Pharmasimple – The Content Success Story –One Year to E-Commerce Success

The aim of the project was to make sure that Internet

users and search engines alike were on the same page,

so content and SEO experts joined forces in a strong

project team. The result: extremely improved rankings

and reach after only one year. To see for yourself, take a

look at the details of the Pharmasimple mission.

A strong website is the basis for sustainable success in e-commerce. Search engine optimisation can become a real challenge, especially for sites with branched structures that have grown over the years. This is clearly shown in our case study for Pharmasimple. At this French company, everything revolved around the online sale of more than 30,000 products in the fields of health, care, daily hygiene, and beauty.

Thanks to:

> 30.000 online products from 770 brands

Including (dermo-) articles, dietary supplements for

cosmetic purposes, as well as pregnancy and baby

products

Well-known brands such as Avène, La Roche-Posay,

Mustela, Puressentiel, Nuxe, Bioderma, Lierac,

Caudalie, Vichy, Weleda, Eucerin, Klorane

Founded in 2010

Headquarters near Brussels (Belgien)

40 Employees

Three locations

Around 50.000 existing customers

It all began as a pure e-commerce player in the

drugstore and pharmacy sector. The site was

designed by pharmacists for pharmacists, so was

very technical and had little in the way of

consumer-orientation.

Editing and translation into languages around the

globe with thousands of registered authors.

Globally, handles more than 100,000 orders per

month – 65,000 for the United States, approx.

20,000 for Germany and approx. 8,000 for France.

More than 10 million articles have been written for

the French platform alone since 2007.

Agency for SEO online reputation and content

marketing, focused on research and development.

SEO optimisation tool, Semji, can be used to select

pages to concentrate on, determine the appropriate

keywords – including search volume – and make a

content rating. The tool shows which keywords are to

be integrated at which positions (h1, h2) for

optimisation in order to achieve a content rating of

80% and above.

Because it was the linchpin for the pharmaceutical

sample business, in order to increase sales, the traffic

on the website had to increase.

The following main problems were identified:

Page structure

Unbalanced relationship between SEA (much

invested) & SEO (under-represented):

Pharmasimple had spent a lot on AdWords.

When the company stopped investing in this

area, it was no longer visible which then had an

impact on revenue.

The solution: a complete overhaul to facilitate

strong growth for more SEO and SEA success, as

well as for an improved user journey and an

optimal user experience on the site.

Coordination

Scalability

Reaction time

Productivity

Quality

Inclusion

Commitment

Training

Willingness to change

Strategic consulting

Technical know-

how

KPI measurement

Jointly bringing SEO-optimised content to

the fore…

23.000 potential pages, 11,000 of which were

indexed, i.e. 48%

3% of pages generated 99% of traffic

700 brand sites

3.500 category and subcategory pages

15.000 product sheets

10.500 Nutzer via organic search

5 % of e-commerce revenue generated by organic

traffic

… with clearly measurable key figures:

Increase SEO traffic to 150,000 visitors per month

(starting from January 2018 with 10,500 monthly

visitors).

Overhaul of the website: Usability and Customer

Journey, improvement of SEO, optimisation of SEA

campaign structure.

Increase share of organic traffic from 6% to 50%

through SEO measures.

With a comprehensive content check, the project

partners needed to assess whether the content on the

Pharmasimple website contributed to the company's

objectives. The first step was to uncover the weak

points so that inferior and non-holistic contents could

be removed, while valuable potentials for the content

marketing and search engine optimisation could be fully

utilised. As content is known to be king, this would be

the basis for a successful web presence.

Product datasheets were often

duplicated

Similar products

Many dealers simply copied the

information on their brand pages

CSV catalogues & comparison

pages

Main categories

Main Products

20% of pages > 3 seconds

Home page > 6 seconds

Pages set at a lower hierarchical level > 10 seconds

70% of the subpages were more than three clicks away and

the product pages were ten clicks away

Numerous orphaned pages (no connection to the domain and

no internal/external links)

doctifarma.fr

pharma-gdd.com

newpharma.fr

pharmashopi.com

cocoocenter.com

parashop.com

atrium-sante.fr

pharmasimple.com

63

44

51

51

47

41

43

71

194.662

1.031.526

595.494

611.127

838.640

1.341.330

1.104.428

82.392

1.201

738

792

1.248

598

479

265

370

776

668

772

899

596

456

252

324

247.689

57.051

179.173

117.988

143.149

32.553

24.955

14.300

586.813

67.624

412.970

266.019

204.720

33.165

21.625

10.552

Good performance values compared to competitors

In order to put the performance of a website through its

paces, it is always worth comparing it to the

competition. The Domain Rating (DR) measures the

strength of a domain and provides information about

the backlink quality in relative comparison to other

sites.

