← Veterinary Business Podcast
Veterinary Business Podcast
From Search to Smart Assistants: How AI Is Rewriting the Veterinary Client Journey
00:25:45
Loading summary
Transcript15 lines
- [00:00]
Don Disha
Foreigner who chooses your veterinary practice never really searches the way they used to. Instead of scrolling through 10 websites or comparing multiple clinics, they may now be asking an AI assistant what to do, where to go, and which practice to trust. And that shift is changing the veterinary client journey faster than many practices realize. Welcome back to the Veterinary Business Podcast. I'm your host for this session, Don Disha. And joining us for this conversation is none other than our very own co host, Naren Arul Raja, CEO of Echo Marketing, founder of the Veterinary Business Institute. And Naren has spent his career helping independent veterinary practices improve their digital presence, attract better clients, and build more sustainable growth in a changing marketing landscape. Now today, Naren will walk us through how AI is changing the way pet owners discover, evaluate and choose veterinary practices. Naran, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you on.
- [01:12]
Naren Arul Raja
Thank you so much. I think this topic, how AI is rewriting the veterinary client journey, or how veterinary practices are being chosen, I think is a really important topic because it is happening as we speak. Thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation. Don't foreign.
- [01:33]
Don Disha
Absolutely. It's a pretty exciting topic. Now, how is the client journey evolving with AI from the moment a pet owner has a concern to the point they choose a veterinary practice?
- [01:46]
Naren Arul Raja
This is a great, great question. Right. I still remember the early days of search and dating myself. I think Google became a company in 1998. So that's almost 30 years ago. And I remember this in 2000, somebody just told me about this thing called Google and I started playing with it. I remember in those days, you know, the only search you could do if you're looking for anything to do with veterinarians is in a veterinary veterinarian city name, right? So that's the amount of depth or precise question you could ask Google over time. You know, Google built millions of servers and, you know, invested, I guess, hundreds of billions of dollars in being able to answer every detailed question you can ever imagine and answer it precisely so you don't to go figuring out those answers. And what AI has done is accelerate that shift. Because what is AI? AI is artificial intelligence. And what it's doing is it's able to go through all the information on the Internet, all the information that's available in the world, and figure out what the exact precise answer is for your question. And again, I don't want to get into large language models and how it works, even though I have a computer science degree. But just understand that AI is this genie that can tell us anything precisely. You know, so you don't have to go and figure things out. So when, you know, humans are, you know, known for one thing, which is anytime we give them a tool that makes a massive difference, they start using it and using it and using it more and more. So if you look at Google search volume, thanks to AI, it's up 15, 20% in the last year. I mean, their stock price is now the second most valuable company on the planet. Why? We use Google billions and billions of times a day and we don't really care if the answer is coming from AI, coming from Google Maps, coming from regular search, or coming from, you know, there are two parts of AI, AI Mode and AI Overview. AI Overview is the simple quick answer from AI. AI mode is where it goes and does deep research and gives you a much more thorough answer. And we are using it literally 12 plus billion times a day. So that's the world we live in. So as consumers get more used to being able to get precise answers for what they want, they are becoming more demanding. In other words, they don't want to go to the wrong website, they don't want to be recommended the wrong business, they don't even want to have to click multiple times. So a lot of times the answers are even embedded. So for example, if you look at Google Maps, you don't need to go to the website. You can literally click that and call the office. You can literally read how many stars they have, how many reviews they have, and look at some of the recent reviews or some of the most popular reviews. So Google is making it so easy where the number of clicks you have to do, because in Google's mind, the more they have to click, the less happy the customer is going to be because now they have to go discover things. Google wants you to not to have to discover things and for you to depend on Google. Of course the other AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, they're all doing this. But the reason I focused on Google is because Google is 20, 25 times bigger than these other gu. And of course we don't want to ignore the other guys in case they become big. But I really, really think when it comes to the consumer side of AI, it's going to be impossible to use Google. Why? Because people are creatures of habit. When they use a product, you