Alexander Belsey

Case Study: An Analysis of the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group Website

For today's case study, I'm going to be analysing the website, and online presence, of the website for the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group, who, as the name suggests, are a group of veterinary practices who have their primary base in Kingsteignton.

The Things I Like About The Website:

There are many things which I think the website does very well, such as:

- Great use of social proof

A key aspect of today's online marketing landscape is the use of social proof, which can be defined as a, 'tactic for increasing conversions by easing the minds of worried customers.'

The Kingsteignton Veterinary Group's website features some great social proof on it's website homepage, consisting of some (very impressive) customer reviews, and an embedded snapshot of their Facebook page:

These are excellent additions to the website which provide a great deal of social proof, thereby helping to put potential customer's mind at rest and further establish Kingsteignton Veterinary Group's expertise.

Another great touch which provides some extra social proof to demonstrate Kingsteignton Veterinary Group's prowess in their field, is the use of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons accreditation badge in the header of every page of the website:

Showing this badge to their website visitors is likely to help win their trust and foster customer confidence; both of which are two invaluabe commodities.

As a consequence of all these fantastic indicators of social proof, website visitors are much more likely to become valuable clients.

- Very clean, clear and trustworthy design

When your business does something as sensitive as providing care for poorly animals, some of whom will be beloved household pets, it's vitally important that your website communicates trust and responsibility to it's audience, and the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website does a great job of this through it's clean, clear layout, and liberal use of whitespace.

The end result is a nice, professional-looking website which doesn't overwhelm it's visitors, and features some nice images of cute animals that convey a warm, caring and relaxing atmosphere.

A calming design style such as this is, I feel, perfect for a business of this type.

- Having the phone number in the website's header allows for easy contact

A lot of websites I look at make the same crucial error; they fail to put their phone number in a prominent place on every page of their website.

Thankfully, Kingsteignton Veterinary Group have not made this mistake, as their website displays their phone number (which, conveniently, is open 24 hours a day) in the header, and it's easy to see on every page of the site.

This is important for two reasons: Firstly, displaying contact details prominently on every page of your website is another way to build trust with your audience, as it shows you're not hiding, and that you are a legitimate business, and secondly, having these contact details readily available at all times means that if someone looking at the website likes what they see, and wants to get in touch about potentially becoming a client, then they can do so quickly and easily.

- The website has a blog

Having a blog on your website is a great idea. By having a regularly updated blog, you're showing Google that your website is active and is regularly being maintained. This helps your website to earn Google's 'trust', which should help it to rank higher, over time.

Adding more entries to your blog will also create more pages on your website, which is useful because having a large, authoritative website is also a strong 'trust' signal to Google, which will help to show Google that yours is a legitimate website that genuinely helps it's visitors, and consistently provides them with value over time.

By winning Google's trust in this way, their algorithm should consider your website as being worthy of attention, with the result that you will often find yourself ranking progressively higher and higher in the Google search results as your quality blog posts help to win more and more of Google's trust.

It is for these reasons then, among others, that I am delighted that the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website has a blog which is regularly updated and is full of high-quality, useful content.

Well done guys, great work!

- Lots of excellent info about the company, their staff and their services

Whenever people are looking for someone to take care of their animals, it's very likely they'll want to properly research the vets they're looking to hire.

Thankfully, Kingsteignton Veterinary Group's website contains a lot of information about their company history, their services, their staff and their specialities.

They have detailed about us, faq, why choose us and meet the team pages, and this is great, because giving all this information about themselves will help to build their brand, win their customer's trust, establish credibility and reassure people that they are a legitimate business who excel at what they do.

- The interactive pet symptom guide is excellent

The homepage of the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website includes an excellent interactive tool which lets people select their chosen animal and what their symptoms are, then tells them how severe the likely cause is, and encourages them to get in touch and book an appointment:

This is an excellent tool for many reasons, but here are just two of them;

Firstly, it's very, very useful for people who have an unwell animal and want to know what the likely cause is, and secondly, it's a great way to get new customers, as it tells people what is likely to be wrong with their animals, then immediately gives them a way to get straight through to Kingsteignton Veterinary Group to book an appointment.

Having tested it a few times, it also seems to function very well, with no bugs that I observed.

In fact, this tool is so good, I think they should make it appear much more prominently on their website, such as including a link to it on every page of the site along with a bit of title text to encourage people to use the tool to find out what's wrong with their animals. Making these additions should help to generate more leads in a way that provides website visitors with a lot of value.

As well as promoting this tool more, there are a few other changes which I would suggest are made to the website.