By doing this for Pharmasimple, it became clear that the

ranking should have been better, although the backlink

structure itself was not inappropriate. In addition, few

domains referred to their page.

The following weak points were noted:

From a technical point of view: unfavourable

categorisation of products, website not responsive

Website performance: page speed too low, too much,

and difficult-to-access content which made it

confusing for the user

The content: too little relevant information, lots of

redundant information, content not detailed enough

Only a complete reorientation could guarantee a solid

basis for the implementation of a sustainable and

effective SEO strategy.

Once all technical problems had been solved in the first step, the project team could concentrate on the SEO

strategy. This involved defining the particularly important products, reordering the structure or categorisation, and

defining semantic clusters as well as important keywords. The writing process could then begin – with a

sophisticated briefing to ensure high-quality content – before implementing a targeted backlink strategy.

To this end, the following steps were required…

No indexation of the

website for a period of

1.5 months

Creation of a pre-

production environment

Template

redesign/template

change

Optimisation of the

source code

Web performance testing

/ pre-production

(responsive)

Segmentation (5 Days)

Customer brainstorming

Identification of

segments that are

particularly important for

the business

700 brand sites

1,500 category and

subcategory pages

5,000 product

descriptions

Content Marketing

Articles (Blog)

Briefing creation

Tools to support

semantic optimisation

Link building

Categorisation (3 months)

A maximum of three

levels

Define priorities and

priority areas

Topic clusters and well-

founded keyword analysis

Weighting of data (for

example, search volume)

The main challenge in redesigning the content

production process was to integrate all texts on the

Pharmasimple website with minimal time and effort.

The total was just under 3.5 million words.

In fact, without a minimum of automation, it would

have been impossible to create 150 product sheets

consisting of 800 to 1200 words and, at the same time,

fine-tuning the form of the text.

When integrating large amounts of text for

Pharmasimple, several challenges had to be mastered

simultaneously. For example, text production volume

had to be increased while maintaining quality and

some texts had to be adapted to new text types.

A smooth, reliable and on-time work process with

clean methods – centrally handled via the Textbroker

platform – was the decisive factor for success in this

context. By making a CSV upload available to the

authors, the number of work steps for them was

reduced and potential sources of error were avoided.

The authors were able to use a convenient CSV

upload. This avoided possible sources of error and

reduced the number of work steps to the

publication-ready content.

External content creation with the goal of optimal

search engine findability is a task that requires special

skills and daily practice. This is why internal processing

is difficult for most companies – including

Pharmasimple.

Textbroker has been a pioneer among text providers

since 2005, leading the way in tailor-made and unique

content. For such a large project it is a good idea to

bring on board a specialist with the necessary expertise

and experience to manage the production of content

qualitatively.

Therefore, by outsourcing the editorial part,

Pharmasimple was able to concentrate on more

strategic management and control tasks, and the

Textbroker authors on their core competence – writing

tailor-made texts.

To make a great film, you need three things: a great script, a great script and a great script.

„

“- Alfred Hitchcock

To make a great film, you need three things: a great script, a great script and a great script.

„

“- Alfred Hitchcock

briefing

Do you fear demotivated authors and endless correction

loops? With clear instructions and feedback, this doesn’t happen.

The be-all and end-all for a successful writing process with

a satisfactory result is an impeccable briefing. It should be

as meaningful and comprehensive as possible, containing

all the necessary information, and be followed by a

rigorous feedback process. The first assignment in this

project, therefore, involved every author. The individual

components of the briefing were worked through step by

step and the perfect final version created collaboratively.

