Forest Hills Lab is a life sciences company headquartered in Hong Kong, with offices in the United States, Singapore and South Korea. It runs two very different businesses under one name: a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical division working on potentially disease-modifying treatments for neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and an aesthetics division that markets medical-grade and non-medical-grade beauty products.
Over six months of our 2023 SEO engagement, Search Console recorded 2,110 clicks from Google search, 44,200 impressions and a 4.8% click-through rate. That is the largest click count of any site in our SEO results portfolio, and the highest click-through rate of any non-restaurant site in it.
| Metric | April to October 2023 |
|---|---|
| Clicks from Google search | 2,110 |
| Impressions | 44,200 |
| Average click-through rate | 4.8% |
| Average position | 18.5 |
| Industry | Life sciences: biopharmaceuticals and aesthetics |
Why Life Sciences SEO Is Harder Than It Looks
The short answer is that Google holds health content to a higher standard than almost anything else on the web.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines describe health, financial and safety topics as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content: pages that could affect someone's wellbeing if they are wrong. For these topics Google applies its strictest standards for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, the framework it calls E-E-A-T, and judges accuracy against established expert consensus.
Google treats health topics as Your Money or Your Life content and holds it to its highest quality standard.
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust weigh more on health pages than on almost any other subject.
On health topics, accuracy is judged against well-established expert consensus. Overclaiming is a ranking risk, not just a legal one.
For a company like Forest Hills Lab that creates two problems at once. The biopharmaceutical side has to talk about serious neurological conditions without overstating what clinical-stage research can promise. The aesthetics side sells to consumers in a crowded, heavily marketed category. One domain has to carry both credibly.
The second difficulty is audience. Investors, research partners, clinicians, journalists and consumers all search for the company for different reasons. A site that serves only one of them loses the rest.
What Search Console Showed
Google Search Console, foresthillslab.com, 11 April to 10 October 2023: 2.11K clicks, 44.2K impressions, 4.8% CTR, average position 18.5.
A note on how to read this screenshot. It was taken in October 2023 with Search Console set to "last 6 months", during the engagement. It shows where the site stood across those six months; it is not a before-and-after comparison.
Three things are worth reading in it.
Clicks were steady, not a spike. The blue clicks line moves up and down day to day, as every site's does, but it holds a consistent level across all six months. Compare that with the two sites in our portfolio where almost all the clicks came in one week.
The average position improved. In Search Console the position line is drawn upside down: higher on the chart means a better ranking. The orange line drifts upward through the second half of the period, which means the site's typical ranking was getting better.
The click-through rate is high. 4.8% across every query the site appeared for is well above the other 2023 business sites in our portfolio.
Why the Click-Through Rate Stands Out
A high click-through rate usually means two things: people are searching for the company or its products by name, and the page they see in the results looks like the right answer.
For a company with a distinct name and a specific scientific focus, a share of searches will be for the company itself: investors, partners and press looking it up. Those searches click at high rates. The rest depends on the title and description each page shows in the results. Pages that state plainly what the company does, and for whom, are clicked more than pages with vague corporate headlines.
Several audiences search for a life sciences company: investors and partners, clinicians and researchers, press, and consumers of its products. Each needs a page that answers its own question clearly. Health content is held to Google's higher Your Money or Your Life standard, so every page needs accurate, expert-backed claims.
What SEO for a Life Sciences Company Involves
This is how we approach a site in this field. It is the approach, described in general; the screenshot above is the evidence for this client.
- Separate the audiences. Research, product, investor and press content each need their own clearly titled pages, so the right person lands in the right place.
- Write health claims to the higher standard. State what research shows and what it does not. Name the stage of development. Avoid promises a regulator or a clinician would object to. On YMYL topics, overclaiming is a ranking risk as well as a legal one.
- Show who is behind the work. Named people, credentials and affiliations are the experience and expertise signals Google looks for on health topics.
- Keep the technical basics clean. A multinational site with several divisions accumulates duplicate pages, old URLs and inconsistent titles faster than most.
Organic Clicks vs Paid Clicks: Pricing the Same Traffic
Assumptions: 2,110 clicks from Search Console, 11 April to 10 October 2023, priced at LocaliQ's 2026 average cost per click for the closest categories in its search advertising benchmarks (US data, updated 1 June 2026): Health and fitness at $6.17 and Physicians and surgeons at $4.76. 2026 prices applied to 2023 clicks, and a Hong Kong company with global audiences, so read it as scale, not a bill. Some of these clicks were searches for the company's name, which it would rarely pay for.
| Volume | Organic clicks | At $4.76 a click | At $6.17 a click |
|---|---|---|---|
| Six months | 2,110 | about $10,040 | about $13,020 |
| A year at the same pace (our estimate) | about 4,200 | about $20,100 | about $26,000 |
Health advertising also carries its own restrictions on Google and other platforms, which makes earning visibility through content more valuable for companies in this field than for most.
The Competitor Pulse Check
| Factor | ValueStreamAI approach | Generic SEO agency |
|---|---|---|
| Health claims | Written to the YMYL standard, nothing promised that research does not show | Keyword-led copy that can overclaim |
| Audiences | Separate pages for research, product, investors and press | One message for everyone |
| Proof | Unedited Search Console data | Rank-tracker screenshots |
| Building the site | We build and fix sites ourselves | Recommendations for your developer |
What This Engagement Confirmed
Steady beats spiky. The most valuable shape in a Search Console chart is a line that holds. Forest Hills Lab's clicks held for six months while the average position improved.
Click-through rate is a quality signal you can see. A 4.8% average across all queries says the pages people saw in Google looked like the right answer.
Health content needs restraint. In life sciences, the content that ranks and the content that keeps the company out of trouble are the same content: accurate, specific and backed by named expertise. For more on SEO timelines and what different sites need, see how long SEO takes, and for healthcare specifically, AI for medical practice marketing and SEO.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is SEO different for life sciences and healthcare companies?
Google treats health topics as Your Money or Your Life content and holds them to its highest standard for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Claims must match established expert consensus, and pages should show who is behind the work. Overclaiming is a ranking risk as well as a regulatory one.
What results did Forest Hills Lab see from SEO?
Over six months in 2023, Search Console recorded 2,110 clicks, 44,200 impressions, a 4.8% click-through rate and an average position of 18.5, with the average position improving through the second half of the period.
What is a good click-through rate for a B2B or life sciences site?
It depends on the mix of searches, but most business sites we work with sit between 1% and 5% across all queries. Forest Hills Lab's 4.8% was the highest of the non-restaurant sites in our 2023 portfolio.
Can one website serve investors, clinicians and consumers?
Yes, if each audience has its own clearly titled pages. A single homepage message rarely ranks for, or satisfies, investors, researchers and product buyers at the same time.
Is this a before-and-after result?
No. The screenshot was taken during the engagement with Search Console set to the last six months, so it shows where the site stood across that window. We state that plainly on every 2023 result in our portfolio.
What's Next
If you run a healthcare, biotech or life sciences business and your site is not being found by the people who matter to you, start with a free look at your Search Console data. We will tell you what is holding it back and what fixing it involves.
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