Good evening everybody and welcome to this Tuesday night's members webinar. Strange to be a members webinar on a Tuesday night, but of course it's part of the business series, which is very proudly sponsored by MWI Animal Health. A big thank you to MWI for their ongoing sponsorship.

We really do appreciate it and we we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for your, your kind sponsorship. So thank you to you. I'm not sure if we're gonna have any newbies with us tonight, but if we have, welcome to you.

My name is Bruce Stevenson and I will be chairing the session tonight. A little bit of housekeeping for you. If you do have any questions for our speaker, just move your mouse over the screen and you'll see a little control bar pop up.

It's usually black and at the bottom. There's a Q&A box there, just click on that and, type in your questions and we will hold all of those over to the end of the webinar and then, Joe has very kindly agreed to take as many questions as we have time for. So speaking of Joe, our speaker tonight, Joanna Woonut, qualified from the University of Nottingham in 2016.

After a couple of years in small animal practise, she left full-time work to pursue a career in writing. She now locums one day a week and the other 4 days are spent writing content and copy through the veterinary content company. Joe, welcome back to the webinarett, and it's over to you.

Thank you very much. Hi everybody. As a, professional content writer and proofreader, I've just noticed I've got 3 T's in my surname there, so that's rather embarrassing.

I, it's people normally only give me one T, so I thought I'd just make it up by giving us 3. Anyway, so let's go ahead and start. We've already said I'm a Nottingham 2016 graduate.

I did a bit of small animal practise for a couple of years. I started freelance writing pretty soon after graduation, but it was just one article here and there, and then quite quickly sort of built that up until eventually leaving to locum and freelance writes. I don't actually do the one day a week locuming.

I did when I wrote that bio. I'm now pregnant and locuming and being pregnant doesn't work very well together, so it's just freelance writing for me, which actually turns out to be a great blessing, and I absolutely love it. A little bit about the veterinary content company.

So we're just over a year old. In that time, we've written over 900 articles, and essentially what we are is a group of 10 to 15 vets, depending on whether you count the ones who write weekly or every other week, who are writing articles about pets and pet health, and the majority of which are for pet owners to read, so they're going out to different clients based all over the world. But we do also do some that vets.

Read, so you may well have seen our work, you wouldn't know it was our work because we don't stick our logo on it. We just sit there and do the writing. So we provide all sorts of different types of content, and this has given me a really good insight into the different types of content, the different types of websites, blogs, and how to write so that those pet owners can understand this.

And that's really what written communication is about. A couple of years ago I did a talk for you guys. In a webinar vet about spoken communication, being in clinic and communicating well, and now this is kind of coming down to how well you can write your communication down.

So we're going to do the what when where and why as different types of communications you might use as a vet, particularly, as I said, focusing on the type where you'll be talking to pet owners as opposed to other vets. And then we'll also do how, how to write well, written communication skills as well at the end. So first we'll talk a little bit about social content, so social media, and this is something that at TPCC we do do a little bit of, and when we do do it, we tend to do it for veterinary practises who just don't have time to write their own.

So before I get started, I just want everyone to have a little 2 minute reflection on How they use social media as a practise currently. So do you find yourselves doing a lot of it? Is it a real struggle?

When was the last time you personally logged on and checked what your Facebook looked like? Did you just hand the reins over? To the youngest Bentley nurse in the practise and tell them to get on with it.

Because certainly that's my experience post graduation. It was, right, you're young, you know what this is, do it. So quite often I find that vet practises don't don't do this particularly well.

So don't need to answer these out loud or anything, just have a little think about it, and then hopefully that'll put you in a good position to sort of understand where where we're coming from when we talk about things in a minute. OK, so we'll have a quick talk about the different platforms that vet businesses might use. So most of veterinary practises out there will use Facebook.

Facebook's really, really good for vets. Partly our clients hang out there. Facebook has A huge number of people signed up, and a lot of them are just your everyday person, your everyday mom.

