they sold the top 44 antibodies.
5. Ranked suppliers by percentage of products appearing on page 1 based solely on the products they sold.
6. Compared the web tactics of the companies that appeared often to those that rarely or never appeared to determine why.

How to Get a Copy

The article is available to our subscribers for free download.  Just follow a few simple steps to confirm your email address so our email provider knows that you requested it and it’s not spam. Once you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to download your free copy.

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.

Have You Seen this Antibody Sales Blog?

Breaking Down Antibody Company Rankings

by Rusty Bishop

I was searching the net for information on the top science suppliers of antibodies, when I stumbled across an interesting post on The Looking Glass blog.  Well, it’s really more of an advert, but it does contain an interesting graph of companies that scientists buy antibodies from the most.

Have a look at the “Top Antibody Suppliers.”  Go ahead, I’ll be right here.

In the table, you will see…

Abcam number 1 – 52% bought antibodies from them

Santa Cruz number 2 – 50% bought from them

Sigma-Aldrich number 3 – 46% bought from them

Really?  That’s amazing.  I hadn’t even heard of Abcam until about 6 yrs ago, how many antibodies do they make?  Sigma? Interesting, I had no idea they make so many antibodies.

In looking down the long list of companies, I began to wonder about how the study was conducted.

1000 respondents from the Science Advisory Board were asked to fill out a survey.  What type of scientists? So many questions… What was in the survey? What was the time period?  I need to know these things to make sense of the graph!

Digging in to the list a little further, you might notice that Life Technologies is actually number 1 when you combine Molecular Probes, Zymed, Biosource, Caltag, and Dynal totaling 59% of respondents.

And Millipore is actually number 4 with Upstate and Chemicon carrying 43% of the respondents.

I’m beginning to wonder what it is that entices scientists to buy from the top companies in the list.  More antibodies? Better antibodies? Better branding?  Got ideas? Leave us a comment below.

For my own sake, I’ll be digging in to these company’s websites to find out whether the top ones are doing a better job of attracting scientists online.

Til next time… Hope you made the list.