Optimizing SEO for pet care and veterinary websites comes with three core tasks: creating well-structured website architecture, responsiveness, and intuitive navigation; creating relevant content with relevant local and non-local keywords; and building website authority through backlinks and other off-page activities.
Knowing how to implement these tasks and do them so well is at the heart of optimizing SEO for pet care and veterinary websites. In this article, we are going to share a quick guide on how to do that.
Three Quick Guides to Optimizing SEO for Pet Care and Veterinary Websites
To optimize SEO for your pet care and veterinary website, below are three quick guides:
- Create well-structured website architecture, responsiveness, and intuitive navigation.
- create well-structured content with relevant local and non-local keywords embedded, and
- building website authority through backlinks and other off-page activities.
Create a well-structured website architecture, responsiveness and Intuitive Navigation
Creating a well-structured website architecture that is mobile-friendly and has intuitive navigation is crucial for SEO.
The four quick things you can do to implement well-structured website architecture and intuitive navigation are to use flat site architecture. That helps reduce the click depth on a page from the homepage. What that means is that you should make sure that it does not take more than three clicks from your website homepage to get to any other page on your website.
Secondly, create a clearly categorized navigation menu and use descriptive and relevant keywords as category names. This implies that your website menu names and category names should help give a clue to what the page or category is all about. The names should also have relevant keywords in them.
Thirdly, add contextually related internal links to help search engines understand your page relationships. This simply means linking contents that are related or help give each other good context together.
The last but not least is enabling breadcrumbs to provide a visual trail of the user’s navigation path. Making these changes will help improve your website ux, which has great effects on SEO ranking.
In addition to the above, create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines and assign the right priority rating to the listed web pages. That makes it easier for search engines to discover and index your content more efficiently.
Create well-structured content with relevant local and non-local keywords embedded.
To create relevant content using relevant local or non-local keywords. You have to brainstorm keywords used by pet owners while they are looking for pet care and veterinary services online.
Examples of keywords used by pet owners can be classified into five quick categories: general topic keywords, specific service-related keywords, pet-specific keywords, symptoms-related keywords, and local keywords.
General topic keywords are keywords like pet care, veterinary care, animal clinic, animal hospital, pet insurance, pet sitter, etc.
Examples of specific pet-service-related keywords are sick pet care, emergency pet care, pet surgery, wellness exams, vaccinations, etc.
Pet-specific keywords include dog care, cat care, puppy care, kitten care, senior pet care, etc.
Symptom-related keywords include limping dog, vomiting cat, diarrhea in puppies, allergies in pets, seizures in dogs, diabetes in cats, etc.
These keywords can be turned into local keywords by factoring in their location.
Once you list your brainstormed keywords, you can utilize them in strategic places on your website content, category names, and page titles. Also, create content that provides solutions, information, or answers to queries that relate to the keywords.
Also, remember to use heading levels to organize your content. Break down long blocks of text in your content into small paragraphs, subheadings, and lists to improve readability and visual appeal.
Building Website Authority Through Backlinks and Other Off-Page Activities
After creating up to 20 pieces of content on your website, the next quick thing to do is to start building backlinks and social proof.
You can use a broken link replacement strategy to gain backlinks. This you can do by using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create Python scripts to identify broken links on any websites in your industry. Then reach out to the website owners to replace the link.
You can start building social proof by encouraging social shares, reviews, and testimonials and by participating in events in your industry.
Why is optimizing SEO for pet care and veterinary websites important?
APPA’s 2021–2022 National Pet Owners Survey showed that 70% of American households have pets.According to the Statista Research Department, it is projected that the revenue from veterinary services in America will reach approximately $54.9 billion by 2024. This shows huge opportunities for businesses in the industry.
Although in the USA, the pet care and vet business is highly competitive, the consolidation going on in the industry, which has led to the formation of some national chains of veterinary clinics, makes it more difficult for smaller and independent clinics to thrive and compete.
Despite these challenges, optimizing SEO for pet care and veterinary websites gives smaller and independent businesses some key advantages.
As a small veterinary business, if you are looking for a digital marketing strategy with low upfront and ongoing costs with long-term benefits or results, SEO should be a good option.
A well-optimized pet care and veterinary website can help smaller and independent clinics continuously attract new clients to their business without incurring additional high costs for their running expenses.