Is Nextdoor Right for Veterinary Practices?
Jenny has more than a decade of veterinary marketing experience, and she is obsessed with developing highly-engaging digital marketing solutions that are achievable for busy veterinary professionals.
After working exclusively in the vet world for over a decade, we’ve learned to never recommend one solution for everyone! Our business approach for web design, SEO, and social media marketing are curated for each specific practice. For some of our clients, we recommend Nextdoor.
What is Nextdoor?
Nextdoor is a neighborhood platform that has grown in popularity for people who want to learn more about the local businesses in their area. The verification process is thorough so there are almost no spam profiles, which is why consumers as a whole — including pet owners — are starting to rely on this platform more and more for their purchasing decisions.
Claiming your Listing
There are a number of ways brands can use their listing at no charge, which is why we strongly suggest our veterinary friends, at the very least, claim their listing (which is completely free). If someone searches for your practice name, you don’t want to leave them empty handed!
Optimize your Free Listing
We recommend the following steps to ensure your free listing is optimized:
- Upload a logo and profile photo of team members smiling with pet patients, instead of just a picture of your building. This is a neighborhood-friendly resource, so you want to use images that show how friendly and approachable your brand is.
- Add and verify your hours — remember to add this to your internal checklist of places to update when things change.
- Add your website link. If someone is interested in your practice enough to be looking at your profile, you want to make it easy for them to learn more. The outside link to your website doesn’t hurt your website’s SEO either–in fact, it helps!
- Post periodically on your free listing, in order to keep the conversation going. Here are a few more post tips:
- Use photos with every post — consider reusing photos or graphics you’re already used on social media that have done well.
- Tell stories like you do on other social media platforms versus being “salesy”; this is about building a relationship over time!
- Post as often as you can, but one organic, feel-good post per month that shows your friendly team members with patients is a good minimum goal.
Recommendations
A large part of the value for consumers who are using Nextdoor is that they can obtain recommendations from their neighborhood, which are seen as even more reliable than just general ratings on Google from strangers. 76% of Nextdoor users say they were influenced by a recommendation they saw.
When you claim your free listing, you’ll want to try to obtain a client recommendation as quickly as possible. Nextdoor requires at least one recommendation in order to start showing your listing in local search results. We suggest trying for at least one new recommendation a month after the initial launch of your profile on Nextdoor.
Remember to always reply when a neighbor leaves a comment about your business, just like you would on Google, Facebook, or any other digital platform. This demonstrates to pet owners that you’re actively “in the conversation” and engaging with your community.
There is definitely an art to how vet practices should respond to online reviews! Be sure to visit Eric Garcia’s article on replying to positive veterinary reviews, as well as his guidelines on replying to negative ones.
Paid ads
Simply Done Tech Solutions helps veterinary practices with advertising on Nextdoor when extra exposure is needed for increased brand awareness or the promotion of new or specific services. Nextdoor offers a few different ways to advertise, based on your objectives. Some of our practices use the Nextdoor vehicle to promote themselves to new pet owners moving into the area.
Whether you’re in need of some consulting or are looking for us to actually execute the campaigns, we’re here for you. Reach out!