What do you want your website to do?

Dr James Ramsden at 3:03PM Tue 4th February

As the story unfolds, our next step is how you look online and how that influences your business. Kings and Queens make an effort to appear regal in order to convey a clear message to their subjects - it's the way they dress, move, speak and relate to others. To be the leader in animal health care the same principles apply - rather than a crown and a sceptre, you need to display something similar, something special... but what is it? 

Before we go there, let's recap. The key point from last month is that when searching online, most vets are invisible to a large chunk of consumers. This needs to be sorted out first - and it's relatively straightforward. Once that's done, more people will start coming to your site and you can turn to addressing how you look.

But why is it important how you look? The reason is that it will make a huge, measureable difference to how you're perceived, valued and treated in the community. At a measureable level, it will make a huge difference to how much money you make.

In order to understand how you should appear online, you need to answer one question:

"What is the most important thing you want someone to do when they visit your website?"

Surveys that we conduct with vets produce an array of responses:

• "to find information"
• "to tell the community about us"
• "I don't know"
• "buy products online"
• "get them to call us"

Have a think about what your answer is - this is your homework for the week. I will also run a live poll on this issue in our webinar later in Feb - it's a lot of fun as you get to see the results instantly and then we'll discuss the pros and cons of each response.

Looking forward to our next encounter,

James