As we know, quite a lot of our clients are more female than male, or certainly the decision makers in the family will be more female than male. So Facebook's a really good place to find them. The other thing Facebook does is allows you to speak to a group of people that follow you.

So, excuse me, once your clients are following your site, on Facebook, your page, then they'll be able to see what you're posting, and that means that you can actually give updates really easily and quickly through Facebook. I imagine most of you found that during COVID. Facebook was one of the best ways to disseminate information really quickly to your clients.

It's also really easy to advertise in a set geographic area. Now I know most of you are probably not in a place to be thinking about advertising right now, because by all accounts, the UK has just gone crazy and no one can get a vet at the moment. It's so busy, but it is something to bear in mind for the future.

So Facebook advertising in a geographic area is super simple. If you are more of a referral practise and you maybe have a wider range of places that you'd want to advertise, it can be a little bit more tricky, and you may need to call a specialist to get good money back when you're advertising budget through Facebook, but certainly for a 10 mile radius from your practise, very, very simple. Most people can do it, no problem.

Instagram is incredibly similar to Facebook on the whole. They are actually owned by the same person, so it's not really surprising. It has a slightly younger audience.

I don't know if you've noticed that. Certainly my parents and my grandparents are on Facebook, none of them are on Instagram. And it's very much a picture-based thing.

So although it can work well for vets, it's a bit more tricky because you have to have photographs or graphics for every single post. That takes twice as much work, and also when it comes to photographs, you may or may not be able to get permissions for these as you think you can. I'm not saying Facebook doesn't need photos, it really does, but you can actually physically post an update on Facebook without a photograph.

Instagram, you can't. One thing to mention if you do decide to use Instagram is Instagram stories. It's so underutilised at the moment that Instagram is throwing in loads and loads of basically free advertising budget for the stories.

If you were to create a post on Instagram and an Instagram story, your story would appear in so many more feeds than just the post would. So if you do have a practise Instagram account, I would strongly recommend you try and have a go at the stories. TikTok, I am a little bit old for TikTok already.

Things move so very quickly. It's something that I know about professionally, but not something I use personally. I would say that it's not a very professional way to talk to your clients necessarily.

It's all video-based for those of you that don't know. It's really good perhaps for people like Kat the Bet and Pete the vet who want to produce educational videos. Excellent for that, for the sort of vet personalities, but for the vet practises, it's possibly not quite so good.

Twitter and LinkedIn, I probably wouldn't bother with as a veterinary practise. Twitter's great if you've got newsworthy stories all the time, but most veterinary practises don't. And LinkedIn is fantastic if you're looking for staff members, but it is very much a professional hangout, not a client hangout.

If your clients are on LinkedIn, which they possibly won't be because Mrs. Blogs tends not to be on LinkedIn. If she is on LinkedIn, she's going to be thinking about her career, she's going to be thinking about networking, she's going to be thinking about everything but the family dog, so probably not worth being on LinkedIn for a client base.

Very good if you want to advertise how amazing your practise is to work at. OK, so going on to posting on social media then, I'm going to focus on Facebook and Instagram because they really are the two that you should be focusing on. And like I said, for most people actually, it's just Facebook.

So for Facebook, I would recommend 2 to 3 posts a week, and that is tricky to maintain, but the important thing is to keep it really regular. So try to pick a schedule you can stick to, even if that's only once a week, as long as you can stick to it, that's a start. My advice would be though to plan your posts in advance.

So get a team together to sit down and brainstorm the next 3 months' worth of content. Now that sounds really hard, but actually if you're only doing 2 posts a week, that's like 25 posts, and it's not very difficult to sit down and think of those. Then you can send someone away to create them and you can actually schedule them so that the Facebook pings them out every now and again without you having to do anything else to them.

You can also use programmes like Hootsuite to post to both Facebook and Instagram at the same time and Twitter if you like, and again, you can schedule on there so that it's all going out and you don't have to think about it anymore. In terms of what to post, I would say an 80/20 mix of useful information, fun facts, and sales slash advertising. Basically, you don't want to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell.

