SEO Optimization for Veterinary Practices

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Put simply, it is the art of ensuring that your veterinary practice’s website shows up in Google, Bing and Yahoo when patients search for help in your area.

There are more than 300 new websites launched every minute around the globe. Search engines have a ton of information to digest. Our goal is to ensure search engines can quickly learn about your website and understand how it can be most useful to their users.

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What SEO factors impact my veterinary practice?

When someone Googles information about the health of their pet, do they find your website? Here are some of the SEO factors that will help them find your veterinary practice:

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Veterinary Website Design

Does your website look modern and inviting? Looks are important, but we need to scratch beneath the surface to see the things that search engines see when they “crawl” (scan) your website.

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Meta Data and Tags

HTML, CSS and JavaScript are just a few of the coding languages used to build websites. Within these coding languages are special tags that search engines look for. They need to be properly configured to help Google quickly understand what your site’s pages are about. This isn’t information that would be visible on your site – it’s embedded behind the scenes. And if it’s incorrectly configured, you’re going to have a hard time earning relevant search traffic for your site.

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Site Load Speed

Google wants to send their users to websites that are easy to navigate. Your website needs to load quickly across all the devices your clients use to access information about their pets. This includes laptops, tablets and smartphones. Websites designed a few years ago may have fallen out of sync with modern web standards. Websites that are slow to load will perform poorly in Google’s search engine rankings.

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Search Engine Optimized Content

Search engines prefer to send their users to sites with well-written, informative content. Their site crawlers will analyze the quality of the writing – spelling, grammar, etc. – to try and determine how useful it will be.

And, just like the Meta Data we mentioned earlier, crawlers look at the formatting of your content to better understand what your website is about.

Google pays a great deal of attention to what their users do after clicking on your site in their search results. If the visitor hits the “back” button in their browser, returning to Google, that’s a problem.

We use a variety of techniques to ensure Google understands what your site is about, and visitors stick around to learn more about your veterinary practice.

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Backlinks and SEO

Backlinks are links from other websites to your veterinary site. When Google crawls the web, their bots follow these links. The exact algorithm that decides how a website is ranked in Google search results is a very complex, closely held secret. But we’ve learned that links to your veterinary website from other reputable websites will communicate to Google that your site is seen as a valuable resource on the web. And this will help you generate traffic to your site.

The challenge, though, is that backlinks from the wrong sites can hurt your Google search ranking. Our team of SEO specialists have worked with a number of veterinary practices to ensure that the backlink profile for their website is an asset, instead of a liability.

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Receive a FREE SEO Optimization Report

for your veterinary website!