1.05 Content for potential clients

Your potential clients are looking for your practice using details of the areas you serve and the services you provide. How can you design your pages so that they find you easily?

State the obvious
To help potential clients you need to state obvious facts about your practice and about each surgery. The species you treat, your contact address, your phone number, a location map, and your opening hours. It's amazing how many practice web sites put this sort of information in out of the way places. Even more amazing is that some practices fail to include some of this information entirely!

Name and address
It is sensible to display your practice name and your contact details on every page. This helps to make your site easier for existing clients to find. Make sure that the search engines can read it though – if your practice name and address appear in as a graphic make sure that they are repeated in plain text as well.

Placenames
Potential clients from your surrounding areas are going to be looking for a practice where they are, not where you are. You need to include the names of the places your clients come from. These don't all want to be in one place as a list. They are more effective if you can use placenames in the middle of natural language. Search engines are suspicious of lists.

Theme and variations
You can't just assume that potential clients will all search for your practice using the same simple term. “Vet in yourtown” for instance. As you write the copy for your site you should try and introduce as many variations as possible without making your text read like a cross between a gazetteer and a thesaurus. Don't try and get all the variations on every page. Use as many alternatives as possible but don't compromise the readability of your site

Lights and bushels
Don't be reticent about presenting details of the services you offer. Every additional word you write makes it easier for a potential client to find you. Take a leaf from the journalists handbooks. Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them what you have to tell them. Then tell them what you have just told them. The natural desire is to do this without too many repeated words so you get a nice spread of keywords and phrases and your page will therefore be much easier to find.

One more piece of information
So. Your web site is well populated with all the search terms that your potential clients are likely to use. Lots of people looking for a vet in your area find your web site. Will this mean that every visitor becomes a long term satisfied client? No. Your visitors need a bit more information – and it is not something that you can provide satisfactorily within your web site.

They need to be satisfied that they are making a fully informed choice.

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