Case study
Pharmaceutical SEO Case Study: $49,900 a Month on 5,300 Keywords
5,300 ranking keywords. 35,400 organic visits a month. $49,900 a month in traffic value, the largest figure anywhere in this portfolio and roughly triple what the parenting site carries on five times the keyword count.
A pharmaceutical SEO case study is an odd thing to put in front of an Australian plumber or dentist. The market is American, the product is regulated, and nobody here will replicate it. It is published because the numbers are shaped differently from every other engagement on the site, in two ways.
The first is concentration. The second is that the line does not curve. It steps.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
- Organic traffic
- 35,400a month
- Keywords
- 5,300ranking
- Top three
- 313positions
- Referring domains
- 461
- Domain rating
- 39
- Traffic value
- $49,900a month
Why 5,300 keywords are worth more than 26,700
Divide the traffic value by the visits and you get about $1.41 a visit, commercial but not remarkable, and below the $1.83 on the car rental engagement. Divide by keywords instead and the picture changes.
| Engagement | Ranking keywords | Traffic value a month | Value per keyword |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pharmaceutical manufacturer | 5,300 | $49,900 | about $9.40 |
| Car rental services | 11,000 | $31,100 | about $2.80 |
| Parenting content site | 26,700 | $15,300 | about $0.60 |
Each ranking term here is worth roughly sixteen times a parenting keyword and three times a car rental one, and pulls about seven visits a month against four and two.
So this is not a long tail. It is a short, heavy head: a small number of medicine and treatment searches with very large volumes and very high advertiser costs.
The top three count confirms it. 313 positions out of 5,300 keywords, about one in seventeen, so close to the whole result rests on a few hundred winners and the pages behind them.
That cuts both ways, and the second half is the part an agency leaves out. Losing forty of those positions would be a bad quarter, where the parenting site and its 1,100 top three positions would barely notice the same loss. Concentration is efficient and fragile, and those are one property described twice.
A step in September 2023, and what it honestly indicates
The traffic line sits at roughly 28,000 visits a month from April 2023 to the end of August. In early September it moves up sharply, then holds at the new level for the rest of the chart, finishing at 35,400.
Nothing else in this portfolio does that. The renovation site turns and climbs. This one is flat, then a step, then flat again.
A shape like that is consistent with three things, and the data cannot separate them.
A technical or indexation change
Pages that were not being crawled or indexed properly start being counted, which lands in days rather than months.
A structural change
Templates, internal linking or consolidation redistributing what the site already had, again arriving at once.
A Google update landing favourably
Broad core updates roll out over a week or two and can move a site's whole position set in that window.
The referring domain line rules out one explanation. Links went from roughly 430 to 461 across the year, with a dip in the middle, and thirty extra domains do not move a site 7,000 visits in a fortnight. Whatever happened, it was not bought.
Beyond that, anybody naming the cause from this chart is guessing. The useful part is the direction: a step is usually a site being unblocked rather than improved, and the same mechanics can take it back. One engagement from the same period, not published here, peaked in that same September and had given away about a third of its traffic seven months later.
Pharmaceutical and medical SEO in Australia is a narrower job
Most of what this site ranks for could not be published the same way here.
Advertising therapeutic goods to the Australian public sits under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 and the Therapeutic Goods (Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code) Instrument 2021, both administered by the TGA. Substances in Schedules 3, 4 and 8 of the Poisons Standard, outside Appendix H, generally cannot be advertised to the public at all, with narrow exceptions such as price lists and government-authorised information. Practitioner advertising is separate again, under the National Law and AHPRA's guidance, which is the constraint covered on the healthcare SEO page.
For an Australian pharmaceutical, device or clinic site, the highest-volume searches are often the ones you are least able to write a commercial page for. Compliance decides the content plan before search volume gets a say, and a provider who quotes a keyword list without asking which schedule your product sits in has skipped half the job.
What this does not show
It cannot show revenue. Ahrefs estimates visits, and $49,900 is what they would cost through Google Ads, not what anyone earned. A manufacturer selling through pharmacy channels may not convert search traffic into a sale on its own site at all.
It is also 93.1 per cent United States traffic, Canada 5.0 per cent, the rest in the low hundreds. The client is not named, because they hired a freelancer rather than agreeing to be a reference. No Google Business Profile, no map pack, no suburb pages, and none of the Australian rules above applied.
What this costs
An Australian site in a regulated health or medicine category usually needs Growth at $1,990 a month or Authority at $3,490, because compliance review adds a step to everything. Local at $990 suits a single clinic in one service area. All of it is on the SEO pricing page, no lock-in and 30 days notice.
Run the sums against your own product, not this chart. Authority is $41,880 a year, and if your margin per customer cannot carry that on a realistic number of extra enquiries, the answer is a smaller tier or none.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionCan you produce a jump like the September one for us?
No, and treat anyone who promises it as a salesperson. The chart shows a step happened. It does not show what caused it, and we will not pretend otherwise. What is on offer is the work that finds whether something is blocking your site, which is where steps come from.
Is $49,900 a month what the client made?
No. It is Ahrefs' estimate of what those visits would cost to buy through ads. A fair measure of how commercial the traffic is, and a useless measure of income.
Only 313 keywords in the top three. Is that weak?
It is small, and it is the whole engine. Roughly one keyword in seventeen sits in the top three, and those few hundred positions carry most of the 35,400 visits. It also leaves the result exposed to one update in a way a broad profile is not.
We sell a prescription product. Can you do this in Australia?
Not this way. Prescription medicines generally cannot be advertised to the Australian public, so the work moves to health professional audiences, disease state information and corporate content. Real work, on a much shorter keyword list.
Why is a regulated industry SEO result relevant to a trade business?
For the traffic value per keyword. It is the clearest evidence on the site that forty of the right searches beat four thousand of the wrong ones, which is the argument for a short list of high-intent terms in the suburbs you service.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Find out whether something is blocking your site
Four fields: your website, your main competitor, the suburbs or markets you service, and your email. Within two business days a senior person spends 30 to 45 minutes on it by hand and sends back three findings, one of them a fix you can make yourself.
Indexation and crawl problems get checked first, because they are cheap to fix and the most common reason a site that should rank does not. No automated PDF, no obligation, no sales call unless you ask.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
I had the pleasure of working with Arbaz, an exceptional SEO Specialist who surpassed my expectations. From the start, his professionalism and expertise were evident. He conducted a thorough website audit, developed a tailored strategy, and optimized on-page elements and off-page backlinks. His knowledge of the latest SEO trends and proactive recommendations greatly improved our website's visibility and organic traffic. His ability to collaborate with the content team and implement technical SEO optimizations further solidified their effectiveness. Overall, I highly recommend this SEO Specialist for his remarkable results and dedication to driving business growth.
We had an amazing work experience with Arbaz in the past, so we decided to rehire him for the SEO dofollow link building for our other websites. He delivered excellent results and met our expectations. He is a highly skilled and reliable SEO expert. We will definitely hire him again for our future projects. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. 👍
Working with Arbaz has been an absolute pleasure. His expertise in managing our off-page strategy is evident in the tangible results and increased visibility we've achieved. Arbaz is professional, diligent, and consistently goes above and beyond our expectations. He not only understands our goals but also offers insights that add tremendous value to our strategy. I appreciate his proactive approach and clear communication. We feel fortunate to have him as a part of our team and I highly recommend him to anyone looking for top-tier off-page strategy services.
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