Your Veterinary Site Has Analytics, Nobody Held the Phone
Veterinary sites land 2 of 47 on the title tag and 3 of 47 on analytics in my audit, and 47 of 47 on phones. A letter to anyone holding three quotes and leaning toward the cheapest.
Sign the cheapest quote. For two of the three things I’m about to show you, it costs your veterinary practice nothing at all.
That came out wrong, and I’d rather fix it in the second line than have you find the hole in month four. For two of them it makes no difference. For the third it makes all of it, and the third is why I’m writing to you instead of getting on with my day.
Three or four of those quotes reach my inbox most months, forwarded by practice owners who want a second opinion from a stranger before they commit to anything.
They all look the same by now. Two pages, a deposit schedule, a list of inclusions, and a number at the bottom that makes every other quote in the pile look greedy.
So what does the low one leave out?
The person who wrote it isn’t cheating you, and I want to be careful there, because the designer charging half of what I charge is usually competent at the exact work they’ve listed.
You should still know which jobs are on that list, which ones were never on anyone’s, and which ones your website builder is quietly doing for free while everybody argues about the price.
The parts that turn up already done
I opened 2,098 veterinary websites for this, one at a time, over a couple of months, and I did it on a phone.
Two things your trade does better than almost every other trade I audit, and neither of them cost a veterinarian a single minute of thought.
The first is the title tag. One line of writing that names a page for machines instead of for visitors, and a search engine repeats it when your practice comes up in a set of results.
Nobody has to make time for it. Your website software fills that line in on the day the page is created, before anyone in the building has had a chance to want anything from it, which is how a trade that has never once discussed the subject comes out 2 of 47 when I scored all of them, with 99.6% of the sites I opened carrying one.
Who wrote yours? Nobody in your building, I’d guess, and the same goes for nearly every clinic I looked at.
The second is analytics. Ten minutes of work for whoever builds the site, usually spent on the same afternoon as the logo, and from then on the site can answer questions your reception desk has never been able to answer.
Does anybody read the emergency page? Does anyone get as far as the directions before giving up?
Nobody had to be sold on it either, which is how the trade lands 3 of 47 for analytics, with 76.2% of the practices I opened running it.
I’d put money on most of those logins going untouched since the week they were created, which is a peculiar thing to be able to say about a trade that installs the software more readily than almost anyone else. Do you know who has yours?
Telecom shops install it just as readily, and their sites have been keeping score for years with nobody reading it.
The job that never makes it onto a list
Now the phone.
It’s eight in the evening, and a woman is standing in her kitchen with a labrador that got into the bin and a phone in the hand that isn’t holding the collar.
She is not reading your team page, she is not admiring the photograph of your surgery, and she will decide about your practice in the time it takes her to scroll once.
She wants a number, an address, and one sentence about what happens tonight.
Sorting out a site that falls apart at phone width is usually a template setting and an afternoon of someone’s time, which is why it appears on no quote I’ve ever read, and why your trade sits 47 of 47 for it, behind every other trade I opened.
For three years I told clinics I’d opened their site on a phone when all I’d done was shrink a browser window on a big monitor, so I’m not writing this from higher ground.
Her odds aren’t good: Google’s phone checks come back clean on 60.3% of the clinic sites I opened. On the rest she gets the desktop page shrunk to fit a hand, and she has to hit a booking button no wider than a tick on that labrador’s ear.
78% clear those same checks across everything I audit, so every other website she used today has trained her to expect better than yours.
She won’t tell you. She’ll go back to the results, pick the next clinic on the list, and you’ll never learn she was there.
How would you find out that yours is one of the sites she gives up on? Nothing about it shows up in your day.
Software is brilliant at some jobs and useless at others
None of this is a veterinary problem. It’s a question of who does what.
Software is excellent at any job with exactly one right answer. Text goes in a field. A tracking code goes in the header. Finished.
Nothing about the phone check has a field to fill in. It needs a person to hold the thing in the dark with one hand, on a phone with one bar of signal, and to have an honest opinion about what comes back.
That person costs money, and the number at the bottom of your cheapest quote priced every single thing on the website except that person and the afternoon they would have spent. Which of those two kinds of work do you think you were actually shopping for?
Add my ten checks together and this trade comes out at 74 out of 100, a fair middle of the pack and nothing better, which is about where a practice lands when it wins the checks nobody had to think about and loses the one a person had to sit down and do. Some of those checks count for more than others, and my methodology page shows what each one costs you when it fails.
You’re about to tell me it’s all word of mouth
And I believe you. It’s the truest thing about this trade, and it’s the reason so many practices get away for years with a website that nobody in the building maintains.
The trouble is who a recommendation leaves out.
The family that moved into the neighborhood last month. The client whose old clinic just sold to a corporate group and lost the vet she trusted. The man whose cat is probably fine, honestly, but he’d rather ask a professional tonight than lie awake until Monday.
None of those three has anybody to ask, so they ask a phone instead, and the phone hands them a list of clinics with no opinion whatsoever about which one is the better practice.
Your followers can’t help them either, because not one of those is a booked appointment.
How many of the clients you registered last month could you name? And how many of them found you the old way?
Word of mouth still works. It just finishes on a small screen now, and the last two inches of it belong to whoever built your website.
Two questions before you sign
Both dull, and neither about design.
First, ask who opens the finished site on a real phone before it goes live, and what happens when it fails. Listen for a name, not a policy.
Second, ask who fixes it in month four, the week the booking button quietly stops sending. A support inbox is not an answer, it’s a place to put your worry.
Someone has to keep the thing running after launch, and what that work actually involves rarely appears on any of the three quotes.
I’m not the cheap quote and I’d rather admit that early. Most of my work now is websites for practices in this trade, and I lose on price most months of the year.
If you want a second opinion on the quote itself, send me the quote and the site it’s replacing and I’ll tell you which lines I’d cut.
Do this before you sign anything
After close tonight, stand at your front desk with your phone in one hand, the way a client stands there with a leash in the other.
Open your own homepage and try to book yourself an appointment using a thumb. Whatever stops you, screenshot it, send it to whoever wrote that quote, and ask what their number does about it.
