As a local veterinarian, you need local clients to bring you their pets for treatment, and to make that happen, you need local search marketing.
The internet is a big place and, while you will reach people if you have great content on your website, Google Business Profile (GBP), and your social media, they may well not be the people in your local area who need you. Without localizing your online marketing tactics, you’re throwing spaghetti against the whole internet wall, rather than tightly aiming what you have to say to only the people in your local area with pets.
You can waste an awful lot of time and marketing dollars if you don’t use local search marketing tactics for veterinarians, and there’s quite enough to do with running a successful veterinary practice, without wasting your time and efforts on things that don’t work.
Small business owners simply don’t have time and energy to waste. Not only do you have to run your business, treat your pet patients, deal with worried pet owners, and manage your staff, but you also have to, somehow, fit in time for marketing and building your business.
It’s not easy. But it doesn’t have to be this hard. Change your focus and start working the local angle with your marketing, and you will see far better results with less effort.
Know Your Local Community
You can’t make a success of local search marketing without knowing your local community, and that includes your competitors just as much as it includes your current and potential clients.
Here’s what you need to do:
Conduct a thorough demographic analysis of who your “best” customers are
When you first started your business, you likely started creating buyer personas to see who your potential customers were. If you haven’t looked at them for a while, or you never did that exercise, that’s your starting point.
Look at what information you already have on your loyal customers. Find the ones who think you’re wonderful and always thank you for your help – the ones who post great reviews and talk about you to their friends. What do you know about them? Where are the gaps in your knowledge? Do you know where they live, their demographics, why they chose you initially, and why they keep coming back? Have things changed since you started your practice? Do you now get customers from a wider area or only one or two zip codes?
Take a look at your analytics from social media, paid ads, and your website, and you should be able to fill in some of the blanks and learn far more about your customers. If you use a professional marketing platform, like Surefire Local, you can dig deep into a whole range of data and statistics to find out who your customers are and what they want.
Next is a really simple step, but so many businesses don’t do it. What is it? Ask them! Chat with your customers naturally when you see them and ask them how things went this time and if there was anything you could have improved on. Ask them what they like. Ask them if there’s anything they’d like to see. Don’t overdo it, but do try to make at least one question a part of your chat as customers are leaving after treatment. Obviously, be sensitive about this if things didn’t work out well.
You can also send short surveys to your clients with short, easy-to-follow questions and space for them to free-write what they think. You can learn a huge amount from this and then use it to more closely tailor your marketing to what your clients really want.
Identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your customers
What suits customers in a small town isn’t necessarily what they want in a large city. Location matters, and you need to dig into what’s going on in your local area and find out about local news, trends, interests, and customer preferences.
Keep up with local online and offline communities, engage with local charities and businesses in the area, read the local news, and stay up to date.
You’ll see what’s important to your local people and can use local news, events, and trends to add to your social posting and show people you understand what they need.
Understand your local competition and their online marketing efforts
We’re not telling you to copy the competition, but you do need to understand what they’re doing to market themselves and how they are reaching their audience. Look at why people go to them rather than you. Is there anything you can improve or add to what you offer?
Learn who their target audience is and how similar or different it is to yours, watch what they’re doing on social media and elsewhere online, and see how they present themselves and what keywords they use.
Check out the comments and questions they get on social media and their blog, if they have one. See what consistently comes up as feedback and what people are asking for. You can use this as research for what to post about yourself, and also learn more about how you can do even better at marketing your veterinary practice.
Localized Online Marketing Tactics
1. Optimize your Google Business Profile
If you haven’t already done it, head over to Google Maps and find your business. If there is an entry there for you, you can then claim your Google Business Profile, so you can edit and optimize it. If there isn’t an entry, then create one and then claim it. Once you claim your profile, you’ll need to verify your business to Google, but this is easily done by phone, post, video, or email.
You need your GBP so that you climb higher in the search engine rankings as a verified business with Google. It is also the only way you can appear at the top of Google Maps in the Local Pack listings. You can’t buy your way into that, but you do want to get listed if you can for greater visibility.
To give yourself the best chance of appearing in the Local Pack, fully optimize your profile by filling in every possible section with quality copy that’s well-keyworded, interesting, and attractive to your ideal audience.
Ensure you include your business hours and your full contact information. People can then find you with voice search by asking for “vet, your area, open now.” They can also get full directions right to your door with your correct address and zip code.
Ensure you cover everything a potential client would want to know and think about how to sell your practice so that you appeal to your ideal customers. Use local keywords in your copy in every possible section to ensure you appear in local search. Tell people how good you are, and what you can do for their precious pets, fill in the Q&A section, add your services, and tell them why they should come to you over any other vet.
You also need to regularly ask for reviews on your Google Business Profile. This gives you a great advantage if you do paid ads on Google, as your number of reviews and your star rating will show, which can attract more customers. It’s also good for people who are new to you to be able to read what other people say about you. It can be the deciding factor in someone choosing you over the competition.
