The veterinary website and marketing space is noisy.
Marketing agencies and employees promise that both social media marketing and Google marketing will deliver great outcomes… but that promise does not always turn into phone calls and ideal new clients in your waiting room.
Does Google or social deliver the best results in vet practice marketing? Or do you need both? If so, what percentage of your budget should you spend on each?
In this article, we compare the return on investment from social media marketing and free Google Search (SEO) for both primary care and referral vets and offer some sound decision-making parameters.
To start this discussion, a little digital marketing information is useful.
I know you’re busy, so I’ll keep it as brief as I can.
Both social media marketing and SEO aim to do the same thing.
Both methods aim to put your practice in front of clients and colleagues who might want to bring or refer patients to you.
But the way Google and social media actually execute this is vastly different.
In social media marketing, you aim to put interesting content in front of the right people as they scroll their feeds.
With Google, however, you aim to appear in the free listings when someone types in things like ‘vet near me’, ‘specialist cat vet’, or ‘my dog is coughing, what should I do’.
Immediately, you can see that user intent is very different between the two.
User A scrolling their Facebook feed might be filling time watching videos, chatting with friends or procrastinating from work.
They are not necessarily looking for a vet, and they are probably not planning to take their pet to the vet in the next few days.
But they might choose to stop scrolling if your post seems interesting.
While user B is actively searching Google to find answers to a question they have right now.
User B is way more likely to be actively looking to book an appointment.
And I can confirm that over the past 25+ years of marketing many hundreds of veterinary and other businesses, Google has consistently delivered far more ideal clients than social media and a much better return on marketing investment.
Whether you choose social media or Google to market your vet practice, you need to find someone with the right skills and enough time to do a great job.
Competition is fierce. And what you produce has to be high-quality.
Social media marketing is easier in many ways than optimising your website for Google. The best results require the active involvement of your practice’s team.
You need someone in the practice with an eye for taking a great photo or video.
From there, the next skill is writing a great post and being organised so that posts go out regularly.
Consistency is key. It’s better to post quality content once a week than have a flurry of 5 posts in the first week and then crickets.
We often find that collaboration and teamwork are the best solution.
Your team takes the photos and provides some background information, and then our professional marketing team handles the wordsmithing and posting.
Skills for Google search
The cornerstone of SEO is adding regular content to your website in the form of information pages, case studies and articles.
As you add more useful information, Google ranks you for more search terms, and the volume of traffic coming to your website grows.
SEO is more technically difficult than social media marketing and requires a number of skill sets.
These include:
Vet practices are unlikely to have all these skills in-house and will need to outsource this work to an experienced team.
Regular, informative posting on social media is useful for building awareness and followers, and when done well, it grows awareness and builds trust.
But does it generate business?
In our experience, regular social media posting is a supportive strategy only.
It rarely generates business unless you have a very active and talented team member working consistently on it. Be mindful as well that if this person leaves your business your marketing stops.
SEO, on the other hand, generates bucketloads of opportunities for our veterinary clients.
It delivers a much better return on investment than social media marketing for all our clients.
And you retain ownership of the asset – your own website.
My advice for primary care and referral veterinary practices is to put most of your digital marketing budget into a quality website, professional SEO and content marketing.
Save 10-20% for quality newsletters to a database of prospects and clients.
And allocate no more than 5-10% to social media marketing.
Deb Croucher is the founder of SVMG, a strategic growth partner for veterinary businesses. A former veterinarian and practice owner, Deb combines industry fluency, commercial strategy, and structured marketing systems to help clinics, specialists, suppliers, and industry partners become clearer, more trusted, and better positioned for growth.
Find answers to common questions about our clinic and your pet’s visits below.
A veterinary growth system brings structure to the parts of marketing that often operate separately: positioning, content, search, campaigns and reporting. SVMG operates that system end-to-end, so activity is not just happening, it is connected, measurable and aligned with how the veterinary market actually makes decisions.
Most agencies deliver services in separate pieces: a website, campaign, content plan or ads. SVMG works at the system level, taking ownership of how those pieces connect, perform and support long-term visibility, positioning and growth.
Yes. Veterinary practices and industry partners operate differently, so the system needs to reflect the audience, decision process and commercial reality of each business. For clinics, that may mean attracting better-fit clients and protecting position; for industry partners, it may mean improving visibility, sales support and market response.
In most cases, disjointed marketing is not caused by a lack of effort. It happens when activity is spread across channels without a clear structure behind it. That’s where bringing everything into one connected system changes how the business is understood and how it performs.
Search is shifting from broad keywords to more specific, question-led queries across Google and AI tools. SVMG builds search and content into the system, so veterinary businesses are easier to find, easier to understand and better positioned when the right clients, clinics or decision-makers are actively looking.
Yes, especially if the activity is there but the direction is unclear. What typically happens is marketing exists across websites, content, social, email or ads, but no one is owning how it all works together. SVMG steps in where structure, accountability and stronger market alignment are needed.