You shouldn't be writing just for your current clients who are going to buy something. You should be writing for the young couple who are saving up for their dog or the family that's just lost their rabbit and will need to get a new one soon because the kids are really upset. Showing up twice a week to give them all free advice makes you the sort of practise that they want to visit when the time comes.

And when I say free advice, it doesn't have to be anything groundbreaking, but just being there day in, day out just creates that trust. It's something that we talk about in content marketing a lot. So here's some ideas about things you might want to write about.

So you could do a monthly thing about your equipment and just do a little bit, highlight it and talk about what it is, what's it for, how often you use it, include some pictures. What's great about that is, again, you're not selling anybody anything. You're just telling them how good your stuff is.

So when they come to need a dental, and they, 00, actually, I remember they've got a new dental machine. It looked really cool. So you're automatically not selling anything.

Your team, obviously your team are your greatest asset, so you can go in and talk about your individuals, meet the team, but you can also talk about how the team is made up, what the job roles are. You can talk about team achievements, team days out, that sort of thing. You can talk and certainly plan for various times of the year, so the really obvious one is like.

My example of really annoying posts is, sorry, everybody, because you've probably all done this, Autumn dangers. But Autumn Dangers is like the post that every single practise out there has probably done to death. It's they work, but it's nice to think outside the box a little bit so that you're not doing the same thing as the practise next door every week, week in, week out.

So think about whether there's some animal themed festivals around the world. I Actually put down here, Chinese New Year. I thought that was quite fun.

This year's Chinese New Year is Year of the Tiger, 2022 is Year of a tier. So you could maybe do some things about different types of hybrid cats or the way that our modern cats are similar to tigers and sort of their similarities and differences in terms of behaviour. So there's actually really some good stuff you can do around that without having to resort to conkers are dangerous all the time.

Diseases, obviously, you know, all this stuff about these diseases that I don't know, so doing short posts about these, you're basically drip feeding them little bits of information. Oh, dogs get arthritis, dogs get arthritis, dogs get arthritis. So that when their dog's limping, they go, Oh, I think the vet, oh yeah, 00, arthritis.

Oh, I better call my vet. So when you write these, you don't have to say, if you see the signs, call us straight away. You can do that occasionally, and it's certainly not a bad thing to do occasionally, but you shouldn't have to have a call to action on every single post because that becomes salesy.

There's a couple more ideas that you can read those yourself. So, be flexible. If you sat down in January 2020 and wrote three months' worth of posts and put them out to be scheduled to go out for the next 3 months, you would have looked mightily strange at the end of March 2020, when the world was falling apart and you're still posting random fun facts about cats.

So just bear that in mind, keep it in mind what you've already planned, and be a little bit flexible. You may need to tweak something. As I said, I would personally pre-plan 2 posts a week, the reason being that you can have your 3rd post as an extra.

So when you have that really cute patient come in or a really nice present received as a gift from a client, you can post those or your RVN and pass their exams. You can post those as extras, they just kind of liven it up and show people that you are there and you are responding to what's going on around you. And talking of responding, don't forget to react to comments.

If people are commenting to funny pictures, you can share things. I don't know if anyone here follows We Rape Dogs on Facebook, but they're hilarious, and you can share those things to your page and it just kind of liven it up and makes it feel a bit of a nicer place to be. When we talk about reaction to comments, I might as well just say now that it's worth making sure there's a policy in place for dealing with comments that you don't want on your page, and it's probably worth talking to the BDS and the RCBS about how to handle those.

Especially if you're going to go ahead and give your control of your Facebook over to the youngest, least experienced nurse in the practise, just maybe have a policy for her to come to a practise manager, or you know exactly what's going to happen if someone says something rude on the Facebook or when you get complaints and things like that. Best to think in advance rather than try and mop up the mess afterwards. That doesn't mean don't use Facebook.

