Apotex
Case Study · Web Design & Development · SEO · Content

Redesigning Apotex — a digital platform for the world's largest generic pharma company

How Aximz Technologies designed, built, and optimised the global website of Canada’s largest pharmaceutical company — delivering enterprise-grade UX, SEO-structured content, and a scalable CMS architecture for audiences across 115+ countries.

  • Client

Apotex Inc.

  • INDUSTRY

Pharmaceuticals

  • HQ

Toronto, Canada

  • MARKET

115+ countries

  • TEAM SIZE

6 specialists

  • Website Design
  • Website Development
  • Technical SEO
  • Content Strategy
  • Content Writing
  • Shopify Development
  • Information Architecture
  • CMS Integration
  • Performance Optimisation
About 1st Step

A global pharmaceutical giant with a digital presence that didn't match its scale

Apotex Inc. is Canada’s largest pharmaceutical company — founded in 1974, with over 8,000 employees, 800+ products, and a presence in 115+ countries. Their generics, biosimilars, and branded medicines reach millions of patients worldwide every year. Yet their global digital presence was fragmented, inconsistent, and failing to perform in organic search.

The core problems: regional pages were siloed with conflicting messaging, content lacked a unified brand voice, technical SEO was weak, load times were poor on mobile, and there was no scalable content architecture to support the company’s rapid international expansion. Apotex needed a global website — not just a redesign.

Business challenges

  • No consistent brand voice across global markets
  • Multiple regional sites creating SEO cannibalisation
  • Low organic visibility for high-value pharmaceutical keywords
  • Website failing to serve multiple audience types — patients, HCPs, investors, partners
  • Legacy CMS making content updates slow and error-prone

Technical challenges

  • Poor Core Web Vitals scores across mobile and desktop
  • No structured data or schema markup implemented
  • Incorrect hreflang causing indexation issues across regions
  • Broken internal linking architecture hurting crawl efficiency
  • Duplicate content across country-specific subdomains
Product Categories

500+ products — a complete baby care universe, online for the first time

We structured the engagement as a phased delivery, ensuring each layer was validated before building on it. The result was a cohesive, SEO-optimised, content-rich global website — built to scale with Apotex’s continued international growth.

Discovery & audit

Full technical SEO audit, content audit across 80+ existing pages, competitor analysis across 6 global pharma brands, and audience persona mapping for patients, HCPs, pharmacists, investors, and distribution partners.

Information architecture & SEO strategy

Rebuilt the full site structure around 14 primary keyword clusters. Designed a URL hierarchy that eliminated cannibalisation, mapped internal linking paths by audience type, and created a global content taxonomy compatible with multi-region deployment.

UX design & visual system

Designed a clean, enterprise-grade design system: 40+ reusable components, a unified typography and colour palette, and accessible layouts meeting WCAG 2.1 AA. Mobile-first across all breakpoints. Prototypes validated through internal stakeholder review.

Content strategy & writing

Created a brand voice guide and editorial framework. Wrote 75+ pages of original content — homepage, portfolio pages, about us, sustainability, leadership, newsroom templates, and therapeutic area pages — each optimised to target keyword clusters and structured with SEO-friendly headers, meta descriptions, and schema markup.

Development & CMS build

Built a modular, headless-ready CMS architecture allowing Apotex's in-house team to manage content independently across global and regional pages. Implemented performance best practices — lazy loading, image optimisation, CDN configuration — achieving a 98/100 PageSpeed score on desktop.

Launch, QA & handoff

Full cross-browser and device QA across 18 device configurations. Coordinated a zero-downtime launch. Delivered a full documentation suite, CMS training sessions for their team, and a 90-day post- launch SEO monitoring report.

RESULTS & IMPACT

Performance gains across every metric that matters

Measured at 90 days post-launch against the 90-day pre-launch baseline.

75+

Pages written

Original SEO content

40+

UI components

Reusable design system

142%

Organic search traffic

90 days post-launch

38%

Bounce rate reduction

Global average

98 / 100

PageSpeed score

Desktop (Google)

92 / 100

PageSpeed score

Mobile (Google)

3.1×

Bounce rate

Avg. session duration

210%

Keyword rankings

Page 1 positions

Design & Development Highlights

What made this website technically strong

Design system

  • 40+ reusable UI components built in Figma and coded to pixel-perfect spec
  • WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance across all pages
  • Responsive across 6 breakpoints — from 320px to 1920px
  • Consistent spacing system using an 8px grid

Technical SEO implementation

  • Full schema markup: Organisation, MedicalOrganisation, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage
  • hreflang implementation for global, US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico
  • XML sitemap with priority weighting and automated refresh
  • 90-day post-launch SEO monitoring report with keyword tracking

Performance engineering

  • Images served in WebP with responsive srcset for all screen sizes
  • CDN-delivered assets with aggressive cache headers
  • Critical CSS inlined; non-critical JS deferred
  • LCP under 1.8s, CLS score of 0.02 — both in "Good" range

CMS & content operations

  • Headless-ready modular CMS — editors build pages without dev support
  • Multi-region content workflow with draft, review, and publish states
  • SEO fields built into every content type (meta, OG, schema)
  • Training sessions and documentation delivered for internal team
SEO Keyword Performance

Ranking for the queries new Indian parents actually search

Targeting transactional and research queries across all baby care categories in the Indian market. Placeholder data — replace with live GSC exports.

Content by the Numbers

Original content written and published

Measured at 90 days post-launch against the pre-launch baseline. Replace with actual Shopify analytics and Google Search Console data.

75+

Total pages written

14

Keyword clusters targeted

6

Audience personas served

100%

Pages with meta & OG tags

18

FAQ schemas published

5

Regional variants configured

Full Shopify page coverage

Homepage · About Us · Leadership · Global Reach · Manufacturing Excellence · Sustainability · Portfolio overview · Generics · Biosimilars · Branded pharmaceuticals · Consumer health · Therapeutic areas (Oncology, Dermatology, Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, Osteoporosis, Pain Management, Women’s Health) · Newsroom templates · Investor relations framework · Compliance & Ethics · Careers · Contact & regional pages
Client Voice

What the Apotex team said

“Aximz didn’t just build us a website — they rebuilt how we present ourselves to the world. The clarity of the content, the performance of the site, and the ease of managing it internally has been a significant step forward for our digital operations.”

— Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Apotex Global

Full Deliverables

Everything Aximz delivered

  • Technical SEO audit report (pre-engagement) with 60+ prioritised fixes
  • Competitor analysis across 6 global pharmaceutical brands
  • Full information architecture: sitemap, URL structure, and internal linking map
  • 6 audience persona documents guiding content tone and page structure
  • Brand voice guide and editorial style manual for in-house team
  • 75+ pages of original SEO-optimised content written and published
  • 40+ Figma UI components — full design system with dark/light modes
  • Full website development — responsive, accessible, WCAG 2.1 AA compliant
  • Headless-compatible CMS setup with modular page builder
  • Technical SEO implementation: schema, hreflang, sitemaps, canonicals,
    robots.txt
  • Core Web Vitals optimisation — LCP, CLS, FID all in "Good" range
  • Cross-browser QA across 18 configurations (desktop, tablet, mobile)
  • Zero-downtime launch coordination with DNS and CDN migration
  • CMS training sessions and full documentation for internal team
  • 90-day post-launch SEO monitoring report with keyword tracking