At Wildcat Digital we know how hard it can be to compete with the big players in the veterinary industry. That’s why SEO can be so useful. It can help you appear above competitors when pet owners need you. Wildcat Digital have helped one independent surgery achieve just that and in this article we give you the top 10 tips that we’ve learnt from that journey.
So, how do you do SEO for vets? A successful SEO campaign is tailored to the individual business, its industry, and the region in which it operates. For vet SEO, it’s important that you:
Read on to learn more on how to do SEO for vets with our expert team.
SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketing tool; for an SEO campaign to be successful it must be tailored to individual business needs, the wider industry in which it operates, and for their local area/region.
As such, SEO for vets will differ from SEO for eCommerce or education, for example. What works for one campaign won’t necessarily work in another industry. Nonetheless, it’s an incredibly useful tool to add to your marketing strategy, particularly as businesses and marketing become evermore reliant on the internet.
Below, our SEO experts list their top vet SEO tips to help you get started. Alternatively, get in touch with us today to learn more about our Vet SEO service and how our team could help your business punch above its weight online.
Learn how to do SEO for vets from the experts at Wildcat Digital.
With any SEO campaign, it’s a good idea to first focus on the basics. Think of it like cooking; you wouldn’t start making a fancy three-course meal without first cleaning the kitchen! Solid foundations set your website up for success and remove issues that may hold it back in the future.
A Technical Site Audit is a great way to check the health and functionality of your website before moving on to other tasks. Learn more about this in our recent blog post about the importance of Technical Site Audits.
A solid keyword strategy that is tailored to your services and the local area is crucial for veterinary SEO success. If you’re gaining traffic from London, but your surgery is based in Manchester, it’s unlikely to improve your bottom line.
Using a keyword research tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs, begin searching for veterinary terms relevant to your business + your local area (or where you want to rank). For example, if you want to be recognised as the top veterinary cardiologist in Manchester your keyword choices should reflect this.
Once you have a list of your chosen keywords, you then need to map them against relevant pages on your website. If no such page exists, make a note of the pages you need to create for later. You’ll need this information when you begin optimising the content on your website.
It’s also important to recognise that keyword research isn’t a one-time thing at the start of the campaign. For many of our clients we regularly review keyword performance after optimisation to see where we can further improve the website. This means further keyword research, keyword mapping and, where appropriate, additional content optimisation.
A great way to support your localised keyword strategy is to follow that up with claiming or optimising your Google Business Profile. This quite literally puts you on the map for anyone searching relevant terms in your area.
There are a few other things you can do for local SEO, such as:
Blogs are much more useful than most businesses give them credit for. This is especially true in industries like vets where there is a huge opportunity to showcase your knowledge, experience, and authority. If you want to do vet SEO right, start putting aside a few hours a week to write blogs that will help to:
At Wildcat Digital, we helped our veterinary client, Knutsford Vets achieve over 40,000 users per month with a strong content marketing strategy. This worked out at around a 370% increase in traffic in just 2 years. Learn more about our SEO campaign with Knutsford Vets in our vet SEO case study.
We understand how hard it is to compete against the increasing number of chain veterinary clinics that are popping up all over the place. Helpful resources such as factsheets and content about common veterinary conditions are great for retaining existing clients and videos are particularly great for common FAQs and How-Tos.
Providing clients with a resource about their pet’s condition which answers all of their questions will go a long way in positioning your clinic as their trusted local vet. It will also help retain clients. This is especially true of online resources that are set up with booking links and contact information. This will also help your website to grow under one of Google’s latest algorithm updates – the Helpful Content update. This update was designed to reward websites that create content for people, rather than solely for SEO purposes. It aims to elevate content that adds unique value to the internet which genuinely offers helpful advice and information to users.
A client of ours wanted to do more to attract patients within their specialism of ophthalmology which led us to creating a number of factsheets on common ophthalmology conditions. These factsheets serve a number of purposes; they offer great user experience to help retain existing clients, but also target relevant keywords and FAQs to attract new clients. Further to this, sharing their knowledge and experience helps to build up both perceived and domain authority.
It’s always a good business decision to align yourself with other local businesses. It’s also a great strategy for SEO. Such relationships can help you to build backlinks which are essential for improving your SEO. Backlinks essentially tell search engines that your website is trustworthy and contains content that is good and useful enough to link to.
To do this, consider who the relevant businesses in your area are (this may be groomers, dog walkers, kennels, catteries etc.). From here, you can request to provide them with a relevant guest blog which links back to your website.
If Patsy and Edina come to mind when we say PR, think again! PR is a great way to boost your backlink profile, both locally and nationally. Apply your voice to national pet-related issues (e.g. bonfire night, summer heatstroke) and create a press release that not only provides all of the relevant information, but promotes you and your clinic as an authority.
Backlinks are great for vet SEO, but the coverage alone is great for business and raising your profile if you’re featured in local publications.
One example of this is when we managed to get one client of ours featured in both local and regional press with an article about Alabama Rot that linked back to the article on their website. This brought in over 2000 page views in its first month. We’re always on the lookout for national issues relating to pet health ready to provide the local angle for our clients.
People love convenience. Setting up your website to allow for online bookings is almost guaranteed to increase your bookings as your traffic begins to pick up. We strongly advise that once your online booking system is set up and ready to go, optimise your key pages (especially service pages!) with booking links.
It’s also a good idea to track your bookings and related web events through analytics. This gives you a bit of an idea of how your campaign is performing in terms of leads and conversions, but also provides you with tangible insight into what your users are most interested in. Use Google Analytics and Tag Manager to set up this tracking.
Not strictly SEO for vets; perhaps more marketing for vets. Engaging with your existing clients through email and social media campaigns will go a long way in retaining those customers and ensuring that they keep you in mind for future veterinary appointments.
This is particularly beneficial when it aligns with your content SEO efforts. Promote your blog posts, resources, new services, offers and more through channels such as email and social media and utilise this as another way of driving traffic to your website.
In one of our campaigns, we used an online email marketing tool to keep existing customers engaged. These emails included news from the surgery, information about services and also featured recent articles. All of which pointed back to the website.
Again, not really SEO, but Google Ads (and other paid media sources) can greatly benefit your SEO campaign. SEO and Ads typically go hand-in-hand, helping you to rise against the competition. In our campaign, we used Google Ads to bid on specific location-based keywords to ensure Knutsford Vets always came out on top in their local area.
Our SEO experts have given you their top tips on doing SEO for vets in this blog, but, if you don’t quite have the time, skills or confidence to do it yourself, get help with our vet SEO service. We have experience positioning a local veterinary surgery as the top independent surgery in the region, ensuring that they rank No.1 for relevant search terms and driving over 40,000 users per month. Learn more about our vet SEO campaign here, or get in touch to arrange a free consultation today.