know, billions of, you know, like a dozen times every day and it gets better and better and gives them better and better answers and helps them even more and faster and so forth, they have less reason to go to a Third party. So and also Google has all the website owners on its side, all the people who have been doing anything to with Internet marketing on its side because they have been using Google tools to build their marketing, build how things work. And Google also has provided tools like Google Analytics that again the website owners can use to, you know, really master and do well here. So things like the move towards zero click search, the move towards answers versus, you know, links, these are all driving a different way of people using it. So this is going to get even more interesting. There's going to be the haves and the have nots. The haves are the ones, you know, pre AI it was around 5% of people got 95% of the free business from, you know, search engines like Google. But I think that number is going to shrink to even 3% which is good for Google. Now even more people have to buy ads as the only other way to get, you know, clients walking in. The problem with ads is a, in my experience it's five to ten times more expensive than you know, you showing up in the top 3% and you really dominating Google. And I think that number is even growing now. I think it's becoming even 10 times more expensive. Why? Google wants to charge more and more money for every click and make more and more money. And the second thing is people know it's an ad for ethical reasons. Google can't not call it an ad. So when, the minute it's labeled as an ad or you know, sponsored link or whatever, people don't trust it. So you're going to have a lot of people, no showing, you're going to have a lot of tire kickers. You're going to have like, you know, people coming to your website and leaving because the tiniest things, you know, turns them off and Google doesn't care. Remember, the more people Google can have clicked and go to your website, the more money it makes. So they don't care that they come and leave. So these are all the reasons why I think you have to adapt in this AI first world, right?
- [07:10]
Don Disha
Links to answers and zero click searches. That's what we are in for as we head towards an AI age. So let's also talk about AI assistants, right? AI assistants are recommending businesses. So what determines whether a veterinary practice gets recommended or overlooked? What are we looking at there?
- [07:33]
Naren Arul Raja
Yeah, that's a great, great question. I think I'm going to get a little technical here and share some technical things and feel free to take notes, feel free to see if these things are happening. Or later on, I'll give you a way for you to find out if these things are happening or not. First thing that has become even more important is what Google and the big players in the Internet called structured data, right? Google is going through billions of websites, so much information. So it needs a way to make sense of it all. So one of the ways it makes sense of it all is through a methodology called nap. NAP stands for name, address, phone number. There are many, many websites on the Internet, like Yelp, like City Search, like Google, like Facebook, that have listings of businesses. So they have a name for your business, they have an address for your business, and they have a phone number for business. And unfortunately, these, you know, there's probably like 100 plus top, you know, websites where your name, address and phone number are listed. They don't work for you. They try to make money through ads. So they really have no incentive to help you because you don't pay them. And, you know, and it's not how the world works. So you have to now manually go in and check your name, check your address and phone number and make sure it's precise. Like for example, if you in your address in one place, road is road, the other place it's RD and so forth, that's not consistent structured data. So you get ding for it. Now we do what we call a marketing strategy meeting and we look for these things. Like a lot of times when we notice a practice is not in that top 3%, they suck at NAP. Now, NAP is not the only thing. There are other things, but nap is a huge thing. So we have a massive team of people who are monitoring these things. Like recently I was talking to a client who has been with us for a couple of years. We are managing 60 different NAP profiles for that, meaning we're checking them consistently. We are looking for any kind of issues that crop up. Because remember, these are all independent websites run by independent people with all kinds of tools and automations and so forth. So a lot of times you don't even create the problem, but the problem gets created, you know, and it's all like, Internet is this huge blob of, you know, things working together, you know, in a very disconnected way. So is anybody watching it? Anybody fixing it? And 99% of the time when we do the marketing strategy meeting, none of the people we take on as clients have anybody on top of this. And the reason is it's hard. And most marketing companies don't tell the clients the hard things because of course, if they do tell the