I was going through various online pharmacies and wondering where I should start my online journey of buying medicines but in the process I realized that many of them don’t have their SEO right. So let us go through a comparative study on SEO in this domain. I am analyzing only one type of page here which is a medicine detail page. These pages are the long tail for SEO in this domain and getting them right might help in getting loads of traffic. All the analysis is based on external tools I can use so there is no insider info to comment on them. I am taking Dolo 650 page as an example to compare the differences.
Practo
https://www.practo.com/medicine-info/dolo-650-mg-tablet-3663
So let us dig deep into this page.
H1 has the tablet name but Disclaimer is also in H1 which is wrong. H2 has a long piece of text which does not look like a heading. Footer has nofollow links to it’s own site which doesn’t sound good. And come on, get your Copyright year correct in the footer. For all you know Google will take this as a signal of how serious are you about your site. Page size is 2.34MB which is too huge. And 4 server scaled images are just unpardonable. Above the fold content has been wasted here. Nobody is going to buy medicine based on it’s looks.
1Mg
https://www.1mg.com/drugs/dolo-650-tablet-74467
Titles and H1, H2 look better here. But Uses can be replaced by usage. Nofollows to own content on the page are there which don’t make sense. Mentioning doctors names as content writer is probably to fix YMYL algo change and makes sense. Above the fold content is still an issue here on mobile.
Netmeds
https://www.netmeds.com/prescriptions/dolo-650mg-tablet-15-s
Title looks good but H1 is all over the place. Few things mentioned in H1 actually belong to H2. Nofollow is not there which is good. One of the lowest Pagespeed score in this domain. Over 2MB page size and 231 HTTP requests on a page is too high. Above the fold content is not used effectively here although they have made image smaller to create more real estate. And still running Magento in this age and time. That is good to start but not when Dhoni is your brand ambassador.
Pharmeasy
https://pharmeasy.in/online-medicine-order/dolo-650mg-tab-15-s-44140
Title, H1 and H2 look much better but above the fold content is optimised more for conversion not SEO. Page load time is almost 20 sec which is too high. 1.61MB page size and 126 HTTP requests is also too high. They have outlinks to reputed sites but they have been done with nofollow which is not needed if you are linking to good quality sites.
Medlife
Dolo 650 MG Tablet 15This runs on Shopify so the usual issues will be there like higher page size and number of HTTP requests. Title and H1 look ok but there is hardly any content on these pages so it will be tough for them to rank. And they have hardly anything useful above the fold on mobile so that makes it even more tough for them in mobile first world.
Conclusion
All the websites have a significant path to traverse to make SEO better. Standard platforms are a great way to start but custom platforms are needed to optimize SEO as well as user experience. As the funding money will dry up, cost of customer acquisition will become important and SEO will play an important role for survival as well as growth.
Do let me know if you want me to cover more sites in this analysis or suggest any other domain where I should do a similar analysis.