Ranking a US Contract Pharma Manufacturer for "CDMO"

Client: a Washington, DC-based contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) serving the pharmaceutical industry. Anonymised under NDA.

The Challenge

CDMO is one of the most competitive, high-value B2B search terms in pharma. The buyers are sophisticated — procurement teams, formulation scientists, VPs of manufacturing — and the search results are dominated by large players with years of authority. Our client had the capabilities but was invisible for the terms that mattered: "CDMO," "contract pharma manufacturer," dosage-form-specific contract manufacturing queries, and the long tail of intent-rich questions buyers actually type.

A second problem was emerging on top of the classic SERP: buyers were starting research inside AI assistants and Google AI Overviews, where the client didn't appear at all.

What We Did

• Mapped the real buyer journey. Strategy built around how CDMO buyers search — capability queries, dosage-form and modality queries, regulatory and compliance questions, and shortlist-stage "vs" comparisons — rather than chasing one head term.
• Rebuilt capability and service pages around specific high-intent queries, with technical depth and the entities (dosage forms, certifications, therapeutic areas) both Google and AI models use to judge relevance.
• Optimised for AI retrieval. Question-and-answer framing, factual density, schema markup and unambiguous capability statements — so AI Overviews and assistants could cite the client confidently. This is the GEO layer in practice.
• Fixed the technical foundation — crawlability, indexation, speed and internal linking — so new content could actually rank.

Why It Worked

Seven percent a month sounds modest until it compounds: twelve consecutive months at that rate works out to roughly 2.25x the starting traffic. In high-consideration B2B you don't win by shouting the head term louder — you win by owning the full cluster of buyer-intent queries and being the clearest, most citable source, in both classic search and the AI answers that increasingly sit above it.

Services used: SEO, LLM/GEO optimization, technical SEO