After text submission, the authors were given detailed

explanations of any corrections required so that they could

understand exactly why, for example, a certain passage of

text was not expressive enough or why their chosen style

was inappropriate. In this way, the copywriters could be

individually guided for as long as necessary. Some required

repeated instruction on the subject of SEO or HTML, while

others were familiar with the subject matter so, after

minor corrections, were fit to continue.

The be-all and end-all for a successful writing process with a satisfactory result is a perfect briefing. That's why the Textbroker-specific briefing guidelines have their big appearance here.

The project consisted of several steps to enable successful content marketing, the first of which was a targeted recruitment of suitable authors. The aim here was to find exactly those authors who were motivated to meet the requirements and were able to implement correction requests appropriately and promptly.

It was vital that the planned text volume was fixed, with a suitable time window, at the start of the project. In order to prevent deviation from expectation and to reduce potential revisions – or even rejections – Textbroker also equipped the project authors with regular training in the specifics of the assignment. In this way, the authors continuously improved their writing skills in order to be able to consistently deliver tailor-made and error-free texts.

Pharmasimple's wishes were always central to the

decision-making process.

Competitors’ content and competing brands were

examined in advance with the aim of distinguishing

each product in context.

Official authority recommendations and standards

within the health care industry were taken into

account to ensure the accuracy of important

information.

Good readability and usability for Internet users was

considered paramount as readers often scan the content

on the Internet and fly over the passages, with only 16

% reading the entire web text.

To distinguish good texts, brevity and conviction were

key, while clear, understandable and lively language

achieved engagement. In addition, texts answered the

W questions that users asked themselves in order to

offer real added value.

For recognition value and a unified appearance, all

texts had the same tonality, used the "we" form and

addressed the reader directly.

An attractive price certainly played a role but was

not textually intrusive.

Word usage and terms were handled consciously and

sensitively, giving preference to those with positive

and inclusive connotations. For example, "people"

instead of "individuals" and "relief" instead of

"healing". The latter was particularly important in the

health environment given the implications of

incorrect description or usage. Therefore, a definitive

list of language dos and don’ts was provided in the

briefings.

As with all e-commerce sites, Pharmasimple’s SEO

content could not devalue an individual product in

the portfolio in favour of another product. In

addition, the texts needed to bridge the gap between

attention-grabbing messages and the correct

presentation of health-related information. In short,

the contents had to professionally inform while

arousing interest, without excessive use of

promotional language. Instead, they needed to

actively distance themselves from the respective

brand communication while still increasing the value

of the respective brand; for example, by informing

the reader about the effect of certain ingredients.

Authors were therefore made aware of which

keywords they could use, and how, so that they did not

unintentionally deceive the reader. They were actively

encouraged to think carefully about the usage of certain

terms and phrases, as well as being tasked with

translating the various product INCI formulas into lay

terms in order to make the ingredients transparent to

consumers. Precautionary recommendations were also

made for dietary supplements sold over the counter. In

principle, the difficulty with pharmaceutical products is

to vary the phrasing (i.e. not always "as part of a

balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle"), avoid excessive

promotional language, and be careful not to confuse

pharmaceutical industry with the medical field by using

incorrect terms. The author team for the Pharmasimple

project successfully achieved this careful balance.

# Keywords in the Top 3

# Keywords in the Top 10

Paid

Organic

Organic results overtook thepaid results after 12 months

Open communication from A to Z was essential for this project –both between the project management team and the authors, and

between the project management team and Pharmasimple.

Regular telephone calls enabled the participants to ensure that

everything went according to plan.

The Textbroker project managers provided professional guidance

to the authors, including anticipating and mitigating the impact

of slow periods, such as holidays. Team-building and further

training measures for the editorial department were given high

priority during implementation, with the ultimate goal of

collaboratively improving productivity.

The results were impressive. The team was able to overcome all

hurdles together and achieve the goals set at the start of the

project by redesigning the Pharmasimple website, improving the

internal organisation and findability in the search engines,

increasing the text volume, and sustainably increasing the

performance of the e-commerce site through high-quality

content marketing.

Tel.: +44 1214 685 191Mail: clients@textbroker.co.ukWeb: www.textbroker.co.uk

Textbroker LLC 80476 West Sahara AvenueLas Vegas, Nevada 89117

Sario Marketing GmbHGroße Bleiche 465116 Mainz, Germany