PPC for vets – a beginner’s guide

Make pay-per-click work for your vet practice

Unless your vet business has a product or service that’s truly unique in your area, you’ll always be in competition with other local vet practices who target the same audience.

In the world of pay-per-click advertising (PPC) via Google, this means you’ll also be in competition for the same keywords – so how do you stand out?

The secret is to outrank other vets by making your Google Quality Score as high as possible, which means convincing the search engine that you’re offering genuinely useful information to users.

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Localise your PPC strategy

Any business that depends on local customers should focus on geo-targeted campaigns, which optimise the user experience by including highly relevant keywords, advertising copy and landing pages.

It’s reassuring for pet owners if they can see an address and local phone number connected to a practice that pops up in response to their search query.

And if you have a multi-unit business, location targeting can give you a huge advantage, as you can create individual campaigns for different clinics. Aggregator websites are unable to do this and can only focus on one overall location.

It’s also more cost-effective, as you can control your budget and keep an eye on how each location is performing, then adjust your spending accordingly.

Essential steps for location-based PPC

Four things you SHOULD do:

  1. Identify all practices and their respective locations (if you have a multi-location vet business).
  2. Create a campaign for each vet practice, using geo-targeted keywords and ad content.
  3. Use valuable extensions – for example, setting a distance radius around the physical location of the practice or town where most pet owners are likely to live. This means anyone with an IP address within this area should see your ads.
  4. Exclude areas you’re not interested in, to avoid wasting clicks.

Three things you should NOT do:

  1. Target the entire nation if you run a business in only one location, as this will also waste clicks.
  2. Use general landing pages that force the user to navigate a generic website to find their local area, as they may give up and go elsewhere.
  3. Scrimp on localised keyword research, as cutting corners like this will limit the reach of your campaign.

Our volume and visibility team is always happy to talk about charming Google and its users, so get in touch for a friendly chat about how we could support your vet practice.