It works very, very well, and you'll get very, very few negative comments compared to the positive ones if you start posting and and and being available for people. OK, so don't forget to analyse. So there's absolutely, it's great posting, posting, posting, posting, posting, but what you want to do is tweak the type of post you're producing to what's working for your practise, and that will change from practise to practise, from area to area, you know, cultural differences make a huge difference when it comes to humour.

So have a look at what got engagement. Have a look at what sort of engagement you got. So I would say the most powerful sort of engagement, especially when it comes to marketing, is shares, because that is that person saying, This was so true or so funny that I want my friends to know that I liked it.

I want my friends to potentially know which practise I use, which is as good as a recommendation. So that's a really, really powerful one. Actually likes and comments are really good as well, and I wouldn't be disheartened if you don't get too many comments.

If you think about how you and I would use Facebook, I don't tend to go and comment on something interesting to say, That's really interesting. I just like it and move on. And sometimes I don't even like it.

So it's comments, you won't tend to get them unless you specifically ask for comments. One little point about comments though, that engagement really shows Facebook people value your your posts that you're posting, and it will improve your advertising. So your advertising budget will go a lot further if people have been engaging with your with your page.

So it does make sense every now and again to specifically ask the comments, whether that's what are your thoughts, or what are your tips, or put your picture of your cat sleeping here, whatever it is, getting that engagement up with the comments every now and again, maybe once every couple of months, is definitely sensible. Competitions work really well as well. OK, we'll move on to website content.

So website content is what we do a lot of at the veterinary content company. So this by far makes up the majority of our work. So it's something that I spent pretty much all day every day talking about, and hopefully I can answer any questions at the end, but here we go.

Firstly, have a 2 minute think about your practise website. When was the last time you personally went onto the website and had a look, or does it just sort of happen in the background and you don't really know what's on there? Have a think about whether it's out of date.

My one of the practises I worked at, I don't know if any of the staff there are here tonight, but one of the practises I worked at in the UK, I went on and checked it just the other day when I was writing this presentation on this page. And they have the photos that they had on there before I joined the practise, and I think there's about 3 team members and only 1 clinical team member who still works at that practise, and that photo is still up there. So it can quite quickly get out of date.

Have a little think about how good your practise looks to people who don't, who don't know you, who don't know, you know, make new people to the, to the area. They log in. What does it look like?

Is it any good? Some practises still have like a really 90s looking website, and as a child of the 90s, I would love to say that that's a good thing. But when you're looking for someone who's got the latest modern medicine so that you can get the best for your dog, a 90s looking website is a little bit off-putting.

So what should you have on your page? The absolute bare minimum is a landing page, normally a homepage, sometimes an about page, and a contact page. And the contact page really needs to include your phone details, address, ideally an email, and your out of hours numbers.

But this would be a massive waste of a domain name. You're paying for your blogs bets.co.uk, so you might as well get the most out of it.

You want your website to be working hard for you. It should be. Advertising your team, your ethos, your love of animals.

And the other thing you should be doing is answering questions to save your receptionist and your nurse time. So thinking back to how busy everyone is right now, it feels like a lot of effort right now to go in and sort your website out, but if you can get some of those questions answered, rather than have people phone up, that will free up time. And one really silly thing about modern technology is that most of us would prefer to get our answer, not calling someone speaking.

Certainly the younger generation would prefer not to call and speak to somebody we can get away with it. So having that information there and available is definitely sensible. Have a little look at your website when we're finished here, just log in and see.

Give yourself maybe 5 questions if you if you're a client, what you'd want answering and see how easy it is to answer those questions. So yeah, going back to what else you can have on your website, the only time that a contact page, being pretty much the only page on there is going to be useful is for new clients. Google's going to see those stale static pages that never get updated, and they'll mark you down for it.

And when I say Google, I really mean all search engine. In this context. If you are not regularly refreshing your content, you start to slip down the search results pages, and let's face it, you can't regularly refresh a contact page and a home page.

So you kind of need to have that information readily available and it needs to be regularly updated. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the content of these pages because there's a reason professional copywriting is a thing. It's really hard to get it right.

