Analyzing an industry’s online landscape is crucial to understanding what typical consumers seek and what possible competitors are providing them. The major pharmaceutical companies have many great opportunities to reach consumers at the times when consumers are the most receptive. But are they using the right medium, and using it to their advantage? Our research shows that consumers are using search engines to research this condition but the pharmaceutical companies are not meeting their needs.

Let’s take a look at consumers who are researching Schizophrenia. This debilitating disease affects over 2.2 million people in the United States1. Over 100,000 new cases will be diagnosed this year alone. This clearly shines through in the search engine space with over half a million schizophrenia related searches every month.

And what are the people looking for?
The keywords can tell a lot about the stage of the searcher’s schizophrenia, or of someone they care for. Has the searcher already been diagnosed (“schizophrenia treatment”, 960 monthly searches) or does he believe he may be showing symptoms but has not yet been diagnosed (“schizophrenia symptoms”, 3,330 monthly searches). In general, there are about 18,630 searches every month from people interested in diagnosing the problem and about 302,370 monthly searches indicating the searcher already has been diagnosed.

No matter the stage, the company that presents the most useful information to the searcher has an immediate edge over the competition.

After the searcher determines the condition is indeed schizophrenia, the next logical step would be to search for help with treating it. When people with schizophrenia, or their friends and family, at this stage seek help, they typically are not overtly thinking in terms of drugs, but rather treatment options.

Schizophrenia “treatment” was searched more than “drug” and “medication” combined.

Do the major competitors realize that this was a good space to market their product? With the exception of abilify.com, the top “schizophrenia treatment” results are dominated by content aggregators. What is keeping the big brands from providing useful schizophrenia information to those seeking it?

Moving further down the “condition awareness” ladder, there are 288,870 specific medication searches every month. Seroquel and Zyprexa were the clear winners of the searchers’ attention, with 80,400 and 54,540 monthly searches respectively. When digging deeper into Zyprexa searches it becomes how apparent press coverage is to the pharma industry. Early in its product life, “Zyprexa” received an (expected) insignificant amount of searches, according to Google. There were, however, several giant spikes in traffic in 2005. As Google Trends points out, these spikes coincide with Zyprexa news/PR events like the June 10 Zyprexa lawsuit settlement or September 19 study showing Zyprexa was found to be an effective antipsychotic. Whoever ranked highly for terms like “zyprexa” or “zyprexa lawsuit” practically controlled the entire image of the brand. I don’t know where zyprexa.com’s rankings stood at that time, but I’m sure their PR department would agree that a strong search engine presence would be invaluable at a time like that. Researching trends for any other industry would undoubtedly show search volume following news volume, but the pharma industry seems to do this to the extreme. Take a look at the search (top chart below) versus news (bottom chart below) volume for “zyprexa.”

Natural search engine rankings are only a part of an overall online marketing campaign (albeit an important one). Take Zyprexa again as an example. Zyprexa is the second most searched schizophrenia drug and zyprexa.com has the more Google top rankings than the other drugs, leading one to believe that zyprexa.com would have the highest trafficked site. Yet, zyprexa.com trails among the top competition on this front, with 16,253 visitors in April. This compared to Seroquel; seroquel.com managed to draw the most visitors of any schizophrenia drug with a quarter as many searches.

Are they buying this traffic with display ads or is it organic traffic?

The pharmaceutical industry will learn the importance of a strong online presence eventually. Although there are a significant amount of schizophrenia sufferers in the world it is obvious that traditional advertising would miss the mark. Sure, creating a strong brand image through traditional advertising is not a complete waste of budget, but when you realize that 99% of the viewers (literally) of the newest drug commercial on primetime television are not the target audience, you realize how important search really is.

*Data Sources:
Search volume - Wordtracker.com
Search engine rankings - Seodigger.com
Search volume trends - Google Trends
Site traffic – Compete.com
Time on site – Compete.com
All data gathered during April, 2008
1: schizophrenia.com

*Methodology
451 keywords that relate to schizophrenia and related drugs were analyzed and classified
A competitive set was created, made up of the top searched schizophrenia drugs and relevant informational sites