SEO for Veterinarians
A simple (but effective) step-by-step guide to build a targeted SEO veterinarian clinic marketing strategy.
What is SEO for veterinarians?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website or web page to increase its visibility in search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO is crucial for any veterinarian looking to attract more pet owners, as the higher a website ranks in Google, the greater the chance a potential client will click through to your site.
Think of it like pet care for your website.
Just as you take care of pets by ensuring they’re healthy, SEO involves making sure your website is ‘healthy’ too. In other words, it ensures that your site is easy for search engines to find, helping you attract more visitors and potential clients.
Did you know?
- 99% of people use the internet to search for local businesses. (Source: BrightLocal)
- Consumer use of Google to evaluate local businesses has leapt from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. (Source: BrightLocal)
- Mobile devices are used for over 50% of all online searches. (Source: Statista)
A person searching for a dentist on Google may use a search query like “dentist near me” or “best dental clinic in [city name]”
They may search for specific services such as “emergency dental care” or “dental implants”. Or they may even include their insurance information in the search query such as “Medicaid dentist in [city name]”.
In order to benefit from SEO, you want your website to rank for these kind of searches.
Why is veterinary practice SEO important?
Here are some of the benefits of using SEO for your veterinary practice:
- Increased visibility: SEO helps increase the visibility of a veterinary website on search engines, making it more likely that potential pet owners will find you when searching for veterinary services.
- Cost-effective: Compared to traditional advertising methods like print or television, SEO is a cost-effective way for veterinarians to reach new clients and grow their practice.
- Targeted audience: SEO allows veterinarians to target specific keywords that align with their services, such as pet care, animal surgery, or emergency vet services, ensuring that your website is visible to the right audience.
- Local SEO: Local SEO helps increase a website’s visibility for people searching for services within a specific geographic location. This is especially beneficial for veterinarians, as it allows you to target pet owners in your local area looking for veterinary care.
- Building trust: SEO can help your veterinary website establish trust and authority with search engines and potential clients by providing high-quality, relevant content. This not only attracts new clients but also builds a strong reputation in your community.
Don’t forget!
Veterinary practices must comply with regulations such as the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) guidelines, the Data Protection Act, and GDPR. Therefore, SEO strategies and marketing tactics must align with these compliance requirements while effectively reaching pet owners.
How do search engines work?
Search engines work by crawling billions of webpages with their own web crawlers, known as search engine bots or spiders. These are then stored and saved in an index.
Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines)
The Google Search Essentials define the actions that webmasters can take to make their websites better indexable or crawlable.
Read them here: Official Google Guidelines
The guidelines are based on three central aspects:
- Crawling – webmasters should support Google in finding websites.
- Indexing – webmasters should help Google to classify and “recognize” the content.
- Usability and user experience – webmasters should support the users of the websites in their use (usability and user experience).
Essentially, according to these Google guidelines, a website should support the search engine in crawling and indexing and ensure a good user experience.
Before you get started with SEO, there are a few prerequisites you want to check off first:
SEO Basics
At a bare minimum, you want to make sure you cover these basic standards before embarking on doing SEO:
- Website Speed – Have a fast loading site so potential customers don’t get tired of waiting for things to load.
- Mobile Friendliness – Make sure your site works on mobile as over 50% of users browse on mobile devices
- Analytics – Setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console & so you can understand what is and isn’t working.
- XML Sitemap – search engines use this to get your site’s URLs
- Robots.txt – tells search engine crawlers where they can (and where they can’t go) on your site.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of making website and server optimizations to help search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively (and therefore help to improve organic rankings).
Technical errors can hurt a website’s ability to rank. There are potentially a lot of errors, but here are some of the most common that will have the biggest impact when fixed:
- 404 errors
- Broken backlinks
- Poor URL structure
- Duplicate/thin content
- Poor internal linking
- Poor website architecture
- Missing metadata (page titles & meta descriptions)
- Missing H1 tags
Reach more patients with veterinarian SEO services
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people use when searching for specific products or services:
Once you understand the keywords your target audience is using, you can optimize your website to appear for these in search results.
Think of keyword research like a diagnostic test for your veterinary practice. Just as a diagnostic test helps a vet understand the health of an animal, keyword research helps you understand what pet owners are searching for online when looking for veterinary services.
For example, if people are searching for “emergency vet near me” or “puppy vaccinations,” these keywords can be used to optimize your website. By targeting these keywords, you increase the chance that your practice will appear higher in search results, attracting more pet owners who need the services you offer.
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research is important for veterinarians because it helps to:
- understand what people are searching for when they are looking for veterinary services, and to optimize their website accordingly.
- identify the specific needs and pain points of their target audience, which can inform the content they create and services they offer, ultimately leading to more conversion and better patient experience.
- identify the competition in the local area and understand what they are doing, so they can create a more effective SEO strategy.
What keywords are best to target?
Understand that there’s no “best” keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic.
The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on:
- The level of competition you’re up against.
- Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what’s currently ranking.
