How we work with a clinic

Before anything: the free ranking check

It starts with an email from you with the clinic's name and town. Usually within two business days we send back a short report laid out as a SOAP note (there is a complete example for a fictional clinic). It is built from public information only: the search results people in your town see, your Google Business Profile as the public sees it, your website on a phone, and your reviews. We do not ask for logins, and we do not need them.

Read it and decide. If the answer is no, reply "no" and we won't write again. If you want to talk, we take twenty minutes on a call, and after the call we send a written plan for the first 90 days and a written fee. The plan is specific to the clinic: the ten searches we will track, the pages we will write, the profile changes we will make, and the review routine we will set up with your front desk.

The first week

You add us as a manager on the Google Business Profile from your own Google account. Google's rules make managers nearly as capable as owners, with one exception that protects you: a manager cannot add or remove users or remove the profile, and only an owner can remove a manager. You stay the owner. We do not ask for the owner login, and we do not create a profile on the clinic's behalf.

We read everything already on the profile and the website against what the clinic really offers, and we send you a list of every change we propose before we make it: the primary category (Veterinarian or Animal hospital, chosen for what the practice is, not for both as keywords), the services and their names, hours including the holiday hours Google prompts you to confirm, the description, which photos stay and which go. You approve the list or edit it. Then we make the changes, and Google's review of edits usually takes minutes but can take up to 30 days.

In the same week we set up a search ranking tracker for the ten searches in the plan and a baseline from your profile's own performance report: how many times people tapped to call, asked for directions and clicked through to the website in the previous three months. Those are the numbers we report against.

Google Business Profile Help: owners and managers; edits and reviews of edits; performance report.

The first 90 days

Days 1 to 30 are the profile, the technical floor of the website, and the review routine. The technical floor means the site loads in a reasonable time on a phone, every button and form works, the structured data tells Google that this page is a veterinary practice at a street address with these hours, there are no duplicate pages, and the clinic's name, address and phone number are the same everywhere online. We fix what we can inside the existing site; if the site cannot be fixed, we tell you what it would take and you decide. The review routine goes to the front desk as a one-page card: the exact words, the clinic's Google review link and QR code, when to ask (after the visit, not at the counter), and the two things never to do (offer anything for a review, or sort clients before asking).

Days 31 to 60 are pages. One page for each kind of visit the clinic wants more of, in the words clients use, each one read and approved by a veterinarian at the practice before it is published. We draft to the strictest rule we know and flag the words boards commonly restrict (emergency, specialist, best, guarantees); a veterinarian at your practice approves every page and profile change against your state's rules before it goes live. The after-hours guide covers the emergency wording in detail.

Days 61 to 90 are the town pages for the places clients really drive in from, the first reply routine for reviews, and the first look at what moved. Profile changes can show in the map within days. New pages take weeks to months to be crawled and ranked; Google itself says crawling can take days to weeks and that requesting a crawl guarantees nothing. We tell you which is which in every report, so a quiet month on the pages is never a surprise.

Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs.

Every month after that

The profile gets checked, because Google can change a listing based on public reports and only notify the owner afterwards. New photos go up when the clinic has them. One or two pages are published or revised, approved first. Review replies go out within a few days of each review, written so that they thank the person and move anything about a case, a diagnosis or a bill to a phone call, and never say or imply that the reviewer is a client. The AVMA's ethics principles say a veterinarian must protect the personal privacy of clients and not reveal confidences, and Texas rule 573.28 says the same for Texas licensees; a public reply that says "we were glad to see Biscuit on Tuesday" is the kind of disclosure both rules address, so we do not write one.

Then the report: one page, the same layout every month. The ten searches and where the clinic stands in the map and the web results. The profile's own counts (calls tapped, directions requested, website clicks) against the baseline. What we published. What is next. Every number carries its source, and the report never claims a visit or a new client that the profile report does not count, because Google counts taps on the call button, not phone calls that became appointments.

We ask for about thirty minutes of a veterinarian's time a month, to approve pages. The rest is ours.

AVMA, Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics, section 3.7.2; 22 Texas Administrative Code, Chapter 573, Subchapter C.

What we do not do, and why

We do not run Google Ads or Local Services Ads, Facebook or Instagram, email campaigns or text campaigns. Local Services Ads are open to licensed clinics in the "Veterinarian" category, and if you want ads we will tell you what we know so you can hire an ads agency. We do search only, so the fee and the report cover one thing.

We do not write anything that promises an outcome. Texas rule 573.30 names "a prediction of future success or a guarantee that satisfaction or a cure will result" as misleading advertising; Florida rule 61G18-21.001 bars advertising that "creates false or unjustified expectations of beneficial treatment or successful cures"; the AVMA's principles say advertising is ethical only when free of misleading claims. We also do not guarantee rankings, because Google says no one can.

We do not use the word "specialist" for anyone who is not currently board-certified: the AVMA's ethics principles (3.6.2) reserve the word for board-certified veterinarians, and Texas, Florida and California make it a licensing matter. We do not build pages for towns where the clinic has no presence. We do not ask for, touch, store or need patient records, and we do not want access to the practice management system. We do not solicit Yelp reviews, because Yelp forbids it. We do not reply to a review with anything a client has not already made public. And we do not take two general practices in the same town, because we cannot work for both.

AVMA, Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics, 3.2.4 and 3.6.2; 22 TAC 573.30; Fla. Admin. Code 61G18-21.001; Cal. Bus. and Prof. Code 4883; Google Local Services Ads Help, eligible categories.

The fee

One flat monthly fee, quoted in writing after the free check, sized to the clinic and the plan. No setup fee, no percentage of revenue, no fee per lead or per new client, no minimum term: 30 days' notice from either side ends it, and nothing has to be handed back, because the profile, the website and every page we wrote were always in the clinic's name. We do not publish a price list because a one-doctor clinic with a sound website and a three-doctor clinic whose site needs rebuilding are different jobs; we do publish the rule that the number in the quote is the number on every invoice until we both agree to change it.

Everything else owners ask, including what happens if a corporate group already runs your marketing, is on the questions page.