10 Tips For Optimizing Your Veterinary Website

08/19/20 | by Czarina Greaney | Website

Websites must be continually optimized to do well organically on search engines and attract new clients, along with retaining current ones. Content, functionality, design, and other factors significantly impact your website performance. And with your competition only being a click away, it’s important that your website for veterinarians immediately showcase your practice in a way that matches your veterinary expertise and professionalism.

Optimize Your Veterinary Website By Using These 10 Effective Tips

Every online interaction counts! Right now is a great time to evaluate your veterinary website so that you can be in a better position online, during, and after the pandemic. Let’s get started with these 10 essential website optimization strategies.

Tip 1: Upgrade the Design of Your Website

When it comes to your veterinary website, the majority of first impressions come from your site’s design. By using a simple and modern design on your website, you’ll be able to attract more web visitors and turn clicks into appointments.

First impressions are 94% related to design, visual appeal, and website navigation, with the look and feel of a website having a major impact on first impressions.

It’s important to present online users with a well-structured and easy-to-follow navigation to help streamline their experience. Try organizing your website’s menu page first and include the most essential web pages (homepage, services page, about us, contact page, FAQ). During this time, you can add a coronavirus page to your dropdown menu. You want to provide the most relevant and updated information to your online users.

Tip 2: Speed Up Your Web Pages

Did you know web pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%? If your website takes a long time to load, then most of your visitors will click the “back” button and look at another website. Make sure your pages load fast enough. Try using Google PageSpeed Insights to test out your load time.

Tip 3: Refresh Your Homepage

Your homepage is undoubtedly one of the most important web pages on your veterinary website because it’s the first page users will see. You don’t need a full redesign to give your website a refresh. You can simply start by updating some photos, changing a call-to-action, and adding in a promotion or a safety precautions blog.

Your homepage should also highlight any important changes your practice has made during this time. For example, if you have changed your hours of operation, added curbside pickup, in-home appointments, and virtual consultations using telemedicine, let your clients know on your homepage.

Tip 4: Update Your FAQ Page

Keep your FAQ page relevant and up-to-date as the pandemic evolves. Revise your FAQ page so your visitors get current information on any policy changes. Consider including a “last updated” or “last reviewed” date on the page to help instill trust. You want to answer the questions of both potential and current clients before they have to ask them.

Here are some questions you can include in your FAQ page:

Question: Can pets spread COVID-19?

Question: Should I avoid contact with animals, including pets, if I’m sick with COVID-19?

Question: How is your clinic protecting clients and their pets during this time?

Question: How is your clinic practicing social distancing with staff members and clients?

Question: What is telemedicine and how can I schedule a virtual consultation?

Learn More: COVID-19: FAQs for Veterinarians and veterinary clinics

Tip 5: Add a Safety Precautions Page to Your Veterinary Website

Once you update your FAQ page be sure to include a separate page that further educates your patients on your cleaning procedures at your vet practice. You can do this by adding a safety precautions page on your veterinary website.

On this page, you can add blogs and other forms of content that relates to the pandemic and what pet owners should do to keep their pets healthy. For example, you can include a blog on how to keep pets mentally and physically healthy while staying at home or how to keep pets safe around cleaning products.

Tip 6: Delete Any Outdated Content

Websites have transformed into something so much more than just text with information on a page. Before you completely wipe out all your old content, take a look at what content may still be relevant and interesting for online users to read.

You don’t want to get rid of an old blog that is doing extremely well. Start by discarding expired events, products you no longer carry if you have an online store, or close down promotions that ended. The key is to evaluate your content, try using tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics to get measurable data.

As you go through your content be sure to ask yourself the following questions: Is it valuable to users? Does the content benefit my practice? Is it too long? You want to give users the best information when they are searching online.

Your veterinary website should tell a story: where you are, who you are, what you do, why you do it, and what problems you can solve for clients in your local area. Be sure you update your website information if you’ve changed your location and hours of operation.

Tip 7: Adjust Your Veterinary Content Strategy for SEO

Search behavior has drastically changed as a result of the coronavirus, but you can still better perform in local search engine rankings with optimized content. Be sure to monitor the shifts in keywords that pet owners are using. Targeting easy-to-rank-for keywords that relate to your business, brand, and industry will help you to appear higher in search engines.

Eventually, things will get back to normal, but we just don’t know when. Therefore it’s important to implement an effective SEO marketing strategy during this time so that it will help your practice generate more clients and revenue when things begin to normalize.

Tip 8: Stay Mobile-Friendly

The internet is constantly being accessed on mobile devices. This means, designing your website to be mobile-friendly ensures that your web pages will perform well. You will need to adapt your website for any device – desktop, tablet, or smartphones.

Your potential clients are using their mobile devices to search for veterinary services and clinics near them. When you make your website mobile responsive, it will fit the screen and display the information evenly and correctly no matter how big or small the screen is.

Learn More: 5 SEO Tips for Mobile-Friendly Websites

You also want to scale your images for mobile users and use short meta titles because they are easier to read on mobile devices. Try avoiding any pop-ups that cover your content because it may block online users from getting a peep of what your content is all about.

Tip 9: Add E-commerce Capabilities to Your Veterinary Website

Increase your website traffic by offering your products right on your site. You’ll be able to sell pet products online to clients and generate an additional source of revenue for your veterinary practice. An online store gives clients the convenience of purchasing their pet’s medicine, toys, brushes, and much more from the comfort of their own home.

Tip 10: Capture Your Veterinary Website Data

After you have made all these changes and updates to your veterinary website, you’ll want to capture your website data and see how well your site is performing! You can easily install a free analytics tool such as Google Analytics. It will help you capture data from your website, allowing you to market your veterinary practice effectively. It’s important to understand how visitors interact with your website so that you can provide the best online experience.

Let us audit your website for free!

Knowing what kind of design features your veterinary website should include to convert website clicks into appointments can be challenging, especially if you’re doing it on your own and have minimal internet marketing experience.

That’s where we come in! Let one of our veterinary marketing experts help you exceed your practice goals and place your website in the best position during and after the pandemic. Call iMatrix at 888.792.8384 today to get a free website analysis or click here.