clients, the hard things, they have to now be accountable for it so they don't even talk about it. So now we take a different approach. Our entire focus is in helping our clients get into that top 3% when it comes to AI search, regular search and like dominate, like crush the competition. So of course we focus on it because you know, to dominate consistently for every single client and have every single client rank for 100 or more keywords or 100 or more different kinds of searches, you can't ignore this. This is so important. The next thing I would look at is, you know, reviews. Reviews are becoming more important today and especially what I call paragraph live reviews or love letter reviews. Why in those paragraph reviews people may have used phrases like they treated me like family emergency care. And Google knows these are the sentiments people are looking at when they're making either it's a service or the type of service like emergency care or it's the sentiment like treat me like family that people want to know when they're making a choice. So Google will even highlight these sentiments. And we are noticing both Google's AI, AI overview and AI mode as well as these independent AI search engines also looking at it to decide who gets shown and who doesn't. It's not the only thing. The other thing that they look at even more closely is content. And I'll get to that next so. And the quality of the content and how it's written and all of that stuff. But I'll get into that technical side yet next. So focus on getting 10 or more 5 star paragraph reviews every month. I think that should be the minimum number because in Google size, if you don't, if you're not getting 10 or more high quality five star paragraph reviews, that's really feeding it, you know, information on that. You still are what you used to be. You still are awesome. And these are the seven reasons why people love you. Then Google starts, you know, deprioritizing you. It doesn't happen quickly, but if you stop getting consistent reviews over time, we see a hit. Now if you're doing everything else, this might be, you know, not be as important. And it's kind of like getting into a top university, right? If your sat is like 16 out of 1600 out of 1600 and you know your GPA is like perfect and interview is perfect. Maybe you didn't essay was not that great. Maybe they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because you are crushing everything else. So that's a way to think about it and Definitely continue to lean in on getting these reviews. I know it's not easy, but we have a methodology. If anyone is interested, ask us for the methodology. Just go to the website and we'll send you. How we encourage our clients to get five star paragraph love letter reviews. The last thing is content, content, content. And here AI has become a problem. Like Google knows 10 miles away that a content is written by AI or it's written by humans. How do they know it? Of course that's a proprietary secret. But if it's written by AI, they beat you up. They really punish you for it. Why? Because Google wants you to add value and be helpful. So if you are just using an AI to write it, of course you're not adding any value. So why would Google send you traffic? This is why they hated copied content. You know that has been going on for years and years. Even copy more than 5% of something from any other website or even if they copy from you, both of you will get penalized. Why? Remember, Google makes so much money from ads so they have to find more and more reasons and make the criteria for you being in the top 3%, you know, more and more stringent so they find every reason to beat you up. So please, please, please a don't use AI content. Have content written by real people who know the topic, who can write things the way Google wants. And last but not least, goog wants to know the content is associated with an expert. Like you have a degree, you are board certified. So make sure Google knows that. Make sure the university, when you graduate, all those things are written in the way Google loves. So there's an acronym called eat. Google loves acronyms. So they tell you how to do that. So your pages, your, you know, on your website has to include that. The other point I would make is when you're getting extra education or qualification, try to get it from, you know, universities. Why? Google believes that universities that have been around for a long time and therefore must be good versus some person who ran a weekend course that Google really has no way to verify if they are an expert or not. Right. So unfortunately that's a bias that helps universities. I'm not saying universities are better or not, it's just that it's a reality we have to deal with. So continue to create original content, continue to publish them, make sure it's not AI driven and make sure it's linked to your qualifications the way Google wants it linked.
- [14:36]
Don Disha
That's great news for a lot of our listeners, our DVMs, you know, who already has have that credential to their name, you can make even more better use out of it through publishing real original content. Now Naran, how should practices rethink their website and content strategy to stay relevant in an AI driven discovery environment?
