1.11 Content that doesn't work

Try asking a few people, both vets and clients, what content your web site should provide. Two things are very commonly suggested. Veterinary advice and an online pet shop. Lets see how effective, or not, they are.

Veterinary advice
Lots of practice web sites promise veterinary advice. None provide a comprehensive resource and none provide advice at the level clients might expect. This isn't the practices fault, it is an inevitable consequence of a combination of factors.

Level of advice
Lets consider the level of advice that your clients are hoping for. They would like to find free professional advice, comparable to that they would receive in the surgery and preferably at a level which will save them taking their credit cards for a walk. Many of your clients will see the verbal advice you provide during a consultation as mere conversation – not part of your stock in trade – and won't understand why you can't provide the same service for free online.

Specific cases
It is obviously impossible to provide online advice which comes even close to the levels of advice you can offer specific cases. It is also clearly unacceptable to do so. In professional terms advice needs to be tailored to a specific case, and in business terms the advice you provide is your main product and should be paid for.
When practices attempt to provide veterinary advice online they tend to end up with pages peppered with “take it to the vet”. Even the best intentioned end up looking as of they are blatently touting for custom.

Scope of advice
It is frustrating for visiting clients when, promised pet advice, they fail to find anything covering their specific species, breed and problem. If you are going to provide pet advice then you should do it properly. Let's see what this means. We'll look at a small animal example but the same would apply to equine, large animal or mixed practices.

Advice by the metre
Go into any bookstore or pet shop. Find the petcare books. Never mind the number of titles, just measure the length of dedicated shelving. Even the smallest pet shop will manage a metre of books. Allowing a conservative 200 sides of paper per cm that's 20,000 pages. Web pages hold less information than the printed page so double that to get a total of 40,000 web pages to match a moderate library of pet care. Even with robust allowances for duplicate information, material outside the scope of a veterinary web site and the thickness of the covers you still end up with thousands of web pages - and each page needs writing, each page needs illustrating and the whole lot needs glueing together with the links that make the web work.

..and in the end.
If you created the thousands of pages of advice, would it attract visits from your existing clients? Maybe. Would it attract regular repeat visits from them? Unlikely. You could extend, but not refresh the content of your web site. People would appreciate the reference material your site would provide - but few would be your existing clients.

Straightforward pages of veterinary advice don't look like a viable option for content, let's look at an online store.

Online Store
Let's measure some more shelves, this time pet products in your local supermarket. Even modestly sized stores display four hundred shelf feet of assorted pet products. Throw in product ranges that were once only seen in specialist shops and vets, own brand products at loss leader pricing points, online ordering and a delivery service with evening deliveries. Would you really want to compete?

dot com pet stores
Several large online pet stores, selling directly or through vets, were set up in the nineties with the aim of cashing in on the valuable pet food and accessory market. Their business model was generally based on central warehousing and national distribution. They have almost all gone under, some quite spectacularly. There are only a couple of survivors left in the UK.

Product promotion
In any case, an online store set up just to serve your clients is likely to be all work and little profit by the time you deal with deliveries and returns. This is not to say that you can’t promote products available in your waiting room online, just that an online shop as raison d’etre for a practice web site is not a viable approach.

So, let's look at content that does work.

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