SEO for online pharmacies that want to compete on trust, not just price.

You're up against national brands with huge budgets, marketplaces, and a fair few sites that cut corners. Paid ads get expensive quickly, and some of the products people search for most can't be advertised to the public at all.

That makes organic search more valuable for you than for almost any other business. Every patient who finds you through Google is one you didn't pay a click for. But Google treats health sites as "your money or your life" content and holds them to a much higher bar for expertise and trust, so the usual SEO shortcuts don't work here.

Online pharmacies tend to grow into big, messy sites: hundreds of product pages, filters, out-of-stock items and old URLs. I write the code as well as the SEO, so I fix these things rather than just listing them in a report.

• Crawling and indexing, so Google spends its time on the pages that matter.
• Clean category and condition structures that make sense to people and search engines.
• Duplicate and thin product pages merged or tidied up.
• Structured data for products, organisation and FAQs where it's appropriate.
• Page speed, especially on mobile where most of your traffic comes from.
• Redirects that keep the rankings you've already earned when things change.

People don't search for a product code. They search for the problem: hay fever that won't shift, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, a UTI that's come back again. A good condition page explains the problem in plain English, sets out the options, and makes it clear that a prescriber assesses every request.

Every page should show who wrote it, who clinically reviewed it and when. That's not box ticking. It's what reassures a patient enough to start a consultation, and it's the kind of signal Google looks for on health topics.

• Your GPhC registration details and the superintendent pharmacist, easy to find on every page.
• Real prescribers and pharmacists with their qualifications, not anonymous "medical teams".
• A clear explanation of the consultation process and how decisions are made.
• Honest delivery, returns and privacy information.
• Reviews from a recognised platform, shown accurately.

Prescription-only medicines can't be advertised to the public in the UK. The ASA has ruled against a string of online pharmacies for promoting weight loss injections and other prescription medicines, and those rulings are public. I build content around conditions, consultations and your service, and leave treatment decisions to your prescribers.

Your clinical team signs off the medical wording before anything goes live. I'm there to make it rank and read well, not to give clinical or legal advice.

Send me your site and I'll look at it properly: crawl health, the pages that already earn traffic, and the gaps where competitors are winning searches you should be getting. You'll get three priorities back within one working day. Bigger online pharmacies usually suit the Growth or Authority plan, and I'll tell you honestly which one makes sense.

Questions practices ask