Short tail keywords are broad, general keywords that are made up of one or two words:
- Veterinarian
- Pet care
- Animal clinic
- Dog vaccinations
- Pet surgery
Whereas long tail keywords are more specific and longer phrases that are made up of multiple words:
- Affordable veterinary care for puppies
- Emergency vet services near me
- Best animal clinic for pet surgery
- Dog vaccination appointments near me
- Local vets offering dental care for pets
How to do keyword research for your veterinary practice
To start keyword research: put yourself in your customers shoes.
What words, phrases and terms might they use in order to find solutions to these problems? These are the keywords you want to find and target.
Here is a simple process to follow:
Step 1) Make a list of broad topics
Create a list of general topics related to your business. These might correspond to product categories, services or anything you believe your target audience would be interested in.
For example, broad topics like:
- Pet Vaccinations
- Animal Surgery
- Pet Dental Care
- Emergency Veterinary Services
- Puppy and Kitten Care
Step 2) Expand topics into a list of phrases
Now you want to take those topics and expand them into a list of related phrases to target.
Imagine yourself as a buyer looking for your product or service and ask yourself: what would I type into Google?
Whilst keyword research tools are useful here, you can do this for free by Googling your keyword.
For example, Google “dental implants” and you’ll get a list of related questions people ask (which you can answer with blog content):
As well as related searches which may uncover other keywords to target:
Step 3) Analyze your keywords
Once you have a list of potential keywords, you need to gauge which terms are worth targeting.
You’ll need to use a keyword research tool here to pay attention to the following keyword metrics:
- Search volume
- Trends
- Search value over time
- Difficulty
- CPC
- SERP features
But most importantly, you want to consider relevancy and search intent:
Relevant keywords:
For relevancy, you want to ask yourself:
- Are these keywords relevant to my business?
- Do I have a chance of ranking for these terms based on the competition?
- Is ranking for these keywords going to have a positive ROI?
If you can answer YES to the above questions, chances are you have picked a relevant keyword
Search intent:
Search intent is the goal and purpose of a search query in Google. When someone searches for something, they are typically looking for more information before performing an action.
Search intent falls in four buckets:
- Informational – Searchers looking for information, they’ll use words like: how, what, why, when etc.
- Navigational – Searchers trying to find a specific site, they’ll use words relating to the service/product/brand
- Transactional – Searchers looking to purchase, they’ll use words like: buy, cost, pricing, cheap etc.
- Commercial investigation – Searchers researching prior to making a purchase, they’ll use words like: best, review, comparison etc
Not only is it important to select good keywords, but also to pick keywords you have a chance of ranking for.
For example, if you want to rank for the keyword: “Oral Hygiene Checklist” but your page doesn’t feature a checklist, you are not meeting a searchers intent so may struggle to rank for it.
Find profitable veterinary keywords
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO describes specific elements of the pages on your website that you control, such as:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags
- Internal linking
- Images
- Content
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is important for veterinarians because it helps ensure that their website is easily found and understood by search engines, which can increase visibility and attract more pet owners to the practice. This can ultimately lead to more clients for the veterinary clinic.
For example, if a vet offers a service like “dog dental cleaning” and this service isn’t clearly mentioned or optimized on the website, it will be less likely for the website to appear in search results when someone searches for “dog dental cleaning” or related terms. However, if the vet has optimized the website with “dog dental cleaning” as a focus keyword, it is more likely to appear in search results, attracting pet owners seeking that service.
Additionally, on-page optimization improves the overall user experience, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. A well-organized, easy-to-navigate website with clear calls to action like “Schedule an Appointment” will be more likely to convert visitors into clients.
On-Page SEO Checklist
- Use short & descriptive URLs – this helps people searching to understand what your page is about in Google.
- Write a good title tag & meta description – these show up in Google and help searchers understand what your page is about.
- Linking to relevant resources – this helps users to navigate your website.
- Optimize your images – give them a descriptive filename and alt text.
- Add schema markup – this helps search engines to understand your content
- Add internal links – these help Google understand what your page is about and to navigate your website.
Get actionable insights into your veterinary SEO
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to specific actions done outside of your website, such as getting backlinks from other websites or social media.
What is link building?
Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving SEO. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building and guest posts.
Why is link building important?
Link building is important for veterinarians because it helps to increase the visibility of a website on search engines. Google, for example, use links to a website as a way to determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website.
The more high-quality links that point to a website, the more likely it is to be considered an authority in its field and be given higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results page).
This increased visibility can drive more traffic to a website, which can lead to more patients for the veterinary practice.
Link Building Tactics:
- Guest posts (either DIY it or use a done-for-you guest post service)
- Buying backlinks (like authority links)
- Content marketing (like linkable assets or editorial links)
- Tried and tested SEO methods (like blogger outreach, broken link building
- Using what you’ve got (link reclamation and brand mentions)
Additionally, link building can help establish a veterinary practice as a reputable and trustworthy provider of animal care, which can be a key factor in attracting new clients. High-quality links from reputable websites in the veterinary or pet care industry can signal to potential pet owners that the practice is well-respected in the field.
