Pam Foster

Podcast: SEO Marketing for Veterinary Practices

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Podcast: SEO Marketing for Veterinary Practices What’s the secret to veterinary practice SEO? It’s much easier than you think. That’s what I explained to Brandon Breshears — Director of Operations at Rethink Veterinary Solutions and creator of The Veterinary Marketing Podcast — during our podcast conversation. Brandon and I both know that many veterinary practices … Read more

What the .vet domain could mean to your veterinary website

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What the .vet domain could mean to your veterinary website

Now that the .vet domain is available, you may be wondering if you should you jump on board and register your pet or veterinary business website as a .vet version.

Should you register your veterinary business website with the new .vet domain?
Should you register your veterinary business website with the new .vet domain?

You may be asking yourself, “Should I buy the .vet domain to help with our SEO/search results or website traffic?”

I was wondering the same thing and I had a conversation with a few of my fellow online marketing professionals. Here’s the upshot of what we discussed.

Mike Linville, owner of Black Dog Studios, a “Responsible Design” web site developer and online marketer in the veterinary industry, said, “After the Google Panda update a few years ago — the search algorithm changed to put less emphasis on domain names (because any spammer could buy domains with $7). Instead, there’s more emphasis on quality content. So in terms of buying the .vet domain name – I don’t think you would see an SEO benefit. But, if you wanted it for branding sake … then I would definitely say yes.”

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Wildly Profitable Marketing for the Pet Industry 2015 Edition

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Wildly Profitable Marketing for the Pet Industry 2015 Edition

I’m happy to announce that my book co-author, C S Wurzberger, and I have just released a fresh 2015 update of our guide, Wildly Profitable Marketing for the Pet Industry.

Updated for 2015: Wildly Profitable Marketing for the Pet Industry
Updated for 2015: Wildly Profitable Marketing for the Pet Industry

This is our fourth year of updating this workbook. It’s designed to be your complete road map to creating a very simple yet effective marketing plan for your pet or veterinary business.

In Wildly Profitable Marketing for the Pet Industry 2015 edition, you’ll see that we’ve updated:

  • Examples and screen shots to feature the latest “best practice” websites, including pet businesses, veterinary manufacturers and more
  • Several resources and links to make sure you have the latest information
  • Statistics, facts and features that are relevant right now
  • Tips and steps for success, including a completely updated Podcast section (see page 216)
  • Other details that make this a great go-to guide for success this year and beyond

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Simple Formula for Writing Magnetic Pet Marketing “How-to” Articles

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Simple Formula for Writing Magnetic Pet Marketing “How-to” Articles

By David Tomen for PetCopywriter.com

“How to” articles are practically a no-brainer when marketing to pet owners because you’ve listened carefully to what your customers wonder about most.
“How to” articles are practically a no-brainer when marketing to pet owners because you’ve listened carefully to what your customers wonder about most.

Lori does the writing and email newsletters for her veterinary clinic’s website. She has a steady stream of ideas for pet-business articles her business uses when marketing to pet owners. Here, we’ll look at the formula Lori uses to write her blog posts, web pages and email newsletters.

My hope is by the time you finish reading this article, you’ll be able to make Lori’s success your reality too.

Topics for your pet-business marketing articles

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Marketing to pet owners with “how-to” articles made easy

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Marketing to pet owners with “how-to” articles made easy

By David Tomen for PetCopywriter.com

The pet-owner focused web content for Dr. Buzby's ToeGrips includes this How-To article on dog nail care. It includes helpful text, a photo and a video.
The pet-owner focused web content for Dr. Buzby’s ToeGrips includes this How-To article on dog nail care. It includes text, a photo and a video.

Sheri is a master at marketing to pet owners. She loves animals. Caring for pets since she was a young girl fostered a passion that led to a career as a veterinarian.

Sheri soon found that sharing her know-how was a great way to build her business. Pet owners trusted her and shared their experience with friends. And her veterinary clinic’s revenues grew exponentially every year since she opened her doors.

Sheri taught Lori, her receptionist and resident webmaster, the easiest way to come up with “how-to” articles. During the week, her staff would make note of customer questions and problems. Lori then selected the best of the lot and wrote a “how-to” article for each week’s blog post.

Lori came up with some of her own methods for generating ideas for blog posts, too. You can easily do this for your practice as well.

If you use the pet web content ideas here, you’ll easily be able to write magnetic “how-to” articles that bring in more traffic to your website and business.

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5 more ways to use social media in pet marketing

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pet social media tips from PetCopywriter.com

5 more ways to use social media in pet marketing

By Jen Phillips April for PetCopywriter.com

Social media offers a perfect opportunity for pet marketers. With a well thought out campaign, you can reach thousands of potential customers and develop loyal brand advocates.

pet social media tips from PetCopywriter.com
Give pet lovers lots of reasons to “Like” you, follow you and do business with you on Facebook

After all, social media is where your customers are. There’s nothing pet lovers enjoy more than conversing with other pet lovers and sharing pictures of their fur kids on social media.

