Your veterinary website has many purposes for your business. It serves as an information hub for current clients. It creates a sort of digital waiting room that introduces your practice before anyone even walks through your doors. It can also either entice new clients or dissuade people from using your services. If you’ve been wondering why your veterinary website is losing clients, we have some potential reasons for you.

Bad Page Performance Means Lower Rankings

The way a website performs is directly tied to how well it will rank on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When a website is plagued with poor performance factors like page speed and user experience, it will negatively impact search rankings. If your website is losing clients, a good place to start is by looking at your page performance factors. These include:

• Page Speed: The faster your pages load, the better your site will rank (especially on mobile searches). 
• User Experience: If your site is not intuitive for a user, they will leave quickly, which will drop your site down on a SERP. Websites should be informative, easy to use, and attractive enough to keep users engaged and rankings high. 
• Mobile-Friendliness: Since most people use their phones for searches these days, it is vital that your website is mobile friendly. If it’s not, it will significantly affect your website’s ranking, and will probably lose you some clients.
• SEO: Search engine optimization is designed to keep search engines happy. If your website is not SEO friendly, you will feel it in your search rankings, and with the amount of pet owners visiting your site. 

Corporate Hospitals Outperforming with SEO

While we briefly mentioned the importance of SEO above. We wanted to take a minute and point out how other hospitals doing a better job with their SEO efforts can negatively affect your website. Keeping on top of your search engine optimization efforts is vital, especially if you have corporate hospitals in your area that are pouring money into their efforts. Regularly updating content and keywords, staying on top of marketing results, and making changes when necessary will help you stay competitive with competitors in your area—even the corporate ones. 

The Need to Update a Veterinary Website

An outdated veterinary website can significantly harm your bottom line. How can you tell it’s time for a new website design? Here are a few factors to look out for:

• Outdated Design: If you have not updated your website’s design in at least ten years, it is time for an upgrade. Outdated fonts, unclear images, and a less-than-modern design will make your website significantly less appealing to local pet owners looking for a new vet practice.
• Lack of Mobile Friendliness: Try to use your website on your mobile phone. Is it easy to click on all of the easy navigation? Can you see all the information that is present on the desktop version of your site? Do pages load quickly and easily? If the answer is no to any of these questions, it is time to update your website with a more mobile-friendly design. 
• Difficulty Contacting You: The point of your website is to get pet owners to contact your practice so they become clients. If your website makes it difficult to find your contact information or to schedule an appointment, you could be losing a lot of clients you didn’t even know you had. 
• No Brand Identity: Your website should be a direct representation of your brand. If it isn’t, it might be time for a refresh. 

Veterinary Website Experts

If the time has come for a new, improved veterinary website, Beyond Indigo Pets is here for you. Our decades of experience building beautiful, easy-to-use sites is what you need to get your veterinary website working for you. Contact us today to start talking about how we can build you your perfect website.