It's really hard to get a good balance between the amount of info that you need and not using too many words and using the right number of pictures and that sort of thing. But we will go into readability towards the end so that you can have a little look at what you've got there and see whether or not you think that the average client can actually understand what you've written. A lot of times I get asked, does a veterinary practise need a blog?

That is entirely up to you. Personally, I would advise it for reasons we're going to. So the purpose of a blog is to provide a regularly updated news page.

So. It's as opposed to the static pages that contain what we call evergreen content, so stuff that doesn't go out of date. The blog contains the kind of timely information that may go out of date quite quickly, so things like changes to opening hours, I think something like that, that could very quickly become out of date.

It doesn't matter because it's supposed to be sort of in the moment and regularly updated. Google Google will rank a website more highly if it has been recently updated, which is what we said before. So if you had everything else equal, if you had a recently updated blog page and the other person didn't, your website is going to come up higher.

And actually if you Google anything, the top 56 search results are all very, very recent articles that realistically have been out within the last 2 months, 3 months, certainly within the last year. So having, you know, your website that you never gets an update very quickly, you're going that, oh, it's not an update for at least a year, down to the bottom of the page, compared to those people that are right at the top because their website's fresh. Google will learn if you post every 2 weeks, week in, week out, Google will learn every 2 weeks.

I've got to go and check that website because they always post new stuff. And they will get on top of it. The search result will feedback the most recent recent stuff you put on, and it will all be work better.

If you haven't updated for a year, Google's going to give up checking your website for updates, which means that when you post an update, it could take several months for Google to even notice it's there, unless you have someone telling Google how to do that, which we can do. But, you know, it makes it much easier if Google can do it automatically because you've been posting as you should. So the topics for your blog vary massively depending on your purpose.

At TBCC we write a lot of the really commonly searched terms, and we're kind of going into those high frequency keywords, so things like Can dogs eat or whoops my dog ate and that sort of thing. And whilst there's nothing inherently wrong with you as a vet practise writing those topics, you ought to be thinking more about what your readers are likely to find interesting and useful. So Yes, you can do the comedy search queries.

It's probably worth bearing in mind that it's hard to do well and done poorly. You can get people landing there saying, oh, that's not what I want, and then they leave and Google will start marking you down. To feature in the top page of Google for any of the common search queries, you have to really have at least 30 other websites, hyperlinking to your website, saying how good you are.

So you have to have a lot of authority on your website. And the problem is that as a practise, you generally won't have a high domain authority, so you're not going to be highly competitive. Words, even if you wrote the best article with the perfect ratio of keywords in there, it's not it's not going to happen.

So it's probably not worth thinking too much about those high search terms, unless you have a really interesting case and you want to highlight that dogs can't eat corn on the cob or whatever and go through that way. So have a think also about who you want to find your site. So Most people, most of you there are going to want new clients to find a website, of course, and you're also going to want some current clients to be able to find your website in order to check on your services and get your updates.

I know that a lot of you put a COVID update notice across the front of your homepage. That's wonderful, but if your current clients aren't used to visiting your website, they aren't going to see it. So you kind of want to make sure that it's a place that people go when they need to find out what's going on.

So how also about what you want them to do when they get to the websites, they want good or reliable information, or maybe you want them to register or book an appointment, and design your website and your blogs around focusing them into those things. So what will those people be interested in? They're going to be interested in these topics here.

So really it's all about your news, your updates. Yes, to an extent, how often they should be vaccinating, but the disease outbreaks and things like that are much more interesting for a blog than the disease information arthritis or something that's present all the time. OK, and then when we talk about disease toxin preventive care information pages, they can be posted on your blog, as we said, they can also be a static page.

They should be evergreen content, apart from the very occasional change where we find out why raisins are toxic this time or whatever. Apart from those very, very individual cases, this stuff never gets changed. So realistically, it does make a very good static page.

I would advise that you put them in static pages as a drop down menu because it's much easier to find. If you write your disease or preventative care info pages onto your blog and onto your blog alone. The blog is normally listed in in chronological order.

