Searches take between 2.5 and 5 seconds!

Did you know that the average person will make a click through decision on a search engine page in between 2.5 and 5 seconds? That's not a lot of time for a veterinarian to be found if their website doesn't appear on the first page.

If finding new clients online is important to you, than it's critical that your website be found on the first page. In fact, 48% of the market share of clicks are made to the top ranked site in the "free" search results.

Let's take Columbus, OH for example. There are over 10,000 searches a month in Columbus for "veterinarian(s)". The website at the number one position will be visited 4,800 times. If that practice has a nice website, they are likely to concert up to 5% of those visits into new clients (according to Google). That represents 240 new clients a month!

This is exactly what we do at My Hometown Vet. Our goal is to optimize your website so that a new pet owner finds your website when they search for you. We're not just a directory, but Search Engine Marketing experts that utilizes all of the Internet to help potential clients find your veterinary practice. Keep reading to learn more!

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski
Managing Partner

Myhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Searching for a Veterinarian on Google

Want to know how many pet owners are using Google to search for a veterinarian or animal hospital in your city? There's an easy way to get a general idea. Knowing this will give you some idea as to how many new clients you could be picking up if your veterinary practice's website is well optimized for that search.

By the way, if you have any trouble with this, we're happy to help you at My Hometown Vet. Just drop us a note (http://www.myhometownvet.com/).

First, go to your browser and type in adwords.google.com. Once you're there, you'll have to set up an account. It's free and you'll be glad you did it. Next, go to the "keywords" tool (screenshot below).

Next, type in the key words that you think pet owners are using to search for you. For instance, "veterinarian atlanta" will give you the following results:

According to Google, there are over 10,000 searches a month just using the keyword "veterinarian Atlanta" or some variation of that word. That's a significant number of people in the Atlanta area searching for a veterinarian.

And according to Google and other search engine metrics, nearly 52% of all local business searches are done with the intent to purchase. That means, the veterinary practice that is well optimized for the search in Atlanta for a pet owner searching for a veterinarian is going to pick up a lot of new clients.

This is exactly what we do at My Hometown Vet. Our goal is to optimize your website so that a new pet owner finds your website when they search for you. We're not just a directory, but Search Engine Marketing experts that utilizes all of the Internet to help potential clients find your veterinary practice. Keep reading to lear more!

To your Internet Marketing success!

CJ Levendoski
Managing Partner

Myhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Is your website Search Engine Friendly?

Although most of the veterinary practices I speak to already have a website, many veterinarians are considering a new website or overhauling their existing site. If one of your goals is to use your veterinary website as a way to reach potential clients and to market your practice, there are some very important guidelines to follow. Most importantly, make sure that you build it to be Search Engine Friendly!

Search Engines have some very specific rules about how websites rank when a pet owner searches for a veterinary practice online. How your website is built, the relevancy of the content (this means writing content rich with the key words pet owners are using to search for an animal hospital), back links, meta tags, and other important SEO factors. All of these factors are important and should be taken into consideration when you either build or overhaul your website.

Keep in mind why you're doing this. Your goal should be to appear on the first page when someone searches for a veterinarian. Did you know that the first result in the "free" results section of a search page typically gets 48% of the visits? No. 2 gets 25%, and No. 3 spot gets 11%. The number 10 spot (still on the first page) only gets 7%. Listings on the second page get 2% and listings on the third page get a whopping .005% of the clicks.

In other words, if your website doesn't appear on the first page of a natural search result, you may never be found! That's why it's so important to make sure your website is built properly. If it's not, invest in the time and money to change it. The Internet is today what the Yellow Pages was 10 years ago. Make sure pet owners can find you when they're looking for you!

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski
Managing Partner

Myhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Search Engine Optimization - How To?

Search Engine Optimization is commonly referred to when discussing your veterinary website ranking on any Search Engine. When a pet owner does a search for a veterinarian on Google in your city, where does your website rank when Google produces its results?

Does it really matter? In an earlier post, I mentioned that 48% of the market share clicks on the first "free" listing. A combined 84% view the first three listings. If you believe that pet owners are using the Internet to find a veterinarian, than it needs to be your goal to appear on the first page; and ultimately in the first spot!

