Advertising Your Veterinary Hospital Website

Part 2 in a 2 Part Series – Making your Website an Effective Marketing Tool for your Veterinary Hospital

Continuation from Yesterday – Part 1

Why keep your veterinary hospital website a secret? Let the public know that you care enough to have a great, well-designed, professional and informative website.

We recommend the following methods for promoting your veterinary website (in effect, your veterinary hospital)

1. Print your URL (website address) on your receipts, business cards, and stationary. Any printed material from your hospital should include your vet website address.

2. Include some information about your vet website on your phone recording.

3. Inside your veterinary hospital, particularly in your lobby or waiting area, promote your veterinary website. Print out the homepage and an interior page from your vet website, frame them, and hang them on your wall.

4. Press Release – Submit a small press release to your local newspaper or magazine that describes some of the interesting features of your vet website. Send your press release to local newsletters – event newsletters, calendar publications, etc. These publications are always looking for good local stories.

5. Newspaper Ad – Put a small ad in your local newspaper and include your vet website address. This will send visitors to your vet hospital website. If visitors have an outstanding website experience, they will bookmark your website for future use.

6. Link Building – Get other businesses and organizations to link back to you. Ask your local chamber of commerce, merchants association, local hardware store or local bookstore to include your vet web site address on their links page. If you are asking a kennel owner, breeder, groomer or pet store owner to put your link on their vet site, make sure they share the same philosophy of pet health care and veterinary medicine as you. Only ask reputable businesses and organizations to link to your vet web site. Still need a new veterinary website? Call Us!

7. Social Networking – Create a Facebook account for your hospital and link it to your website. Tell friends, relatives and colleagues who have Facebook accounts to post links to your vet website.

8. Pay-Per-Click Advertising – Google makes its money from Pay-Per-Click Advertising. These are the ads and links that appear on the right side of a page displaying search results. The ads are called Sponsored Links and they also appear on the top of the search result pages. Pay-Per-Click Advertising can be useful to promote and advertise your veterinary website; however, setting it up and maintaining it is an advanced technique and requires considerable skill to do well. If you are interested, we can set up a Google Adwords account for your website.

9. No matter how good your website is, if it’s not optimized for Google and other search engines, you may never be found. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving traffic to your website as a result of having a high listing (or ranking) on Google’s search results page (or any other search engine – MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc). The listing of web pages returned by a search engine is in response to the user’s keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the web page.

Typically, the higher a website appears in the search results list (also called rankings), the more visitors the website receives from the search engine. It is in your best interest for your vet website to appear as high as possible in web search results through strategic internet marketing and veterinary SEO.

There are billions of webpages on the internet and more are added each day. This means that, even if you are diligent about updating your veterinary hospital’s website, it’s easy for your site to get lost on the web. If you would like to further improve your website’s search engine rankings, we can help. VetNetwork offers a series of comprehensive search engine optimization packages (starting at $500) that can improve your veterinary hospital website’s rankings and put you in the top 10 search results on Google and Yahoo.

For A complete description of the Search Engine Optimization packages that we offer, please visit our SEO website at TopDogRankings.

Written and Copyright ©
Mark Feltz, DVM
VetNetwork, LLC 2010
www.vetnetwork.com