A veterinary group's website almost always opens by selling the group: a shared mission, a combined team photograph, a map with four pins. It is a natural thing to build and it is the wrong frame, because nobody has a relationship with a group. They have one with a building, a car park, a receptionist who knows their dog's name, and a vet they have seen four times.
The mistake
Flattening four practices into one voice costs you the things that actually differ and that clients actually need: this branch's hours, this branch's phone number, whether this branch has a step at the door, and whether your dog's dental happens here or across town.
Worse, it usually produces a single set of opening hours for the group, which is wrong for at least three of the four branches.
Pick the branch first
The structural answer is to make branch selection the first interaction, then let it drive the whole site — hours, phone, address, team, out-of-hours state — and remember it for next time.
- A persistent branch bar on every page: which branch you are viewing, whether it is open right now, its address and its number.
- A nearest-branch lookup by postcode, because “which one is closest” is the real question behind “locations”.
- A real page per branch, with its own team, its own parking, and an honest description of what the place is like. Not a stub with an address on it.
- An out-of-hours state that follows the branch, so the emergency routing shown is the correct one for the site the visitor actually uses.
We built this as a worked example on Meadowbrook Animal Health, where the branch choice persists and the change plays as a departure-board flip — a branch change is a change of sign.
Publish the table nobody publishes
The most valuable page on a group website is a comparison table of what each branch can actually do.
Surgery on site. Imaging, and which kind. Overnight patients. Saturday opening. Cat-only consulting time. Step-free access. Which car park is difficult. Groups hide this because it looks like admitting weakness. It is the opposite: it is the only page on the site that treats the reader as someone making a practical decision.
If your branch cannot do dentals and the client has to drive to the main hospital, they will find out eventually. Finding out on the website is a mild inconvenience. Finding out when they arrive is a review.
Answer the merger question
If some of your branches were independent practices with their own name on the door, your clients have a question they rarely ask out loud: has this been sold to a corporate group, and has anything got worse?
Most group sites answer it with a photograph of a field. A page that states plainly who owns the practice, what changed when each branch joined, what clients gained and what they lost does more for retention than anything else on the site — and it is almost completely unoccupied ground in search.
The local SEO problem groups create for themselves
Groups routinely damage their own local visibility in two specific ways.
- One Google Business Profile for several locations, or several profiles with the group's name and no branch identifier. Each physical location needs its own profile, its own name as locally recognised, and its own hours. See the profile guide.
- Location pages that are the same page with the town swapped. Google treats these as thin duplicate content and they rank for nothing. Each branch page needs genuinely distinct content — its own team, its own parking, its own services list.
Done properly, a group has a structural advantage: four locations means four map-pack entries and four sets of local queries. Done badly, it means one diluted entity competing with itself. The difference is almost entirely whether the branch pages are real.
Questions we get asked
How should a multi-location veterinary website be structured?
Branch selection first, then everything else follows it: hours, phone number, address, team and out-of-hours routing. The choice should persist between visits, and each branch needs a real page with its own team, parking and service list rather than a stub.
Should each veterinary branch have its own Google Business Profile?
Yes. Every physical location needs its own profile with its own locally recognised name, address, phone number and hours. A single profile covering several sites, or duplicate profiles without branch identifiers, suppresses visibility for all of them.
Why do veterinary group location pages rank badly?
Because they are usually the same page with the town name swapped, which search engines treat as thin duplicate content. Branch pages need genuinely different content: different staff, different parking, different services and different hours.
Should a veterinary group publish what each branch can and cannot do?
Yes, and it is the most valuable page on most group sites. Clients find out eventually; discovering it on the website is an inconvenience, while discovering it on arrival is a bad review.