SEO for pharmaceutical formulation, API and CDMO businesses

Three businesses wearing one website

"Pharmaceutical company" covers at least three businesses that share almost no search behaviour. Most Indian pharma sites are built as though it were one, which is why they rank for the company name and nothing else.

The formulations business sells branded generics through prescribers, distributors and trade. Its searchers are doctors, chemists, stockists and — whether you want them or not — patients who read a strip of tablets and typed the name in.

The API and intermediates business sells to procurement teams who search molecules, grades, CAS numbers and specifications. We've written that playbook at length for Gujarat chemical exporters and won't restate it here; if that's your business, start with the product-page approach on our Ahmedabad page and SEO for manufacturing companies.

The CDMO business sells development and manufacturing capacity to other pharma companies. Its buyers are business development and technical evaluation teams building a shortlist, and they filter on things no keyword tool will show you: dossier coverage, regulated-market filings, facility approvals, inspection history.

The first decision on a pharma site is which of the three it's actually for. A homepage greeting all three at once greets none of them, and the internal politics of that decision are usually the real reason the project stalls.

Doctor-facing and patient-facing, and the line the code draws

In most regulated markets, and in practice in India too, information written for a prescriber is not information you may put in front of the public. Efficacy data, dosing, comparative claims and full prescribing information belong to one audience. A patient looking up a tablet name belongs to another, and what they may lawfully be shown is much narrower.

Nearly every Indian pharma site handles this with a disclaimer nobody reads. That's not a structure, it's a hope. The split has to exist in the site itself, and it changes how the pages get indexed.

Schema.org gives you the vocabulary: MedicalWebPage accepts a medicalAudience property, with Patient as a defined subtype of MedicalAudience, so a page can state in machine-readable form who it was written for. Small on its own, useful when a machine is deciding what to summarise.

1. Separate the sections by path, not by modal. /hcp/... for prescriber material, everything else public. A URL prefix is auditable; a JavaScript interstitial is not.
2. Decide the indexing rule per section, deliberately. A fully gated prescriber section earns nothing in search. What works is an indexable landing page per product carrying the non-promotional facts — molecule, form, strengths, indication as approved — with the detailed prescribing material behind the gate.
3. If you noindex the gated pages, do not also block them in robots.txt. Google's documentation is explicit that a page blocked from crawling can still be indexed, because the crawler never sees the noindex rule. This is the single most common technical mistake on regulated sites and it produces exactly the wrong outcome: gated URLs listed in search results with no description.
4. Never gate the safety information. Whatever the commercial preference, adverse-event reporting routes and safety warnings should be reachable without a login by anyone, including a search engine.
5. Handle the patient who searched a brand name. They will arrive. Give them a short factual page — what the product is, consult your prescriber, here's the adverse-event route — rather than prescriber material or a 404.

Dossier and filing status as an indexable page-level asset

This is the section we'd build first for a CDMO or API business, and it barely exists anywhere in the Indian category.

A sourcing manager evaluating suppliers isn't asking whether you're a quality-focused partner. They're asking factual questions about a specific molecule: is there a filing, in which jurisdiction, from which site, commercial or development stage, and when was that site last inspected. Today they answer those by emailing you and waiting three days. Every one of them is a page.

The objection is always that this is commercially sensitive. Some of it genuinely is, and customer names under confidentiality stay off the site. But the existence of a filing and the approval status of a facility are typically matters of public record already. Publishing them organises information a buyer can find anyway, in a form that arrives before your competitor's email does.

• One page per molecule, not per therapeutic area. The buyer searches the molecule. A category page cannot rank for two hundred of them.
• Put a review date on every filing page. Filing status changes, and a stale page is a credibility problem in exactly the audience you least want to lose.
• Do not imply an approval you don't hold. "Facility designed to US FDA standards" and "facility inspected by US FDA" are different sentences and a technical buyer knows it.
• Keep customer names off the site unless you hold written permission. It's rarely given, and assuming it is the fastest way to lose an account.

A review workflow that survives regulatory affairs

Ask why a pharma site hasn't published anything in fourteen months and the answer is never the CMS. It's that a draft went to regulatory affairs, medical affairs and legal in parallel, came back with contradictory comments, and died.

The fix isn't lighter review. It's routing by risk and moving the expensive judgement upstream, so individual pages are checked against decisions already made rather than argued from scratch. Two lanes, and everything gets assigned to one before it's written.

• Build a pre-approved claim library. Every approved sentence about every product, with its source and approval date, in one document. Writers draw from it; reviewers check the draw rather than re-litigating the claim. This is the change that takes a pharma content calendar from theoretical to real.
• Name the reviewer on the page and date it. MedicalWebPage carries reviewedBy and lastReviewed for precisely this, and it's the record you'll want the day someone asks who approved a sentence.
• Version-control the copy, not just the site. When a claim changes you need to know every page that carried the old one. A claim-to-URL map is ten minutes per claim and saves a week during a recall.
• Set a review SLA in writing and report against it. "Regulatory review, five working days" is a commitment somebody owns. "When they get to it" is how the project dies quietly.
• Brief writers against the constraints up front. On a pharma brief the banned-claim list belongs at the top of the page, above the keyword and the outline — not discovered in a reviewer's comment on the third draft.

What the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act takes out of your copy

The Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954 restricts advertising of drugs and remedies for a schedule of listed conditions, and prohibits advertisements that mislead about a drug's true character or make false claims about curing or preventing disease. It sits alongside the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, which restrict promotion of prescription-only medicines to the public, and the Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices, which governs promotional conduct towards healthcare professionals.

That's our working understanding of the framework, not legal advice, and UCPMP's applicability and enforcement have been actively revised in recent years — have your regulatory affairs team confirm the current position before a word is published. What we can say confidently is what it does to a website, because we've watched it happen to drafts: a marketing team's instinctive first draft is mostly unpublishable, and finding that out at legal review rather than at brief stage is what makes pharma content expensive.

• "Cure", "guaranteed", "permanent relief", "no side effects" — gone, in every form, including inside a testimonial where a third party says it.
• Patient testimonials and before-and-after imagery for anything prescription-only. The strongest conversion asset in most industries is unavailable in this one.
• Condition content that ends in a product recommendation. Disease-awareness material and promotion stay visibly separate, and a page walking a patient from symptoms to your brand name is promotion whatever the header says.
• Comparative claims against a named competitor product, published where the public can read them, without the data to support them.
• Anything implying diagnosis. A symptom checker on a pharma domain is a different regulated object from one on a hospital domain.

What we'd sequence first, and what we commit to

On a pharma engagement we spend the first three weeks on governance rather than keywords, which is not what anyone wants to hear at kickoff. Agree the two review lanes, name the reviewers, set the SLA, start the claim library. Nothing else on this page is deliverable until that exists.

Then filing and facility pages for the molecules with live commercial interest, because they're fastest to rank and closest to revenue. Then the audience split and the technical work behind it. Then Lane B content, last, because it costs most to produce and clears slowest. The general healthcare SEO approach — named clinical authorship, the evidence bar Google applies to medical content — still applies on top of all of it.

Our SEO runs from ₹75,000/mo, with smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo, ex-GST, month-to-month after the first quarter, and you keep every asset including the claim library. We don't promise a ranking position and we won't pretend to have influence over how fast your regulatory team signs. What we freeze on day one is your trailing-90-day count of qualified enquiries from organic search. Miss it in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. We take three clients a month, which is why that's a commitment rather than a line in a deck.