Don’t believe me? The American Kennel Club has 111 thousand followers on Twitter. The hashtag #dogsofinstagram has over 2 dozen posts in three days. The industry conference Blogpaws spent weeks gearing up for the big event with Twitter parties and dozens of posts across Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Chances are, you are at least using Facebook to engage with your customers.

Yet, the dilemma a lot of pet marketers face is they don’t know how to harness the power of social media. With that in mind, here’s how your pet business or veterinary practice can develop a sales funnel via social media and track your results.

Social Media for Pet Marketing

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For the most effective pet website SEO, focus on this tactic

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For the most effective pet website SEO, focus on this tactic

This just in… quality content matters when it comes to attracting visitors to your pet or veterinary website! Actually, it always mattered, but a recent blog post from Marketing Profs brought it to our attention with statistics from a new marketing survey.

Survey says! Quality content, posted frequently, is critical for getting traffic from Google and other search engines.

The blog post stated, “Marketing and sales professionals say creating quality content is THE MOST EFFECTIVE search engine optimization (SEO) tactic, according to the results of a recent survey conducted by Ascend2. More than half (57%) of the global professionals polled say quality content creation is one of the most effective SEO strategies employed by their company.”*

What else matters when it comes to bringing in business through Google and other search engines? The Marketing Profs article noted these survey findings from Ascend2: “Other SEO efforts seen as effective include:

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7 Reasons Why Your Pet Website Should Include Video

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Photo: 7 Reasons Why Your Pet Website Should Include Video

7 Reasons Why Your Pet Website Should Include Video

By Chris Butler for PetCopywriter.com

Photo: 7 Reasons Why Your Pet Website Should Include Video
A how-to video can do wonders for your pet website

If a picture is worth a thousand words, do you have any idea how much a one-minute video is worth?

Whether you’re marketing pet products or promoting a veterinary practice, videos are priceless especially if you include an animal.

According to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, a video is worth 1.8 million words, which is about three times the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  That equates to about 3,600 typical web pages!

I don’t know about you, but writing that many pages for one website, even if it’s about my precious four-legged friends, would be a bit much. Besides, what are the chances of anyone reading the whole thing?

Just look at the abundance of pet videos that circulate the Internet on a daily basis. People love watching videos with cute animals in them. And if you use the videos to demonstrate something useful about a pet, or pet product, you’ve really set yourself apart.

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5 Ways to Make the Most of Your Pet Business Facebook Page

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Photo: success in marketing to pet owners

5 Ways to Make the Most of Your Pet Business Facebook Page

By Jen Phillips April for PetCopywriter.com

Photo: success in marketing to pet owners
Customers will come running to your business if they Like your Facebook page efforts

There’s a saying that people don’t wake up in the morning and go to your website, but they do wake up in the morning and go to Facebook. In fact, if you’re a pet business marketing to pet owners, Facebook plays a key role in your marketing efforts.

Here’s why.

Facebook by the numbers:

What does this mean to you as a pet business? It means your potential customers are using Facebook.

However, if you’re like a lot of pet businesses, you’re not sure how to best use it to grow your business. After all, it’s not as simple as getting a storefront on the busiest street corner in town to maximize your foot traffic (and sales).

How do you get noticed and increase your customer base on the popular social media network? It starts with a plan.

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Negative link alert for pet websites

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Negative link alert for pet websites

Beware “negative SEO,” which can bring down popular sites in the pet industry.

The other day, David Beart from PetYak.com alerted me to a growing problem where bad links are seriously hurting pet websites with poor rankings and traffic in Google, Bing and other search engines. He said, “I found out the hard way that my website had 54,000 bogus links pointing to it, and I got penalized. Several hacked sites from Russia and Poland, and from.info and .net sites using cloaking, are hitting all types of verticals (including the pet industry).”

But before I explain bad links, let’s back up a bit.

Google is always trying to give searchers the best possible results. Throughout each year, Google updates their search algorithms (formulas) to clamp down on entities trying to hack the system.

Google’s latest update, Penguin 2.0, is clamping down on bogus inbound links/negative SEO. QUALITY inbound links from legitimate websites/companies… especially links to internal pages of your website, using anchor text such as “See their complete selection of dog treats” (not a real ink) — are fine. However, hackers are flooding unsuspecting pet websites (and other industry websites) with bogus text links from “fake” referral pages, and Google sees those links as “unnatural.”

When this happens, Google can slap your site with a penalty, which can kill its traffic. This is something you need to know about and address with your pet website now. Here’s how.

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All content by Pet Industry Copywriter Pam Foster

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