Your emergency vet practice provides a much-needed service to its community. You save lives and give pet owners peace of mind. But while your services are certainly essential for anyone with a four-legged family member, you still need to work just as hard as any other business to foster awareness of your practice online. Google Search can be especially fickle. If you’re unsure of how to improve your Google rankings, stick around so we can share some insightful SEO tips with you.
One of the Most Important SEO Tips–Optimizing Your Website
Optimizing your website is one of the first things you need to do to start improving your Google Search rankings. The most popular search terms are:
- “Emergency vet near me,” which gets about 301,000 national searches each month
- “Emergency vet,” with 165,000 national searches each month
That means over a quarter of a million people are looking for emergency vets near them. Combining these popular search terms with your target location can, over time, make a big difference for your emergency practice and increase its visibility and accessibility to more pet owners.
Invest in Blogging
Successful emergency vet practices routinely produce new blog articles for their websites. Why? Because having additional, helpful information on your website that mixes high-value keywords with quality content is another way you can increase website traffic and serve more patients.
Plus, along with helping you rank higher in Google Search and get more visitors to your website, your blog also provides pet owners with information they can use to make better decisions for their companions and take proper precautions and/or actions should an emergency arise.
Your blog content can also include calls-to-action to get pet owners to contact you if they have questions or concerns. Along with being informative and a benefit to your website’s SEO, your blog provides you with another opportunity to grow your authority as an emergency vet and build trust with area pet owners.
Keep Your Google My Business Optimized
How well does your Google My Business (GMB) listing represent your practice? If its information is inconsistent with other online listings and out-of-date, then it probably isn’t serving you well. Just like your website, another important SEO tip is to keep your GMB listing current and use highly-searched keywords to increase your Google rankings.
“Emergency vet in [city, state]” should be included in your hospital’s description, along with a list of services your practice provides. If you have photos of your practice’s exterior and interior, save them with “emergency vet” and your location included in the filename.
Another way to optimize your GMB listing is to get more Google Reviews. More and more people use Google Reviews to make purchasing decisions, and they’re more likely to trust a practice that has a large number of (mostly positive) reviews under their GMB listing.
Create Google Ads
Google Ads are more likely to get you noticed in Google Search, granted you use keywords in the ad copy with local pet owners’ search intent in mind. Relevant keywords should also be included in your landing page copy for a better experience for users. It helps to look at what your competitors are doing (if they’re running a Google Ads campaign), and to pause your ads and revise the ad and landing page copy as needed to get better results.
Pay-per-click advertising done well ultimately pays for itself, and it is a very effective technique for raising awareness of your brand.
Stay Active on Social Media
Social media is fickle. If you don’t keep your accounts active and engage with people, your audience will dwindle. Therefore, our next SEO tip is to stay active and routinely post on your pages so that pet owners will remain interested and keep your practice in their minds.
Furthermore, you can use your posts to direct followers to your website to increase conversions, which is good for SEO, and you can build trust with pet owners by responding to their queries and offering helpful tips. All of this can contribute to higher rankings in Google Search.
Partner with SEO Experts to Learn More About Key SEO Tips
SEO is a complex subject, and you shouldn’t have to expect to handle it on your own. In fact, you shouldn’t! InTouch is fluent in SEO and all things digital marketing. Along with helping you improve your Google rankings, we can translate your data into easily digestible information and provide you with actionable SEO tips for even better results down the line. For more helpful SEO tips from our team, get InTouch by calling (800) 493-9003 today.