SEO (search engine optimization) is key to boosting your practice website’s ranking in search engines to attract more pet owners, increase appointments, and ultimately improve practice profitability. Websites at the top of search engines grab 36-42% more traffic than lower-ranking websites and perform up to 10 times better than competitors.
Knowing the importance of SEO for any business, countless companies have created simple online SEO assessment tools, which all basically work the same way. You key in your website’s URL, click a button, and presto! You soon see a score out of 100 telling you how well your website is SEO-optimized.
Sounds handy, right? Well, online SEO assessment tools certainly qualify as convenience tech. And many include helpful insights and information. Yet depending on what SEO checker you choose, you may or may not receive a true or even useful picture of your website’s SEO health given some of the inherent problems with online SEO assessment tools.
Different Overall SEO Scores
To begin with, different SEO checkers can give very different overall SEO scores for the exact same website. To demonstrate, we keyed in a randomly chosen website address to nine different SEO checkers (also randomly chosen). Here are the scores we got out of 100 (in the order we tested them):
- 78%
- 83%
- 73%
- 85%
- 81%
- 84%
- 59%
- 54%
- 52%
No Baseline
It’s also difficult to know what some SEO checkers are basing their assessments on. While some tools offer detailed analysis of important SEO issues like page loading speed, alt attributes, and tags, other tools only offer vaguely worded findings such as “8 issues” or “3 major errors.” And other tools offer no details, and only tell you “This site is okay” or “This site could be better.” So, there’s really no baseline between SEO checkers to know whether you’re comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges.
Questionable Expertise
And it’s hard to know what SEO assessment tools to trust. How did we test this? We took the nine randomly selected SEO assessment tools and input their own URLs for testing. While most generally scored higher than our randomly chosen test website address, some scored about the same, and one scored lower. The same SEO checker that gave our test website address a score of 59% (with indications of 3 major errors and 9 moderate errors) gave itself a score of 54% (with 8 major errors and 10 moderate errors). In other words, a company of supposed SEO experts seemingly did not know how to optimize their own website.
Even with a detailed assessment from an SEO checker that you trust or was recommended to you, the end results come down to one of two choices:
- You can fix the problems yourself.
- You can pay the company behind the SEO checker to fix the problems for you.
Neither choice really represents an optimal choice for practices.
Fixing problems for yourself requires SEO expertise (and perhaps experience as a developer), and even if you have the skills, fixing problems yourself takes time. In busy practice, time is typically always at a premium. And fixing problems yourself after clinic hours does little to maintain your work-life balance.
Paying someone to fix SEO problems offers convenience, but it also requires a leap of faith. You may know nothing about the company, and even if they seem reputable, there’s a big difference between a company that knows about general SEO and a company with specific and proven experience in website optimization for veterinary practices.
Experience You Can Trust
If you’re looking for such a company to do an SEO assessment of your practice website, and if you don’t want to pay for the assessment, we’ve got great news.
Today, you can get a free SEO assessment when you book a free demo of LifeLearn WebDVM, custom-built websites to rank veterinary practices higher on search engines. LifeLearn’s team of veterinary SEO experts will analyze your website’s current performance on Google and other search engines and identify areas for improvement.
With more pet owners using smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices to find veterinary clinics, WebDVM helps your practice website stand out online with responsive designs, making it simple for pet owners to find your practice and make an appointment wherever they are.
The best part is, all editions of WebDVM come standard with the SEO Kickstart package, which includes location-based keywords, SEO technical optimization, and submission to search engines.
See why more practices are switching to WebDVM.
Book your free WebDVM demo and get your free SEO assessment.
LifeLearn is only making this offer for a limited time. So, we encourage you to take advantage of it today before it expires.