The Things Which Could Be Improved

- Include the social proof on every page of the website

As mentioned in the above section, I'm very impressed with the social proof on the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group homepage that comes in the form of the customer reviews and embedded facebook posts on the right hand side of the webpage, and with the RCVS accreditation badge which appears in the header of the website.

However, while the accreditation badge is present at the top of every page of the website, the customer reviews and facebook posts are not; they only appear on the homepage.

I feel this is a missed opportunity, and that the increase in trust, credibility and customer confidence which this social proof provides should be utilised on every page possible, otherwise it will make no impact at all unless people happen to visit the homepage.

Adding this extra social proof to all possible pages should help Kingsteignton Veterinary Group to generate more leads through their website due to the increased levels of trust and credibility that will likely be created.

- Link to the 'Request An Appointment' form on every page of the website

There is a great 'Request An Appointment' form on the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website on it's own dedicated webpage.

This form is a very good way of getting website visitors to book appointments and become customers, which is why (similar to my suggestion for the interactive pet symptom guide) I think it should be promoted more.

A very effective way to generate leads from the website would be to include a link to this appointment request form within the content of every relevant webpage.

For example, while this webpage about puppy parties (what a great idea, by the way), does include a link to this appointment request form within the content, other important pages which people are likely to look at, and which provide a natural opportunity to suggest the website visitor requests an appointment, such as the why choose us, farm and equine, clinical and medical services and all of the well pet services pages, do not.

This is a shame, as giving people the chance to request an appointment on every one of these pages is a natural, organic thing to do, and it's a feature which is likely to increase the amount of business Kingsteignton Veterinary Group gets from their website.

- Change the contact form button text

The Request An Appointment form currently uses the word 'Submit' as it's button text, and this is an issue because studies have shown that using 'Submit' as the button text on contact forms significantly lowers form completion rates, so I would therefore also suggest that Kingsteignton Veterinary Group change their form button text to read something else, like perhaps 'Send Info' for example.

Making this change should increase the number of people who complete the form to book an appointment.

Changes To The Website's Online Presence

In this section, I'll analyse how the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group's website is performing in Google's search results and outline anything they can do to improve their search engine optimisation (SEO).

Firstly, I need to define a term.

The organic search results are the blue links which appear every time you do a Google search, like in the example below where I've searched for 'BBC':

Ranking on the first page of organic search results for certain search queries can be very, very valuable indeed. If, for example, you are a lawyer based in London, and your website ranks at number 1 in Google's organic search results for the search term 'london lawyer', then you can expect to receive tens, or even hundreds of thousands worth of business every year through just this single search term. And no matter what your line of business is, there are always certain search terms relevant to your business which will make you A LOT of money, if you can rank near the top of page 1 of Google's search results for them. And ranking on page 1 really is crucial, as 95% of the website traffic from Google searches goes to the websites that are ranked on page 1 of the search results, while those ranked in the top 4 positions on page 1 get over 70% of the search traffic. So then, what are the important search terms which Kingsteignton Veterinary Group could do with ranking their website on page 1 of the organic search results for? Well, as they are a veterinary practice with branches in Kingsteignton, Chudleigh and Bovey Tracey, let's start by seeing where they rank for keywords of this type, such as 'kingsteignton vets' and 'vets in kingsteignton'.

Using one of my favourite tools, Serpstat, I've been able to find that Kingsteignton Veterinary Group's website dominates page 1 of Google's search results for the keyword 'kingsteignton vets', as it currently occupies 5 of the 10 search results, including all of the crucial top 5 positions:

This is a great result, and what makes it even better is the fact thatthis keyword is searched for 480 times every month in Google UK, meaning that is must be generating a fair amount of business for Kingsteignton Veterinary Group on a regular, ongoing basis.

Next, I've used another of my favourite tools, a Google Chrome extension called Fatrank to see where the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website ranks for 'vets in kingsteignton' and as you can see, it also ranks at position number 1:

Awesome!

I've next used Fatrank to see where Kingsteignton Veterinary Group rank for search terms relating to vets in both Chudleigh and Bovery Tracey:

Again, Kingsteignton Veterinary Group are ranking in a number 1 position, this time for 'chudleigh vets', but their rankings for the search terms relating to Bovey Tracey are disappointing.

I've used Keywords Everywhere to find out how many people are searching for vets in Bovey Tracey every month, and the results are below:

The results show that 50 people every month are searching for vets in Bovey Tracey, but as Kingsteignton Veterinary Group are ranking in only positions 5 and 8 for these keywords, it's likely they are losing out on business to their competitors in these instances.

If they could be ranking between positions 1-3 for these keywords relating to vets in Bovey Tracey, it's very likely they would secure more of these potential customers who, every month, are looking to hire a vet in Bovey Tracey.

