VEG ER for Pets is a fast-growing 24-hour emergency veterinary care provider with over 100 hospitals across the U.S. Known for their pet-first, walk-in model and customer-obsessed experience, VEG had historically seen strong SEO performance driven by a two-pronged strategy:
1. Local, non-branded search (e.g., "emergency vet near me")
2. Editorial content that built topical authority across their core service categories
While this strategy had fuelled consistent growth, VEG knew they had untapped opportunities on the local side of things. The local landscape is heavily competitive, with most markets deeply saturated with a high density of national competitors and local vet clinics alike. Organic visibility and clicks are extremely valuable, especially when a single emergency vet visit can lead to anywhere from $1,000-$10,000 in revenue.
With a scattered local SEO strategy that wasn't fully hitting the mark and massive opportunity in front of them, VEG hired me to build, execute, optimize and scale their local SEO program to drive more organic visibility and revenue for the business, especially as they grow.
After performing an in-depth audit and competitor review, it was clear that there were several issues holding VEG back from an Local SEO perspective.
Next, we looked at the overall SEO opportunity, which was massive. With over 100 locations nationwide, the scale of potential high-value, non-branded, locally driven keywords was incredible. Keywords like emergency vet, emergency vet hospital, animal hospital, dog hospital, urgent pet clinic drove most of the potential demand.
But once you start to combine them with local keywords like the name of a city, neighborhood, county or "near me", things really start to scale. Add in another level of keywords that speak to VEG's value from of 24 hours, 24/7, open now, open holidays, etc. and we ended up with an incredibly large, but laser-focused keyword list that was bound to drive relevant, high-need, bottom of funnel traffic.
A list of keywords is useless without a strategy, so we shifted our focus to how we would build a scalable system to rank, drive traffic, and conversions for as many of these keyword combinations in as many markets as possible.
Hyper-local keyword research. The way potential customers in San Ramon, California search for our services differs from users in Nora, Indiana. Some markets use "emergency vet" while others double down on "animal hospital".
Competitor research and SERP analysis in every market. For every market we analyze who were up against. What is performing well today? Where can we be incrementally better?
Site Structure & Page Templates. We organized location pages under state subfolders and created an optimized SEO page template for hospital pages
Technical SEO fixes. We improved page load times, fixed technical issues, added canonicals, included schema markup, and improved internal linking.
Local Profile Optimization. We invested heavily into our Google Business (and Yelp) Profiles, optimizing for local keywords, ensured NAP consistency, and encouraged high quality reviews.
Built locally relevant backlinks to our hospital pages to improve local relevance and to drive deeper brand awareness in our markets
Developed a Local SEO GTM Playbook for the local teams to use when launching new locations
Before looking at numbers, one of the best outcomes of this initiative was getting internal alignment across the marketing organization on how we treat our local GTM, driven by an SEO-first strategy, but one that extends far beyond search. This has transformed how VEG approaches planning, launching and growing in their local markets.
But we also drove incredible results that are impacting the bottom line of the business:
The results so far have been great, but we continue to work on this every day especially with further plans to expand our hospital locations over the next 3 years.
Jessica Haverlin
Marketing Director at VEG
Jason Faber offers Fractional SEO & Growth Consulting to grow your organic revenue.
Based in Toronto, operating worldwide.
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