- [15:01]
Naren Arul Raja
You know, that's a great, great, great question. So you know, in an AI driven environment, one of the no nos, right? I already talked about one of the no nos, which is, you know, using AI generated content or copied content. You do this, you go to jail, forget it, you're not going to be seen, you're going to become invisible, you become, you know, you get blacklisted. So and the other mistake that people make is they try to focus on one particular page or one particular keyword. Now Google used to look at every page individually. They had something called Google Lighthouse score, they gave that score. Now Google replaced it with something called Google Crux. Now Google Crux looks at your entire website and looks at if the entire website. It's almost like all or nothing. If your entire website doesn't comply with everything Google wants, you get penalized and you are not found. Why is that? Google realized that people, you know, want context, want everything to be, you know, making sense. So, so it's looking at your entire website. Is it loading fast? Does it have detailed information? I'll get into the nuts and bolts and if you don't have those things, it'll punish you. So the first thing is focus on the user and what they really want. Don't try to gimmick Google by focusing on keywords. A lot of people make the mistake of just focusing on keyword versus being useful and giving people information on the topics they're interested in. So, so the people who do the right thing and do what Google want rank for hundreds of keywords. Every one of our clients, you know, before the 12 months is out is ranking for minimum 100. And today I have clients who rank for 600, 700 different searches and different search phrases that are very, very popular on Google. So this is what's called long tail. So when you focus on intent, you do end up dominating, not just like, let's say for a particular type of care, 30 different phrases or keywords and searches related to that and you become overwhelming. And of course when people see you again and again, this is why the top 3%, their cost of acquiring a new client is literally one out, you know, 10% of acquiring a new client with the alternative, which is Google Ads. The other thing I would focus on is, you know, I already touched on it, you know, first party, meaning it's, it's real humans writing original content the way Google wants, linking it to your qualifications and doing it consistently, not doing it once and forgetting about it, but just continuing to add and add and add become more and more useful. Google loves a site that continues to grow versus just somebody publishes it. Let's get near the mic and nothing happens afterwards. Do you want me to redo that question again?
- [17:34]
Don Disha
No, no, you're on the point. I'm sorry I had to interrupt you because.
- [17:39]
Naren Arul Raja
Okay, let me just redo that because I know, I'm sure you have to cut the mic part. The next thing is prioritize human written content. We talked about why Google punishes you if you use AI content and also why Google punishes you if you use duplicate content or copy content. So don't do that. It's original content. Deep answers to deep questions like FAQs. Showcase your knowledge, showcase your authority, and of course link it to your bio. These are all things that Google really, really appreciates. Don't regurgitate, don't copy paste. And the other thing Google cares about is consistently doing something, just like I said, consistently get reviews consistently make sure your marketing, company, companies adding the right kind of content that Google wants on a regular basis. Finally, I think we also have to realize that, you know, if you are transactional and you are targeting this keyword or that keyword, you get penalized. And you want to make sure it's much more focused on making your consumers happy, giving them what they want. And also Google is looking at the full journey and of course so are chatgpt and stuff. Can people easily book an appointment? Can they easily call you? Can they read you reviews? So are you kind of connecting the loop? Are you making it easy for people to do business with you? Of course the technical side is also important, like if your site doesn't load quickly or, you know, it's wonderful on, you know, desktop, but it's not really wonderful on that tiny, you know, phone screen, you know, Chrome browser on this particular device. So Google, Google and all these engines are looking at the experience, you know, are they going to love me for sending, recommending that particular business or are they going to hate me? If the person is going to love you because not just the reviews, but rather more important, importantly, their experience online is awesome, then you're going to get brownie points. So these are all the things you should focus on as we move more and more into this AI world.
- [19:28]
Don Disha
Right? Thank you very much for those points. There Naran. I mean, now let's get into some of the practical ways our veterinary practices can use AI internally to improve marketing efficiency without losing that human touch, which is so rare nowadays.