Next, using Serpstat, I've also been able to identify a lot more missed opportunities which Kingsteignton Veterinary Group could be benefiting from.

Doing a search for keywords which receive at least 100 Google searches a month from within the UK, and for which the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website ranks in positions 11-30 for (i.e. on pages 2-3 of Google's search results), I've identified 57 such keywords, which have a total search volume running into several tens of thousands every month.

The full list is too long to put here, but you can see a snapshot of it below:

By improving their rankings for these keywords by only a moderate amount, Kingsteignton Veterinary Group could get several thousand extra visitors to their website every month, who they then have the chance to convert into valuable customers.

So, the question now is, how can Kingsteignton Veterinary Group improve their rankings in this way?

The answer, is to do 3 things:

- Improve on-page SEO

- Improve off-page SEO

- Add more text content to certain pages of their website

Firstly, let's take a minute to define terms again.

On-page SEO can be defined as 'the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines,' while off-page SEO 'refers to links and other external signals' that are not on the website itself.

To answer the question of whether the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website has well-optimised on-page SEO that is conducive to it ranking highly in Google's search results, I'm going to use Serpstat again. Serpstat has an awesome on-page SEO audit tool, which I used to assess the

Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website, and it gave me these results:

As you can see, the website only scores 36%, and it has 328 high priority errors.

To be honest, this is a poor score, and the large number of high priority errors will be a major anchor dragging the rankings of the website down.

If they are fixed, then it is very likely the the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website will rank progressively higher over time for a wide range of keywords, thereby bringing many more visitors to the website every month, who may then become valuable customers.

As for off-page SEO, the most significant factor determining how high a website ranks in Google's search results is the number, and quality of, links back to your website that other high-quality websites are giving you. According to Serpstat, the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website currently has 76 other websites linking back to it, from 266 individual webpages.

The thing is, you can never have enough backlinks from other high-quality, authoritative websites, because the more of these you have, the higher your website will rank in Google! Given this situation, I would therefore suggest that the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website needs some more backlinks to it from other high-quality websites; ideally ones in the same industry, or a closely related one.

Another factor which determines how high a webpage ranks in Google for a particular keyword, is how many words of content relevant to the keyword there are on the webpage.

This trend can be observed in the following graph:

While it's not always necessary to make every page of your website have 2000+ words of content in order to improve it's SEO, a good rule of thumb is to try to ensure all your webpages have at least 1000 words of unique content each, if you want them to rank highly in Google's search results.

I used this tool to determine how many words the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website had on several on it's main pages, and although some of them had over this 1000 word target (such as this one and this one), a number of others did not.

One example of a page which did not meet this 1000 word target, is this page about worming puppies.

Using Serpstat, I've found that this page ranks for some keywords which are searched for over 2000 times a month in total, but that it's ranking too low down the search results for these keywords to bring any real quantity of people to the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website:

It is very likely that increasing the amount of relevant text content on this page to reach the 1000+ word target will cause it to rise significantly up the Google rankings for these keywords over time, thereby bringing more people to the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website, where they may then become customers.

Additionally, there are almost certainly many more pages on the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website beyond the ones identified, whose search engine rankings could be greatly improved by following this 3-part SEO prescription of improving the website's on-page SEO, getting more backlinks from other high-quality, authoritative websites in the same (or a closely related) industry, and adding more unique content to the important pages on the website which currently have less than 1000 words on them, until they reach this benchmark.

By following this formula, Kingsteignton Veterinary Group can get many hundreds more visitors to their website every month, rising to many thousands more per month over time.

Conclusion Over the course of this review, I have outlined ways in which Kingsteignton Veterinary Group can improve their website and online presence to get more customers. Although there are many things I like about their website's design in it's current form, there are a few alterations which I think will help to turn a greater number of their website visitors into sales leads and customers; namely, showing all their social proof on every page of the website, linking to their 'Request An Appointment' form more often across the website, changing the button text of the form from 'Submit' to something else, like perhaps 'Send Info' for example, and promoting their excellent interactive pet symptoms tool more. There are also a number of methods which could be used to ensure that the Kingsteignton Veterinary Group website ranks higher in the Google search results, and consequently gains an increase in attention, exposure and website traffic. In particular, gaining more backlinks from other high-quality websites in a relevant industry, improving the website's on-page SEO and raising the word count of the important pages on the website which currently have under 1000 words on them, are all measures which would provide Kingsteignton Veterinary Group with substantial benefits. As outlined, they are presently missing out on a number of opportunities to get a good deal more highly targeted and very relevant visitors to their website every month; visitors who could easily turn into lucrative clients.