It’s undeniable that pet owners love their furry, scaly, and feathered little friends. However, when your prospective clients’ pets have been injured, aren’t feeling well, or need to undergo their wellness exams, how will you get your prospects to choose your office over the competition?
Many of your prospective clients are looking for reputable veterinarians online via search engines, social media sites, and online business directories. According to Pew Research Center, 77% of online medical information seekers begin at a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
Moreover, a lot of online health information gathering no longer takes place exclusively on desktop computers, as online searchers also use smartphones, tablets, and other devices to gather online medical information.
Your prospective clients are using their smartphones increasingly while on the go. According to Pew Research Center, 52% of smartphone owners gather health information using their phones. In other words, when their pets are in need, pet owners are just as likely to turn to their smartphones as they would to their computers when searching for reputable veterinarians and online medical information.
When your prospective clients search for veterinarians online, will they find your website?
According to the latest statistics from comScore, more than three-fourths of all digital consumers use both desktop and mobile platforms. Such consumers are known as “multi-platform” users. To market your veterinarian services to multi-platform users, you’ll need to ensure that your website is mobile responsive (i.e. the layout and/or content adapts based on the size of the screen).
While you may have an existing website to market your business online, is this website mobile responsive? Is your website regularly updated and optimized to provide the best experience to multi-platform users? Just as importantly, what does Google Search think of your website?
In February 2015, Google engineers announced that Google Search would be expanding the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. To make a long story short, if your website does not carry Google’s “mobile-friendly” label, after April 21, 2015, your website may not show up for any Google searches performed on mobile devices. As a consequence, your website could plummet so drastically in rankings on the search engine results pages that it might as well cease to exist.
Many tech experts are calling this algorithm update the Google “Mice” update. If you fail to optimize your website, Google’s little rodents will soon be chewing away at your rankings on mobile search results.
“But my practice is doing just fine. I get lots of great referrals and get decent foot traffic.”
Your business may be doing fine for now, but if you fail to keep up with the marketing efforts of your competitors, you may eventually see yourself left behind. Recent research indicates that 77% of veterinarians are promoting their using professionally designed websites.
Your competitors are keeping up with the needs of digital consumers and the latest technological innovations. They’re optimizing their websites for Google Mice and driving more targeted traffic to their websites. They’re bent on converting their site visitors into customers. They’re implementing long-term strategies designed to sustain revenue and business growth.
Busy professionals like you don’t have the time to worry about optimizing websites. How can you continue to meet the needs of your clients and market your services effectively to online prospects?
We’re here to help.
We can update your website, making it more functional and navigable, and better equipped to nurture leads and convert them into clients. We can make your website more mobile-friendly for Google “Mice”.
Send us an email now or call us so we can schedule a free consultation with you today.
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