- [19:48]
Naren Arul Raja
Yeah, this is really, really interesting. So some of the practical ways that you can. Veterinary practices can use AI internally to improve marketing is, you know, becoming more and more popular, right? I know we all heard of AI answering the phone. My experience, humans kind of get underwhelmed, especially new clients, when they feel like you don't value them enough to even have a human. Human being answer the phone and, you know, be courteous and be helpful. So I'm not a huge fan of AI for answering phones. I do think a huge part of attracting and retaining the best clients who really care about their pets is the experience. So I do think when they call you, better, you know, appreciate them or honor them by answering the call with someone who knows what they're doing and who knows how to be courteous and who knows how to build a relationship. So there are some places where I wouldn't use AI, of course, for reminders, I think, especially if it's automated, like, hey, you have an appointment at 4. You know, you can use technology to do that, right? Because they have an appointment at 4. There's no judgment whatever. But when it comes to real, meaningful communication, you could use AI to draft emails. Let's say you have a client who hasn't showed up for a while, you want to send a nice text message, and you want to personalize it based on what happened. You could, could use AI to draft it, but I wouldn't trust AI to send it. I really think a human has to read it, make sure it's making sense. Because the problem is when AI makes a mistake, it's your fault. It's not the AI's fault. You can't say, oopsies, AI messed up. They. They blame you. The practice, the practice owner. So I really would have humans reviewing anything that is customized that's created by AI, like for things like, you know, routing. You know, you can use AI tools to help staff classify and organize inquiries and all the other stuff. But be careful in the process of optimizing. You're not optimizing the wrong thing. One of the feedback I get from many of my clients who have played around with AI is sometimes AI optimizes the wrong thing. So it kind of creates, increases. The wrong kind of clients showing up, for example, or the wrong kind of things happening. So be careful where AI doesn't accelerate the wrong things because Remember, you know, there are profitable clients and there are lifelong clients and not everybody's equal. And so you have to use intelligently. So don't use AI blindly where you just let somebody else think about it and do it and just press a button. Rather, you need to be engaged and you need to be involved in this. So yes, use AI outside of the patient journey. Everything we covered about SEO and search and AI search and so forth to make your practice efficient. But do it carefully and thoughtfully with a human owner overseeing things. Otherwise I think it could really hurt you. Of course, AI still is new and we all know about some of the challenges, so that's why I said you have to be on top of it.
- [22:33]
Don Disha
Now, you know, being a full time veterinarian taking care of a practice as well, that in itself is like three full time jobs right there. So for our practice owners listening in right now, right, who might feel a bit overwhelmed, might feel a bit stuck, wondering how to really prepare for the future, give us a good first practical step they should take today to ensure that their clinic thrives in this AI driven landscape instead of getting left behind.
- [23:07]
Naren Arul Raja
Absolutely. I do think you need to know how you are doing with regards to all. Like for example, if you are ranking for 200 search terms and phrases on Google, you're more than likely going to do well on ChatGPT and everything else. But if you're not, if you're only ranking for 5 or 7 or 10, but you're not in the hundreds, that means you really have an opportunity to get into that top 3% and create an unfair advantage where your cost of acquiring a quality patient is literally 10 to 20% of those who are depending on ads. And the challenge with ads is it gets more expensive and people don't trust it. So you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find someone who trusts you. So, so for those reasons, I do think that is an advantage to get into that top 3% and that's kind of has been our expertise. And we know within a year every single client we have touched gets into the top 3% and ranks for 100 plus keywords. So have someone review you. Right. Everything I talked about today in terms of some of the technical things are using structured data. How are you doing with nap? Are using content the right way, are you using eat? Are you optimizing your website for crux so that that website provides a great experience. So these are all things you could go and figure it out, but you probably have to spend, you know, hours and hours our team will spend six hours doing the research. It's our gift to you. Go and have our team do that research, tell you how you are doing, how your competition is doing, and then give you a roadmap so that you can dominate your market. So that's our gift to you. It's a $900 value. Like I said, we still spend six hours researching you and your competitors. The link, I believe is veterinary businessinstitute.com MSM veterinary businessinstitute.com MSM right.
- [24:47]
Don Disha
Thank you very much Naren for sharing that wonderful resource with our listeners. Absolutely make the best use of it. Go ahead and book that schedule right away and get yourself a great marketing plan and make 2026 the best year yet. Naran, thank you so much once again for joining us today. Thank you to everyone listening to the Veterinary Business podcast. If you found this episode valuable, be sure to subscribe and stay connected for more conversations designed to help veterinary practice owners adapt, grow, go and build stronger, more sustainable practices. I'm your host for the session. Signing off, Dan Disha. We'll see you on the next one. Take care everyone.