Do you need a blog on your veterinary website?

A blog on your vet clinic website (often labelled resources or articles) is a powerful business growth tool.

A good blog will drive free traffic from Google, educate existing and prospective clients and bring new pets into your consulting room.

But there are pitfalls and some tempting shortcuts that can backfire on you.

In this article, I discuss

• why a good blog helps to grow your business
• what to write about
• planning and resourcing
• shortcuts and pitfalls

All people, including pet owners, are hungry for information.

They find a lump, or their dog vomits, or they want to know what to feed their kitten, and they turn to Google for the answers.

If your website is there on the front page of Google to answer their questions or if they have come to trust your website and go there as a first step – fantastic.

You can give them your opinion on these matters and further build the trust in your relationship.

However, if they find your competitor, a pet food company or just a random blog online, they are introduced to a new practice and may be offered information you disagree with.

You then need to spend time educating them. Or you may never see them again.

It’s important to understand that once you have a well-structured website for your vet practice, the only way to grow your footprint on Google and come up for more and more search terms is to add more content regularly to your site.

And a blog is the perfect way to do this.

Once you decide to add a blog to your site – what do you write about?

The simplest way to think about this is to consider all the questions you and your team answer day in and day out and address those.

Subjects like

• What do I feed my kitten?
• How do I protect my dog from fleas and ticks?
• Why is it important to desex my dog?

are simple but great.

To change it up a bit, you can extend to different topics that interest you, like

• caring for Australian wildlife in your garden or
• day in the life of our vet nurses

If your vet blog is well-written and contains some personality and originality, your clients will love it, and Google will rank it.

(Side note here – Vets are notorious for trying to cover every possible detail on any given subject in their articles.

The result is dense text that clients don’t understand, and Google fails to rank.

I know this first-hand because I had to untrain my science-trained brain in my early days of writing for my vet practice in the early 2000s.

Unless you are trained in writing for digital media, convey your main talking points to a professional writer and leave them to pound the keys.)

This brings me to planning and resourcing.

Planning is key.

Google and your clients are not looking for a glut of 6 articles and then crickets.

They are looking for regular new content added every week or month for years.

Creating a content plan, being disciplined, and sticking to the schedule are key.

At Specialist Vet Marketing, we also analyse the Google demand data and tie our writing in with current trends to make sure we get the best bang for every buck invested.

In terms of resourcing, every article takes more time than you think.

To plan, research, write, edit, source images, optimise for search and add each article to the website is several hours of work.

Think carefully, and don’t start a veterinary blog unless you can adequately resource it.

All that talk of resourcing can lead you to the door of some tempting pitfalls.

The most common is ‘let’s get ChatGPT to write the articles – we’ll save a fortune’.

2 things will happen if you do this.

The first is that your content will be bland and uninspiring. It won’t bring new business through your door.

And secondly, Google and the other search engines will recognise this as AI-generated content and fail to rank it.

The second pitfall is copying. ‘We’ll just take content from another website and paste it into our blog’.

Again same thing.

The search engines will flag you for duplicate content and reduce the ranking of your whole website.

A veterinary blog is a powerful growth tool, but only if you invest, do it properly and are persistent and disciplined in your approach.