Case study · Healthcare / Online Pharmacy
Our work centred on Chemist Direct — the online chemist for over-the-counter medicines, vitamins and everyday health — part of the Pharmacy2U group, the UK's largest NHS-contracted online pharmacy. In a "Your Money or Your Life" category where Google demands proof of expertise, we rebuilt the E-E-A-T signals, condition content hubs and digital-PR authority across the group, lifting organic revenue 3.1x while strengthening the medical trust that healthcare search rewards.
Visit chemistdirect.co.uk ↗The brands
Chemist Direct — where the bulk of our work focused — is the online chemist of the Pharmacy2U group, selling over-the-counter medicines, vitamins and everyday health to millions; its sister brand Pharmacy2U is the UK's largest distance-selling pharmacy, dispensing NHS repeat prescriptions to the door. Together they sit squarely in Google's "Your Money or Your Life" territory, where ranking is gated not just by relevance but by demonstrable medical expertise, authoritativeness and trust. The brands had scale and clinical credibility, but their organic visibility lagged the authority they had genuinely earned. The opportunity was to make Google see the expertise that real patients already trusted.
The challenge
Health and medicine sit in the most scrutinised corner of search. Google's quality systems hold YMYL pages to a far higher bar, rewarding pages that show real medical expertise and penalising thin or unsourced health advice, while NHS, charity and government sites dominate the most valuable condition queries. Both brands faced the same triple bind: condition and treatment content that lacked visible clinical authorship and review, a backlink profile that under-represented their genuine standing, and technical issues across large pharmacy catalogues that diluted crawl efficiency and indexation. To grow safely, we had to deepen E-E-A-T without overclaiming, earn authoritative coverage through digital PR, and clean up the technical foundations, all under strict medical-compliance guardrails.
In healthcare search you don't win by writing more, you win by proving who is qualified to write it. We built the authority Google needs to see.
The approach
We rebuilt condition and treatment pages around visible medical authorship and review, adding qualified clinician bylines, "reviewed by" dates, citations to authoritative sources and structured author and medical-webpage schema so Google can see the expertise behind every health claim.
Reviewed pages +100%We mapped the conditions and treatments patients actually search and built interlinked content hubs around them, with our proprietary AI supporting topic modelling and senior strategists owning the medical accuracy, so each brand became a genuine answer engine rather than a thin catalogue.
Non-brand clicks +186%Because trust in YMYL is carried by who cites you, we ran healthcare digital PR, data-led studies, expert commentary and seasonal health stories, to earn coverage and authoritative backlinks from national press and health publishers rather than chasing low-quality links.
Authority links +240Across two large pharmacy catalogues we resolved crawl, indexation, duplication and Core Web Vitals issues, tightened internal linking and schema, and protected medical-compliance constraints, so the authority we built was actually crawled, indexed and ranked.
Page-1 keywords +58%The results, in depth
Every lever, before and after — an audited view of where the organic growth actually came from.
The craft
