Lakeside Animal Hospital’s old website was a very outdated canned (pre-built) website, which did not accurately represent the high end welcoming physical location of the hospital or the highly qualified doctors and staff. We needed to be able to showcase LAH’s love for taking care of animal’s health in a way that appealed to their target market who love their pets like family. In addition to the low budget feel of the old website, it had a major load time issue that kept visitors waiting up to 10 seconds before the website finished loading. The slow load times, along with the improper setup of the onsite SEO was causing LAH to rank so low in search results that their name showed in 4th position for a direct search of “Lakeside Animal Hospital”. You know things are way off if you can’t even rank in the first position for your own company name. In addition to all of this, the mobile version of there website was not very well laid out and hard for visitors to navigate. When we took on this project, we knew it would be one of the biggest transformations we’ve ever completed!
Lakeside Animal Hospital’s website gives online visitors an interactive experience that makes the website and the hospital’s brand more memorable and appealing. As the animals from LAH’s logo walk, fly, and run across the screen, each visitor will experience a very slight dose of dopamine, which results from the unexpected surprise of the animations. Anything you can do to make your website more “alive” and memorable is sure to increase user attention and retention of your brans and/or message. The custom design we created revolved around LAH target market of younger online visitors who are looking for a new vet or have recently gotten a new pet. They are also one of the areas only Vets who specialize in exotic animals, so we made that a focal point of the new website. The unique and professional design of the website portrays the exact image LAH wanted for their brand.
Lakeside Animal Hospital had two significant issues with their old website that had an extremely negative impact on their SEO scores. This first issue was the terribly slow load times that Google penalizes, and the second was an improper setup of their on-site SEO. We improved their load times by 843% from 13.2 seconds down to 1.4 seconds. LAH’s SEO ranking on the old website was so bad that they did not even rank in the first position for their own name. Their Facebook page was ranking higher than their own website, and you should always send your potential new clients to your own website because you own and control all of its content. After we launched the new website, Google moved it into the first spot for their name, which should have been a given, and they’ve also seen considerable increases in ranking for their other high priority keywords.
Most do not realize that it’s possible to have a website that is coded improperly but still able to be seen. Even though Lakeside Animal Hospital’s old website was on the same platform as their new website (WordPress) it had 8 Errors and 2 Warnings on HTML5 Validator, which should not be the case for any professionally developed website, now their new website is coded correctly. It only has one error, which is a false positive that comes up for all WordPress websites (the bad value for rel on link false positive error). Improperly coded websites may temporarily show correctly in some browsers, but the long-term stability and security of a website may be compromised if the website does not use proper syntax in it’s code. We always ensure that our websites have no major coding errors or warnings.
After going through our marketing and strategic branding program, we determined Lakeside Animal Hospital had three client personas. The first was a “standard” client who may be interested in traditional services for common pets like cats and dogs. The second was clients who need veterinarian services for exotic animals, and the third was the millennial market who may have just gotten their own pet for the first time. The Millennial market client persona was segmented out due to the higher likelihood that the millennial market would be more likely to use an internet search to find a vet for the first time. The new website was designed to be appealing, and capture leads from these primary target markets.
Now Lakeside Animal Hospital has a website that loads lightning fast, is very memorable, is SEO optimized, mobile-optimized, and gives LAH a professional image with the overall feeling that their client’s animals will be well taken care of. They rank number 1 for their own name and also have seen improvement in SEO rankings for other essential keywords like local vet, Richmond veterinarian, and other relevant keywords for their business. They had a previous relationship with an online advertising agency and they were able to seamlessly integrate their marketing solution into the new website because all of our websites are optimized for SEO and online marketing.