Where you appear in the "free" listings in dependent on how well your website is Optimized. The article below is an excellent resource on ways you can optimize your website. However, at My Hometown Vet, we realize that the busy veterinary practice doesn't always have time to optimize your website. That's why we're here!

What Can You Do To Make Your Site Optimized?
By Dan Deceuster
http://marketseedling.com/?p=58

“One of the most common questions people ask about SEO is this: “What can I do to my site to make it optimized?” While that is a loaded question, its important to recognize that SEO is not simply optimizing a site. It is a process that takes time and involves doing things both on your site and off your site.
I would like to focus on the on site changes anyone can make to better optimize their website. I will explain off site tactics in another post. But first, let’s start with a few misconceptions.

You do not need to optimize your meta description or keywords. Search engines no longer use these to affect your rankings in their search results. However, having a good description is key for the users, as they will see it just below your title in search results. Make it compelling so that people will click on it. But remember, no matter how many keywords you put in your description or keywords tags, the search engines will not use them to determine your ranking.

The most important on site thing you can do is optimize your title tag. This is the title people see in the search results and the title at the top of most web browsers. Make sure it is between 60-70 characters. Anything longer will usually get cut off in the search results. Above all, make sure the keywords, terms and phrases that you are targeting are in the title, or at least the most important one(s).

It is important to remember also that search engines rank web pages, not websites. Each page on your site should have a unique title that is optimized for the content of that page.

The second most important thing you can do is optimize your internal linking structure. Breadcrumbs are an excellent start as they will link your pages in a hierarchy and your most important pages will end up with the most links from your other pages. That’s not to mention the great anchor text in those links as well

You don’t want hundreds of links on your pages, even if they all point to your own pages. Google always has recommended no more than 100 links on any given page. Make sure your home page has navigation links to your other pages along the top and in the footer. Make the anchor text of those navigation links relevant to the content of those pages. Include the keywords you are trying to optimize for on each page in the links pointing to each page.

The third most important thing to do on your site is have a sitemap and robots.txt file. A sitemap is a search engine friendly thing to have for your site. It makes sure web crawlers will find all of your pages. A robots.txt file will give instructions to web crawlers. Don’t want certain pages indexed? Have duplicate content? Then use the robots.txt file to tell the web crawlers what to do when they get to your site.

The fourth most important thing to do on your site is use keyword rich text and content. Each page should have a couple of paragraphs of text that has a high density of keywords you are targeting. Put the keywords in bold, this helps increase their importance in the eyes of search engines. But make sure your content is not overly stuffed with keywords and is still user friendly.

The last thing to do is optimize your images. Some people disable images in their web browsers. If they do this, they can either see a big red “X” where you placed an image, or they can see keywords. This is done in the “alt” attribute. Make sure all your images have one that uses keywords.

Follow these five pieces of advice and you will have a site that is ready to rank!”

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!CJ LevendoskiManaging PartnerMyhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Search Engines

Are all Search Engines (SEs) the same? Ask yourself this; when you sit down at your computer and search for a local business, which SE do you use? Which SE do pet owners use when searching for a new veterinarian or an animal hospital? Here's the breakdown:

Google makes up 70% of all searches done in the United States. Yahoo is second at 20% and MSN makes up close to 10%. The remainder is shared by several other SEs, like AOL, Ask, etc.

So, how should this effect the way you market your veterinary practice online? Should you just advertise on Google? No. Certainly, advertising and optimizing your website in order to rank well on Google is important, but don't neglect the thousands of searches done on the other SEs. In some cases, advertising on the smaller SEs is less expensive. You may not see the amount of traffic, but the clicks are no less valuable when pet owners are searching for a new veterinarian.

Remember, meet your prospective clients where they are. Don't limit yourself to just one "venue" on the Internet. The Internet is huge and clients can find you many different ways.

At My Hometown Vet, we use Pay-Per-Click advertising on all SEs using a variety of key words. We also employ Search Engine Optimization techniques for each of the SE's. But we don't stop there. We work on your local business results (that's the map with the little push pins on the SE results page), Social Networking sites like Facebook, Blogs (like this one!), and business profile sites like City Search, etc.

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski
Managing Partner

Myhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Search Engine Success

If you sit down at your computer and do a Google Search for a veterinary practice in your city, where does your website rank in the results?

