“Semrush was crucial in helping us boost our local and national presence in a very competitive industry.”

Kevin McReady, Sr. SEO Manager at BetterVet

Challenge: Take on big-bite competitors and own the neighborhood

BetterVet was founded in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic, with the mission of providing a better veterinary experience for pets, pet parents, and veterinary care providers. The company achieves this by providing veterinary care in the comfort of the client’s home with its 50 mobile veterinary doctors and online virtual doctors. Since the company’s inception as a mobile veterinary practice in Boston in October 2020, it has expanded to over 20 markets across the USA and cared for more than 70,000 pets.

In December 2022, BetterVet faced a challenge with its organic traffic, which was growing at less than optimal rate, causing the company to rely heavily on expensive paid advertising strategies. However, by the end of 2023, BetterVet made a significant turnaround. The company increased its organic traffic by over 2000%, while also managing to greatly reduce its ad spend. This was achieved by focusing on creating high-quality content, generating authoritative directory links, and fully optimizing all of their Google Business Profiles.

On the local side, BetterVet had to break into a very saturated market. The company competes with many established veterinary practices (both mobile and brick-and-mortar) that have been servicing their areas for decades. These are companies that have had Google Business Profiles for well over 10 years with hundreds or thousands of reviews.

Nationally, the SERP was flooded with pet-related blogs and heavy-hitting brands like PetMD, Chewy, AKC, and VCA Animal Hospital, all of which have very authoritative websites with millions of organic users.

In 2023, BetterVet identified two goals for results using Semrush:

Boost the local visibility of 23 Google Business Profiles
Skyrocket national organic search traffic, keywords, and rankings

Let’s see how BetterVet did it.

Solution: Create helpful content and optimize for local searches

BetterVet’s main focal points for increasing their online presence were:

Fix overall website health to clean up errors and old redirects
Optimize Google Business Profiles using Local SEO best practices
Improve the local ranking of BetterVet’s primary keyword “mobile vet near me”
Create high-quality, helpful content that meets Google’s EEAT signals
Generate authoritative backlinks from both national websites and local partners

Here’s the step-by-step process on how BetterVet skyrocketed organically.

Step 1: Maintain a healthy website

In order for BetterVet to start 2023 on the right foot when boosting its online presence, it needed to improve its “foundation”. This involves fixing errors on the website caused by layers of new web pages, designs, and changes.

BetterVet utilized Semrush’s Site Audit tool to identify critical errors and warnings about their site that can make crawling and indexing content difficult for search engines.

In December 2022, the site's technical health scored 69, which is not very good…

Most of the errors were caused by infinite redirect loops, 404 pages still being linked to, missing meta information, and other common site errors.

After applying technical SEO best practices over the course of a year, site health has jumped up to a health score of 93.

Semrush Site Audit comparison: December’22 Vs. December’23

Step 2: Optimize all Google Business Profiles

When the website was healthy and error-free, BetterVet turned its attention to optimizing its Google Business Profiles (GBPs). Since the company provides mobile veterinary services to major areas across the U.S., a strong local presence is critical to bringing in new clients and reducing customer acquisition costs by not relying solely on paid advertising.

Being a service-area-business (SAB) means there’s a little extra BetterVet had to do in order to improve their rankings on local map packs and “near me” searches.

To get this done, they focused on:

Adding all relevant services and variations to each GBP
Aligning the local landing page with information on the profile
Providing Google with their service area locations
Continuously obtaining 5-star reviews from happy pet parents
Answering frequently asked questions and enabling messaging
Regularly publishing pet healthcare and service-related posts

This was done for each of their 23 GBPs, helping generate new clients daily from the organic channel.

Step 3: Improve ranking of primary business keyword

With a healthy website and optimized Google Business Profiles, BetterVet needed to ensure that it ranked #1 overall for “mobile vet near me”, its primary keyword.

This term is highly valuable as searchers who type in this query seek a mobile veterinarian that services their area.

Semrush’s Keyword Overview provided all the information BetterVet needed to understand the keyword and the intent behind it. The tool's Personal Keyword Difficulty score personalized the metric to BetterVet's website and topical authority instead of showing an average score. In the case of "mobile vet near me", the difficulty is currently zero, as the domain is ranking at the top of search for the term:

Being a transactional intent keyword with local results, BetterVet needed to find a way to rank in both the Map Pack and organic results.

They implemented a mix of the following SEO best practices:

Ensuring the keyword appears in page titles and meta descriptions
Inserting the keyword in both headings and paragraphs
Internally linking to the page using descriptive anchor text
Using the keyword in image alt tags
Adding relevant frequently asked questions

After those optimizations were complete, BetterVet ended up ranking #1 on Google for their money term of “mobile vet near me”.

Step 4: Create high-quality, optimized, and helpful content

To help expand on its national visibility and rank for veterinary medicine terms, BetterVet improved its content writing process using the SEO Content Template tool.

The goal was to scale content creation and reach topical authority in key pillars. This enabled BetterVet to quickly build out SEO-focused content briefs for their writers.

With content briefs being generated in seconds rather than hours (manually), their writers then utilized the SEO Writing Assistant to create optimized copy.

By repeating this same process for all of their content needs, BetterVet saw massive growth to their resources pages.

In fact, writing SEO-friendly articles generated 1.3 million clicks and 56.7 million impressions in 2023 alone.

Step 5: Build authoritative backlinks from directories

Ranking well in Google often comes down to authority and trust, two things that can be improved with strong backlinks.

BetterVet’s approach to link-building had to be efficient and effective - gaining links from sources that will move the needle. In their case, directory links from high DA websites like Apple Maps, Bing, Foursquare, Mapquest, Yellowpages, and many more…

Semrush’s Listing Management was perfect to quickly find, connect, and appear on all of these popular directories. In the click of a button, they were able to submit hundreds of directory requests for each of their profiles.

Not only did these directory links help improve their domain authority, but they also added more reach and visibility to the BetterVet brand. These sites get hundreds of thousands, some even millions, of users per month that can now find BetterVet online.

This helped supercharge their Local SEO efforts, create a consistent NAP across multiple directories, and boost their position in the Google Map Pack.

Now, a majority of their locations are ranking #1 on Google Map Packs within their service area.

Results: 2000% organic traffic growth

In just one year, BetterVet’s organic traffic exploded by 2002%, reaching well over 1,5M users.

With the organic channel generating significantly more traffic, BetterVet was able to drastically reduce its paid ad spending to acquire new clients.
BetterVet’s organic leads increased from an average of 45 new clients per week to 85 and peaked at 99. That’s an 88% increase in organic leads.
The company now ranks for 6,427 keywords in Google’s top-3 positions and owns 2,054 Featured Snippets:

As of July 2024, BetterVet’s traffic is still growing and hitting new milestones every month.

Key Takeaways

To start improving your online presence, it’s best to build a strong foundation by maintaining a healthy website. Use the Site Audit tool to identify technical errors that can make it harder for search engines AND users to navigate your site.
Use Semrush’s Listing Management feature to find, submit, and fix high-impact directory websites. Doing so can drastically improve your local presence and domain authority, allowing your site to appear higher on search results.
Discover and target relevant business keywords with keyword research tools that display insightful keyword metrics like search volume, difficulty, and intent. These tools make keyword research easy and effective.
Create content briefs in a single click with Semrush’s SEO Content Template feature, then use that information to develop high-quality, optimized content with the SEO Writing Assistant tool.

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