An Easy & Effective SEO Strategy For Veterinary Practices

SEO is thrown around all the time in the veterinary marketing space, but I don't think most veterinary professionals know what SEO is or how to do it. In this article I'm going to show you a way that you'll be able to take the content that you already have ranking on your site and supercharge it. Many times if you're creating content or trying to target a specific keyword phrase you'll be guessing at what works, but not with this strategy. You'll be using data that you should already have in place and grow your current assets.

What is SEO? Some quick background info.

Search engine optimization is making your content work better for all the parties involved in any search query. Any time a search is done on Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine there are 3 parties involved. First you've got the search engine, they provide results to the searcher. Their goal is to have their search engine provide the best and most relevant results so that they can generate revenue. If their results stop working, then they lose revenue. Next you've got the searcher. They are looking for a some type of specific results. With any search query you've got intent and context that the searcher has. The last party involved in a search query is you, assuming that you've got a website and provide veterinary services to your clients.Our goal is to identify which queries have the intent and context that we're looking for(pet owners who need a veterinarian) so that we can serve up the proper content to meet their needs. Search engine optimization is optimizing our content so that we can properly communicate to the search engines what our content is so that it can be served for relevant search queries. The optimization doesn't just stop at the onsite structural factors that we focus on, but also on optimizing the an offer so that we can take that client or potential client to the next step in the professional relationship. If you had a million visitors but no one turned from a visitor to an actual client your traffic be worth anything to you.Let's talk about what SEO is not though. SEO is not a faucet you turn on and off. We are optimizing our content's structure so that it is more easily discoverable to the search engines. Don't try and game the system, Google wants to serve relevant and correct info and that is what we'll be doing. In this strategy we'll simply be focusing on what you have already done and there won't be any new content creation going on. If you want to hear more about SEO you can listen to this two part podcast series I did.Click Here For: SEO Part 1 &SEO Part 2.

Setup Needed To Start

With this strategy you need to only have a few things set up. For starters you need a website, hopefully with some content or a blog. If you don't have content or a blog set up on your site it is time to start. You'll also need Google Analytics installed on your site too. Once you have those two things we'll be able to begin.

Why This SEO Strategy Works

The internet is getting aging every day. Over 2 million new blog posts are being written every day. That's insane! There is so much content out there, and as time goes on, older information may go out of date. Think about someone going to Google to search for John Glen the astronaut who just passed away. Someone searching for them a year ago vs someone searching for them a week ago would provide very different results, and for good reason. Things change as time goes on, so Google assumes that content needs to be updated.Google uses an algorithm to decide what to serve up, and updating posts can be very helpful in improving rankings. This works especially well for moving up content that is already ranking and gets a fair amount of search queries. If you could see that for example, 15 people per day are searching "best veterinarian near me" and that you are ranking at position 7 or 8, updating that post and improving that ranking would be extremely valuable.So here is the game plan broken down in 5 very simple steps. You don't need to know how to code or any technical information. I'll show you exactly what to do and you'll be able to see within a pretty short amount of time what the benefits are. The steps are:

1. Find Your Top Performing Content
2. Perform on page SEO
3. Update the post
4. Re-engerize the post
5. Optimize your offer

You should be able to do this strategy without too much time or energy but the returns should be very substantial. Not only that, this activity should really help to drive clients into your practice and help you with you generate revenue.

Step 1: Find Your Performers

I mentioned this works with content that you already have. What we are looking for are your top performers. We'll take what is actually generating traffic and up the positioning so that you are able to do even better. This is where Google Analytics comes in. Open your Analytics account, go to Acquisition, choose Channel, Select Organic and then adjust the primary dimension to Landing Page. This report tells us which pages organic traffic went to most. If you have conversion goals set up in Analytics you would be able to see what landing pages actually converted into leads, but I think for starting out, go for just sheer volume of visitors. Here is a quick video showing you how to sort and find your top performers:Once you know what pages are performing the best it is time to start optimizing.

Step 2: Perform on Page SEO

This is the technical part. There are 5 elements we want to make sure are optimized so that the search engines will be able to identify what the page is about. We need to optimize the Title Tag, meta Data, Heading, Body Copy and Image Alt. The title tag is usually the title of the blog post or content that you've created. Make sure that the target keyword is in the title tag. This needs to seem natural and be relevant though, not likeThe Yoast SEO Plugin allows you to edit the Meta Data easily. Most times, meta data populates the description b