Top Tips n Tricks Veterinary Webinar a Resounding Success

We were quite recently asked to present on a webinar to a group of veterinary practices that regularly attend such presentations as part of their Veterinary CPD through a great company called The Webinar Vet, as we had worked with Anthony Chadwick and his team in the past with great success we decided it would be good to do another webinar and see what we could offer to help improve their website and business foot fall.

Learning from our previous experience where some of the feedback was that the subject was a little overwhelming for a one hour session we decided that we would  confine the subject to “5 Simple Tweaks and Tips” that would help a Veterinary Practice Website attract more local customers. With well over a hundred practices attending we wasted no time and after a brief introduction to the company we got straight into the tips and tricks.

Keyword Research

Seems like an obvious place to start really but you would be surprised at the amount of people that really still do not understand the importance of getting this right. A typical mistake we see rather too often is that when people are optimising their site for the web they tend to optimise for the company name, which is great if you are a huge brand say such as “Frontline” for example. Most users that are performing searches for things such as Vets in their area won’t really be looking for you by name, they will more likely be looking for the services that you provide, so for example “vets in lincolnshire, vet lincolnshire” and similar terms.

On Page Top Tips

When optimising your pages for the search engines a thing often overlooked is the “Title Tag“, which is somewhat bizarre when you consider it is one of the first things the search engine spiders see. Again a typical mistake we see here is that it will say something along the lines of “ABC Vets – Home Page”, well it’s not really telling me a great deal if I am the search engine spider, Its telling me that I am on the home page of a website and that its called ABC Vets, well every website has a home page, no one is searching for the term “home page” and unless they already know who you are no one is searching for “ABC Vets” either.

We are not saying don’t use your Company Name here but make the title relevant, ensure it has some keywords that you are looking to rank for, make sure that these are at the front of the title, so for example you could say “Vets Lincolnshire | Vet Gainsborough | Companion Animal Vets” remember the title tag wants to be between 60 and 65 characters in length and no more.

Google Places

We have often discussed the merits of getting your business in the Google Places listings so I am not going to go over much of what we talked about here apart from the fact that if you still haven’t claimed yours then it is something we would highly recommend.  Local businesses are more often found through online search: Local SEO has gone from strength to strength in recent years and now it has become the most popular way to find local consumers.

Google Places Citations

A citation is a listing that has been placed with another website and holds details such as the business name, address and phone details. In this instance we are not looking for that physical link, what we are after is a verification that we are who we say we are and Google will use these citations to confirm just that. One thing to be sure of when you are doing this is consistency, ensure that the details held on any other directories or sites that you are using as a citation are exactly the same as what appears on your actual website.

Of course we discussed a lot more on all of these aspects and we discussed a couple of other things as well such as Adwords, that are way beyond the realms of this blog posting. Needless to say the feedback from the webinar was phenomenal resulting in numerous on site audits and consultations with some great comments such as this along the way “Your webinar was fascinating, and by far the best one i’ve listened too in a long time. I’ve already taken some of your advice on board, but am looking forward to hearing from you once you have done the audit of our Website.”

We are now looking forward to doing the next one, in the meantime hope you have all enjoyed the little tips discussed above.