2. Localized Content Marketing
You need quality content at every stage of the marketing funnel, from the first time a visitor finds your site, right through the customer journey until they’ve visited your practice and become a regular client. This content should be location-specific and include local keywords naturally in the copy.
It’s important to write naturally, for your audience first, but still get your keywords in. You should include keywords in the URL of the page, the top headline, at least one subheading, the first paragraph, the meta title, and the meta description. In addition, don’t forget to add keywords, including local keywords to images and videos, partly for SEO and partly for accessibility.
Going back to client research at the beginning, we talked about getting to know the local community and local events, news, and trends in blog posts and social media updates. You can then use this local knowledge to inform your general marketing and to give you ideas for writing great content.
3. Local SEO Strategies
Especially if you have more than one practice in different areas, you can create a dedicated page for each area. You can then write the content focusing on that area in particular and using those local keywords and hashtags. As we said above, use your local keywords in the page URL, the main content, at least one subheading, and naturally throughout your copy.
Even if you only have the one location, adding a page for that location can still be a good tactic as you can easily use your local keywords and talk about the area as someone with local knowledge, which means you come across as an expert who understands the local people.
It’s also important to acquire high-quality backlinks from other local businesses, directories, and community websites. You can offer to add a backlink in return, and this provides proof to Google that your business matters in the local area. This should help you rise in local search.
Don’t forget to optimize your website to be mobile-friendly and fast to load. People don’t have patience anymore with slow-loading sites and after three seconds, they’re likely gone to the competition if your site still hasn’t loaded. You can’t afford that, and nor can you run a site these days that isn’t mobile-friendly. Google is mobile-first now with the search results, and they do lower websites in the search results that aren’t mobile-friendly.
4. Local Online Advertising
Paid advertising can make a big difference to your bottom line and Google Ads and Facebook Ads are great for creating highly targeted online ads. You can set specific parameters to target potential customers within a certain radius of your location, and you can use all that knowledge from your earlier research to target particular demographics too. The more tightly you target your ads, the more you are likely to reach your ideal local customers, rather just than random people from around the world who like cute pet pictures.
Once you’ve set your ads up, you have to continually monitor and analyze your ad performance. You’ll find that some ads outperform others and that some ads don’t get many clicks at all, or that the conversion rate compared to the cost isn’t as effective as it should be. Switch off any ads that aren’t performing to save your marketing budget, and focus on the ads that do work. Copy them and create more like them to keep tweaking and optimizing your ad performance for better results.
5. Local Branding
As a local business, you must get involved in your local community. This can give you an excellent local reputation and many local marketing opportunities.
You can partner with complementary local businesses for cross-promotion opportunities, such as pet supplies stores, dog walkers, local kennels, and more. It’s the perfect opportunity to add more local backlinks and to reach other audiences than your own that have similar interests.
In the same vein, you can connect with local charities and community leaders. Here, too, you can help your local community while building your reputation and getting known in the area. You could offer an auction prize to a local charity, sponsor a local team, or organize a sponsored dog walk… the possibilities are endless. It’s even better if you can participate in events that have a strong online presence, as you can benefit from coverage by other social media accounts, as well as covering the events on your own social channels and in your newsletter.
6. Monitor and Analyze Performance
There are so many tools and options to monitor and analyze your marketing performance. You can try Google Analytics to learn more about your website visitors’ behavior, including what they did online, how they found your business, and what content they read. Your social platforms will all have their own analytics to track visitors, engagement, clicks, and more.
Use the tools that give you the most insights into who your clients are, how they are finding you, what keywords they are using in search, what questions they are asking, what they think of your business, and more. You can then tailor your marketing around real data and results, rather than guesswork.
Track your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as your website traffic, conversion rates, and local search rankings to ensure you’re on the right path with your marketing and make real data-driven adjustments to marketing campaigns based on actual performance.
Localize Your Online Presence with Surefire Local
Localizing your marketing really can improve your online visibility and attract more local customers. As long as you follow the steps above, you should find your business growing as you gain more of your ideal customers for your practice. You’ll get better customer engagement, higher visibility in local search results, and a growing business with loyal customers.
Surefire Local is all about helping small businesses establish their online presence by creating local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easier for new customers to find them. We offer an all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses that provides the kind of benefits and features to save you hours on your marketing and to enable you to manage your budget far more successfully. Don’t waste time you don’t have to on your local search marketing. Instead, let Surefire Local help you get better results for less effort:
- Website / Local SEO optimizations – creating geotagged content that is published on your website, blog, and social media profiles
- Online review management – send review requests, write responses to reviews, and analyze your brand sentiment to learn what customers think about your business
- Directories management – claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer for your business across 80+ online directory listings platforms
- Content marketing – tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, and social media profiles
- Social media management – tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments
- Local online advertising – Ads designed to attract only the attention of customers within your service area
- Analytics and reporting – Transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating, with AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see improvements
- Educational resources – webinars and blogs designed to help small businesses learn all things local online marketing
Why not attend a Surefire Local marketing platform demo and see how easy your marketing could be.