Why is it important for a veterinarian's website to appear at the top of the natural ("free") search engine results? If your a veterinary practice owner and your goal is for pet owners to find your practice online, it's imperative that you appear at the top of a search engine's results page. Why?

Did you know that the top three results make up 84% of the clicks? The No. 1 spot gets 48% of the market share, No. 2 gets 25%, and No. 3 spot gets 11%. The number 10 spot (still on the first page) only gets 7%. Listings on the second page get 2% and listings on the third page get a whopping .005% of the clicks.

Let's put this in perspective. If there are 1,000 searches per month in your city of pet owners looking for a veterinarian (if you'd like to know how many searches take place in your city, call us and we'll tell you), the veterinarian's website that's listed first will be clicked 500 times. If you're not on the first page, you might not get clicked at all! If you're number three, you could go from 110 clicks to 500 clicks by having a strategic Internet Marketing campaign.

A realistic conversion goal (number of visits that become new clients) is about 5%. So, if you're No.1, you could realistically see 25 new clients per month as a result of a solid SEO ranking.

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!CJ LevendoskiManaging PartnerMyhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Managing Negative Comments or Reviews Online

If you're marketing your veterinary practice online using local business profiles, at some point in time, you'll have to manage negative comments and reviews. Managing your reputation online is part of marketing your veterinary practice on the Internet. It comes with the territory - but it is well worth it.

If a disgruntled employee or an unhappy client writes a negative review about you or your animal hospital, how should you respond? Should you try to have it removed? As any veterinary practice knows, unflattering results can appear in your local profile (like Local Google results). They can be embarrassing and can hurt your reputation. But don't forget, great reviews and flattering remarks can also be posted!

My Hometown Vet can help you. Below is an excellent video and article about how to deal with these negative review.




Recovering From Negative Reviews
4:17
"A Web site can be a marketer's lifeline with its customers, but what happens when it's marred with negative reviews and comments? Bruce Weinberg, marketing professor at Bentley University, tells WSJ's Erin White how to address and recover from poor feedback."

April 22, 2009
How to Manage Your Reputation Online
By Azadeh Ensha
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/how-to-manage-your-reputation-online/

How to Manage Your Reputation Online
By Azadeh Ensha

On Tuesday, Google announced that it had started displaying Google profile results on name queries to help give users more control over their Google identity.
As anyone who has been Googled knows, unflattering results of your name or company — especially when listed in the first several pages — can run the gamut from embarrassing to damaging.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to remove content from Google. The search engine’s rule of thumb is to send you to the webmaster of the site, which often owns the content in question and has final veto power over its removal. As for Google profile, it runs at the bottom of United States name-query search pages, which means potentially damaging items will still be prominently highlighted in the search results.

If the webmaster doesn’t agree to have the negative content removed, your next best option is to bury it. Here are some quick, easy ways to do that.

Use your name to register your own Web site. I would also recommend a sub domain and a blog, again using your real name. Wordpress and LiveJournal both have high Google PageRanks. Look into how to use title tags and headers to further optimize your results. Almost without exception, your Web site will show up as the first result in your name search.

Piggyback off Web sites whose pages rank high in Google. Social networking sites are great for this. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Naymz, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Vimeo, FriendFeed and Ning are great places to start. You don’t have to actively use these sites. Simply park your profile, add the necessary amount of content and make sure to adjust the settings to public view where appropriate so that your profile can be crawled and indexed by Google. Social sites are especially useful in pushing down negative content because some, like LinkedIn and Flickr, allow you to create a unique URL, like flickr.com/johnmiddleinitialdoe, which will further ensure that the site ranks high atop your name search.

Another option is to leave a comment on high-ranking blogs and Web sites using the same name.
One person who has been successful in pushing down offensive content is oft-skewered Web personality Julia Allison. Ms. Allison’s name search incorporates many of the above tips. Ms. Allison also changed her last name, which is another way to clean your Web footprint, as is using a middle initial.

It’s also useful to set up a Google news alert for your name so you can continue to monitor your brand. Remember, everything you put your name stamp on can potentially leave a lasting trail on the Internet so, perhaps most important, think before you type.
Have any other strategies for managing your rep online? Post them below. If we get enough, I’ll digest the best suggestions in a follow-up post.

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski
Managing Partner

Myhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.