Keeping Your Veterinary Hospital Website Out Of Google Jail

Overly Aggressive SEO Tactics Can Land You in Google Jail

Your veterinary hospital is successful and expanding. Now is the time, you feel, to develop the best website possible; a website that will truly promote your services and help you improve your connection with your veterinary community. However, everyone who owns and maintains a website wants their site to be as discoverable as possible by customers, new clients, and web crawlers. Thus, in the land of search engine optimization and keyword stuffing, it pays to think ahead and avoid possible Google penalties that will have long-term negative ramifications for your hospital’s rankings and online marketing.

Strategic Marketing

You own a veterinary hospital and you are smart. You don’t fill your hospital with temporary employees, old-fashioned equipment and print thousands of flyers that claim you are the best veterinary clinic in town. You provide pet owners with professional, state of the art care and your reputation is part of what makes you successful.

Google Jail – Not a Good Place to Be

But how does this relate to your website? Filling your hospital’s website or blog with purchased or stolen filler articles and relying on spammy SEO is not only unprofessional but can land you in Google Jail- not a good place for either your reputation or your veterinary hospital’s business. You know you are imprisoned in Google Jail when your veterinary hospital’s website rankings plummet, traffic to your site all but ceases and your competitors’ rankings grow stronger than ever.

Avoiding Google’s Wrath & Jail Time

What is the best way to stay away from the wrath of Google? Here are several suggestions:

1) Hire a legitimate, proven SEO professional
2) Mix up your site’s anchor text
3) Focus on your clients, not search engines

Hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Professional

If you were charged with a crime (guilt or innocence aside), would you hire a law student or a seasoned attorney with criminal defense experience? When answering, apply the same reasoning to hiring an SEO employee.

Take the time to hire a true SEO professional – someone who understands the value of search engine marketing and can derive top rankings without lowering your hospital’s standards. A company or individual well-versed with an excellent track record will bring you a long-term friendship with Google. Don’t hire the quick techno teen who wants to make a few extra dollars over vacation. Hiring a real professional will help you avoid Google jail and in turn, large expenses in damage control.

Selective Keywords

Anchor text (words that actually appear in a link) and keyword usage have traditionally been a big part of SEO building. Many veterinary hospital websites can become a bit “keyword crazy.” If your site is packed with the same keywords, eliminate some, reach for the nearest thesaurus and start interchanging them. Google is smart and will penalize you for keyword stuffing. The best approach is to use a variety of similar words and maintain your focus.

Focus on Pet Owners, not Search Engines

What is the goal of your veterinary hospital’s website? Why did you create one in the first place? Most likely it is to expand your clientele, promote your hospital’s services, connect with local pet owners and, overall, take your hospital to the next level of business success. These are all laudable goals – so stick to them.

Create your website content for your clients, not for the search engines. Publish useful, relevant content and build spam-free and user friendly links. Concentrate on that which makes your hospital shine – your highly qualified staff members, state of the art technology, and superb veterinary services. Make your site reflective of these elements both technically and in content.

Serving Time in Google Jail

Unfortunately, there is no get-out-of-jail-free card if you land in Google jail. Just as in real life, you must face your crimes by pleading guilty, plea bargaining and demonstrating remorse. Recapturing your ranking and returning to Google’s good graces is a long and tedious process. You will need to identify spam backlinks to your hospital’s site, compile a list of root domains, email webmasters and request link removals, etc. For a more thorough description of Google’s reconsideration process, click here.

An Ounce of Prevention

As always, the best medicine is preventive. Follow your veterinary instincts and apply the same principals to your hospital’s website as you do for your patients: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Focusing on creating a quality website with well-written content geared toward your clients, is your best strategy.

VetNetwork is the only company dedicated solely to helping veterinarians with their website and marketing needs. Our team of website developers, SEO experts, writers, editors and programmers has only one goal in mind – To Help You Grow Your Practice.

Hiring VetNetwork’s experienced SEO professionals will save you time, trouble and money and, most importantly, keep you out of Google jail.

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