What the best clinic websites do differently

Most pet owners meet your clinic on a phone screen before they ever meet you in person. 

Want to make the most of that first impression? Read on. 

You have three seconds, literally

A couple of stats first. According to research from the Baymard Institute, 88% of people are less likely to come back to a website after one bad experience on it. On mobile, more than half of visitors abandon a site outright if it takes longer than three seconds to load. (source: Google).

So if your website is slow, hard to read on a phone, or takes three taps to find opening hours, you might be losing the client before they've even considered booking. And the quality of your services has zero to do with it.

What turns a visit into a booking

Once someone's on your site, a few things determine whether they book or bounce. Worth checking your own page against each one:

• Can they find pricing and services without calling? That’s a big one. If the answer's no, you're generating unnecessary phone calls and losing the visitors who won't bother calling at all.

• Do the photos look like your clinic or any clinic? Real photos of the space, the team and the animals you treat build more trust in five seconds than a paragraph of copy does in five minutes.

• Is there proof other pet owners trust you? Reviews and testimonials do a lot of persuading. A site with none reads as untested, even if the clinic's been running for 20 years.

• Can they book in one step? Every extra click is a chance for someone to close the tab and call a competitor instead.

How Vetdesk helps: You may know us for our app (actually, NZ vet clinics’ app!), but we also build clinics’ websites – and they’re as functional as they’re good-looking. Find out more here.

The importance of updating content

You don’t have time to write two or three articles per month, let alone develop and follow a content calendar. But a blog on your website is worth it, as it does two jobs at once:

• It gives pet owners another reason to trust you, and
• It gives Google more reasons to show your site to prospective clients looking for answers.

Clinics that keep this updated, even a few posts a quarter, tend to outperform the ones with a beautiful but static site.

How Vetdesk helps: Your clinic's app, powered by Vetdesk, already comes with a pet care content library, packed with vet-approved articles you don't have to write yourself. That same content can populate your website too.

Getting found in the first place

A great website that nobody finds doesn't help much. Three things move the needle most for a local clinic:

• A complete and accurate Google profile – hours, photos, services, all kept up to date.

• Recent reviews – one of the strongest local search signals, and one of the easiest to influence: just ask happy clients at the right moment (ideally through a system that does the asking for you).

• Local language – mentioning your suburb or region naturally in your copy helps search engines connect your site to local searches.

This is far from a full SEO strategy. But it can do a lot of heavy lifting.

What does social media have to do with it?

Quite a bit. Your website and your social presence should feel like the same clinic talking: voice, photos and promise all matching up.

Social is often where a pet owner notices you first. The website is where they decide to trust you. Treating social as a feeder into the website, rather than its own disconnected channel, keeps that trust intact all the way through to the booking.

Good-looking isn't the same as good

Some clinic websites look good: clean design, nice photography, a tidy homepage. But while the site looks finished, there’s a problem under the hood: it doesn’t connect to anything.

Instead of hitting the calendar, the "booking form" emails the front desk. Submit it on a Saturday afternoon and it sits in an inbox until Monday morning, while the pet owner, who has no idea their request is waiting rather than confirmed, has already moved on to the next clinic on their list. One with an actual online booking system, probably.

So the site ends up being nothing more than a great brochure: handsome but static, and disconnected from the tools your clinic runs on day to day.

The fix: an online booking system that connects your clinic’s website and client-facing app with your existing practice management system (which happens to be what Vetdesk does for a living!).

Your new website's best sidekick

A great website earns first impressions, answers questions, and gets people to book. A client-facing app takes it a step further, adding an extra layer of convenience.

Imagine your clients having an app where they can:

• Book appointments in a couple of taps
• Receive timely reminders from you
• Read pet care advice tailored to their pet's breed and health conditions
• Shop for pet products, including repeat orders on subscription, with orders received and processed straight by your wholesaler of choice

It means putting your clinic in their pocket, always within reach and top of mind.

A website is still where a new pet owner finds you. The app is where an existing client stays close afterwards. Done well, the two work together as one experience, growing your community and helping you engage and retain your clients.

Vetdesk builds both, for a fraction of what it would cost to buy either from two different providers – all in two-way sync with your existing practice management system.

Curious about how it works? Request a demo.