Link building also helps increase referral traffic to a website, where visitors are directed to your site through a link on another trusted website. This can boost brand awareness and help reach new audiences who may not have otherwise discovered your practice.
In summary, link building is important for veterinarians because it helps increase visibility, build reputation and trust, and drive more referral traffic to the website, which can lead to more clients.
Get high quality backlinks
Veterinary SEO Best Practices (+ 4 Tips)
- Use HTTPs (SSL certificates)
- Make sure your web site pages load fast
- Target a relevant topic that has traffic potential
- Meet search intent
- Target a topic you can compete for
- Use your target keyword in your page title, H1 tag and URL
- Use a short (but descriptive) URL
- Write a good title tag and meta description
- Optimize your images
- Write good content
- Add internal links
- Get more quality backlinks
4 Actionable Veterinarian Practice SEO Tips
Here are some things your practice can do to begin the process of developing a good veterinary marketing strategy.
- Add relevant keywords
- Optimize for local searches
- Start blogging
- Earn links
1. Add relevant keywords to your website
People looking for veterinarians also search for specific services like pet vaccinations or emergency animal care. Long-tail searches often have fewer searches, but the traffic they bring is highly targeted and more likely to convert into real clients.
For example, instead of only focusing on optimizing your website for “veterinarian” or “animal care,” you could add keywords like “veterinarian in [your city],” “emergency vet in [your area],” or “puppy vaccinations in [your city], [state]” to your website. This can help attract pet owners specifically searching for those services.
2. Optimize your site for local searches
If your SEO plan doesn’t use local SEO to target specific areas, you’ll likely miss out on some great leads. Adding the name of your town and nearby towns to your website copy is the easiest way to get better results.
But don’t forget about things on your site besides writing copy. You should also add places to the titles and URLs of your pages.
Also, make sure that your business is listed on Google Maps and local directory sites. This will help your business show up more in local searches.
3. Start writing useful content
The main goal of veterinary SEO is to get more patients by making your website more visible in Google.
One way to do this is by writing a blog. If you write a blog with tips on how to care for pets, like advice on pet nutrition or grooming, you’ll start to attract interested readers and potential clients. As your traffic grows, so will your search rankings, and pet owners looking for a vet in your area will turn to you as a reliable source for information and services.
4. Earn quality links
How high your site ranks in search results for keywords and phrases related to your business depends on how many and how good the links are to it. This means that you need to get good links if you want to keep your rankings.
You can do this by making good content and reaching out to bloggers and leaders in your field to ask them to share it. This will not only help you move up in search results, but it will also make your veterinary practice look like a leader in the field.
Backlinks are a very important part of SEO for veterinarians. They are like a vote of confidence for the content your practice puts out. Because of this, links are one of the most important ways that search engines like Google decide how to rank pages.
- Not doing enough keyword research
- Not matching user/search intent
- Targeting keywords that are far too difficult
- Not building enough quality backlinks
- Breaking Google’s Terms of Service when building backlinks
- Missing out on internal link opportunities
- Not allowing Google crawl your content
- Not allowing Google index your content
- Having a very slow site
- Treating SEO as a one-time thing
How does veterinarian SEO work?
SEO for veterinarians means making sure that your website is optimized for both search engines and users. This makes your website more visible in relevant and organic search results.
Optimizations include:
- on-page SEO
- link building
- technical SEO review
- content audit
- local citation audit
Why do veterinarians need marketing?
It helps set your practice apart.
Your clients are pet owners. A marketing plan not only helps you find your target market but also helps pet owners understand why they should choose your veterinary clinic.
A good veterinary marketing strategy should bring in new clients, retain the ones you have, and increase awareness of your services. The main goal is to get potential clients to call or schedule an appointment online.
How long does veterinary SEO take?
Typically, veterinary practice SEO takes at least six months to deliver results.
In some cases, practices may start to see results like increased traffic, phone calls, and appointments, in faster time frame than this.
Although typically 6 months is a good benchmark as SEO is a long-term strategy vs. a short-term strategy like PPC.
How much does SEO for veterinarians cost?
Prices for veterinarian website SEO depend on multiple factors, but the average cost for veterinary SEO is $1500 – $5000 per month.
If you’re looking to partner with a consultant or veterinary SEO expert, the average rate is $100 – $300 per hour.
What’s Next?
Guest Posts
We do guest posts better than anyone else with complete transparency. You get to approve all placements before they’re made and even the exact anchor text that’s going to be used. Site owners themselves will produce your content to guarantee its a perfect match.
Content
Crafting the right message isn’t just a matter of choosing the right words. We develop site content and blogs using the latest tools to determine the right keywords and balance of terms to build high-performing content.
Managed SEO
Sometimes, it takes more than just one service to make a difference. Multiple services working in concert can amplify the effect and create the growth that’s evaded you in the past. Talk to us about managed SEO campaigns built around any of your goals.
Too busy running your veterinary practice to do SEO?
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