Pet service businesses understand the importance of staying up to date with the latest business solutions in order to reach more pet owners, increase profitability, and remain competitive in a market occupied by thousands of competing pet service businesses.
The challenge is, researching the solutions you need can take time, and time can always seem in short supply when running a busy pet service business. So, to save you time, here’s a quick checklist of six things to optimize and grow your pet business today:
1. Improve Pet Owner Trust With Modern Website Design
If you’ve ever visited a website only to leave because the website looked less than professional, you’re not alone in this type of reaction. According to Stanford University, 75% of people surveyed said they made judgments about a company’s credibility based on their website.
In other words, your website design reflects a quality of trust that makes the difference between a website visitor who becomes a client and a visitor who bounces right out of there.
Trust and credibility include a website that’s optimized for mobile.
- According to MarginMedia, 48% of people surveyed said that if a business didn’t have a mobile-optimized website, they took that as a sign of the business not caring.
- According to Econsultancy, 62% of businesses with mobile-optimized websites experienced increased sales.
- According to Hubspot, 70% of mobile searches lead to action within an hour.
Discover the kind of websites that attract that kind of action
2. Make Sure Your SEO Includes Faster Website Load Speed
Ranking high in search engines to attract more pet owners involves more than using the right keywords on your pet service website. It includes optimized website load speed. Here’s why.
Search engines like Google are businesses. To keep people using their services, Google wants to provide users with the best possible experience, and people do not enjoy slow websites.
According to the Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay in web page load time causes:
- 11% fewer page views
- a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- a 7% loss in customer conversions
To ensure user satisfaction, Google is always adjusting its algorithm to rank faster-loading websites higher while dropping slow-loading websites down the page. So, the faster your website loads, the more you increase your online discoverability to attract more pet owners and convert those pet owners into clients.
Here’s how to easily improve your website load speed today
3. Protect Your Profitability With After-Hours Telehealth Support
Pet service businesses can have important veterinary questions at any time of day, including nights, weekends, and holidays. Trouble is, veterinary clinics might only be open Monday to Friday. In time-sensitive situations, having questions answered quickly can be critical to a pet’s health, and not having the answers can have repercussions that damage your business reputation and profitability.
This includes using the internet to search for veterinary medical information. While the internet includes medical information that’s vetted and trustworthy, it also contains untold pages of unreliable content. To avoid the risks to your pet service business and the pets you serve, use an after-hours telehealth triage service staffed by registered veterinary nurses for trusted and critical support in time-sensitive situations.
Find out where to get after-hours pet telehealth support
4. Reach More Pet Owners With Custom Digital Advertising
If you use a Facebook business page to promote your pet business, you may have noticed a drop in how many followers have been viewing and interacting with your organic posts. The reason is that, in addition to Facebook’s algorithm changes, Facebook’s newsfeed now has more ad content from competing businesses. And the overall impact has destroyed organic reach.
- According to Hubspot, fans only saw 16% of newsfeed posts in 2012 by page managers.
- In 2014, organic reach for the average Facebook page plummeted to 5% according to EdgeRank Checker.
- By 2017, the average number of engagements with organic Facebook posts had fallen by more than 20% according to BuzzSumo.
To reach more pet owners, more businesses are now leveraging digital advertising because digital advertising lives where more pet owners consume information. According to Statista, people now spend 343 minutes on average daily on digital devices, including smartphones, desktops, and other digital advertising channels. In comparison, people only spend 16 minutes per day reading newspapers and 12 minutes per day reading magazines. And digital advertising attracts conversions. According to WordStream, 65% of all clicks made by users who intend to make a purchase go to paid ads.
See how simple it is to launch your own online ad campaign
5. Use Custom Content
Content is still king when it comes to reaching more people and growing the success of any business. According to Hubspot, people spend 50% of their time online engaged with custom content, and one new piece of custom content creates as much online discovery as six old pieces of content.
In their bid for content, many pet businesses turn to content curation services, which can seem like a bargain. However, there’s a hidden cost that can affect your website ranking in search engines.
Unlike content marketing, which is the process of creating and sharing new content to boost online discovery and attract more clients, content curation services do not necessarily create new content. Rather, they amass content from different sources. This simply means that the curated content you share is also being shared by many other pet businesses, and that can rank pet business websites low on search engines. Google has explicitly stated that it prefers original content over curated content because original content provides a better user experience.
Here’s where you can source original content
6. Improve Pet-Owner Engagement With Trusted Pet Health Information
One thing will always be true in business: An engaged customer tends to be a loyal customer, and today’s pet owners are always searching for trusted sources of pet health information. When you provide pet owners with the information they want through mobile-optimized appointment and customer management systems, you not only strengthen customer trust and loyalty to encourage repeat appointments and improved profitability. You gain a competitive edge in a market occupied by thousands of competing services.
Here’s where to find trusted pet health information that pet owners seek
