Veterinary SEO Guidlines – KISS PR

With increased number of pet owners the demand for Veterinarians has been increasing for the past few years. Many veterinarians have realised that the people now are finding their options of veterinary clinics online. So, they have also started looking to the internet as a way of growing their customer base. Several veterinarians have a website to distinguish themselves from their competition. However they need to optimise their websites with SEO guidelines to see good results. Veterinary SEO is basically applying SEO strategies for the veterinary businesses to help them grow their business.

The key to growing a local business through SEO is visibility. Visibility is appearing on the top in a search results page. With repeated appearance on the search result page your brand will slowly become familiar to people and will eventually become a go to clinic. Another advantage of visibility is the traffic that comes to the website. Ranking high on search results will attract a lot of first time visitors to the website. This will further boost your online presence. Below are a few popular veterinary SEO practices that can help your business be the top search result for your target search terms

1. Local directories – Online local directories are the best for local businesses. When your target customers live in a close by locality it is best to enlist your business in all the online local directories.
2. Google My Business – The advantage of a local business is the possibility of appearing in the Google organic search results and on the Google maps. To appear on Google Local results it is important to list or claim your business on Google My business page and update all the required information like: Business Name, location, name of the clinic, business hours, contact information, pictures etc to make it a much more reliable option for your potential clients.
3. Reviews – Reviews are very important as a part of online marketing strategies. It builds a sense of legitimacy and reliability towards the business. Hence, encourage your regular customers to leave a review about their experience with your service. The more the number of reviews, the better. Reviews enable potential customers make a decision to walk into your clinic. It also gives a sense of popularity with more number of positive reviews.
4. Blogs on animal health – Most people are looking for accurate and helpful health information about pets. When your website has such engaging and useful information it will attract more clicks and traffic. The blogs shall contain articles on common pet health tips and issues that many pet owners can identify with. These types of topics will help pet owners to visit your blog frequently to discover health tips for their pets.
5. Long tail keywords – Most veterinarians make the mistake of optimising their sites for keywords like animal, hospital or pet clinic which is not a god SEO practice. The competition is less and search volume is much higher for long tail keywords like: why is my dog scratching all the time? Or why is my cat vomiting? These keywords are much easier to rank and the best way to do is to build web pages that are specific to the common problems with pets.