Though you can search your blog, it can be quite hard to philtre those searches properly to find the information you want, and it can get quite frustrating. If you want your owners to read about the importance of arthritis prevention or the vaccination or whatever, you should have that somewhere in your menu so it's easy to find. And OK, we'll go on to newsletters and e-newsletters.

So again, this is something that we don't do as much of at TVCC, but it is something that we have certainly been involved with, and we do a little bit of every now and again, probably once a month. So it's up to you whether you do these or not. Not every practise will benefit, but on the whole, newsletters are considered to be one of the best returns on any sort of advertising budget, so it's definitely worth thinking about.

So for your 2 minute think, do you use newsletters, use newsletters? Have you used them in the past and given up? Do you get loads of rubbish newsletters through your door that you delete?

Do you have the ability to do newsletters? They take a fair amount of time. Do you have up to-date email addresses, and are you able to do it?

Think about whether or not you should bother. Newsletters are not likely to increase your client base. They, by definition, you kind of have to have someone's email address or physical address in order to send them a newsletter.

Therefore, they probably are already a client. However, it can increase sales within the current client base, which means that if you've got Mrs. Bloggs sitting at home with 10 cats that she's forgotten to flee this month, your newsletter is a very targeted way to get her a reminder of that.

It's a really good way of reaching out and giving news. It does require a little bit more effort, so it does require fresh content and it needs to be on a regular basis. There's nothing worse than saying you're going to do a quarterly newsletter and then it going 9 months between issues because everyone was too busy.

It does need to be kept regular as best as you can. Don't forget to consider GDPR and permissions as well with a newsletter for sure. So help think about design as well, so newsletters can be printed or done over email.

So for printed newsletters, there's lots of different ways of doing it. If you haven't come across Canva before, I would highly recommend people go and have a play. It's great fun, accounts are free.

. Word and publisher, yeah, they're great, but they're getting a little bit old now, and most people can sniff out a cheap, badly printed, poor paper quality, black and white because it's cheaper, newsletter that was written on Word and printed off and left behind the desk at reception for clients to pick up. You can also do email and personally as a modern girl and eco-friendly and all, I would probably go down the route of email myself. So male chimp or the alternatives are fantastic.

One thing to bear in mind with email is that it can be a bit more expensive, whilst many of these things will have free accounts. They're normally limited at about 1,000 1000 email addresses, so you do have to bear that in mind. And responsive design, so half, if not more, of your clients are going to be opening this on a mobile.

Some of them are going to be opening on an iPad, some of them are going to be opening on their Amazon Kindle device things. Some are going to be on a computer. So your email has to have responsive design.

So when you are using things like MailChimp or similar, you do need to just make sure that those are coming out how you expect them to on each device. Content is pretty much the same as for blogs, so I won't go into it in too much detail. Just bear in mind that a newsletter article is normally significantly shorter than a blog article, so blogs, you want to be at least 700 words for reasons of Google noticing what you're doing.

Newsletters, printed or emailed need to be much, much shorter. I would say maximum 300 words, and realistically you want less than that. If you are doing it as an e-newsletter, then you can of course print it on your blog and on your newsletter.

Only put the 1st 200 words or so into the newsletter and then have a link to your blog for people to finish reading it should they want to. OK, so on to the how we actually write this stuff. So as I said, this is something that over the last year, I've now got about 15 vets helping me write.

I've taken on, I think, 5 or 6 vet students now, so it's something that I've been teaching quite a lot of. Hopefully I can give you a very small overview, despite the fact my EMS normally takes about a week for me to teach everything, but here we go. So when it comes to writing your content, you need to think of your topic, you need to think about your audience, you need to choose appropriate subheadings, then start writing and think about readability, which we'll go into, read and edit, and a final proofread.

When we say choose a good topic and title, I've given you plenty of ideas about this presentation, but I think vaccinations, for instance, I would have told you before, that's not really a good topic. That's huge, that's not specific enough. So let's break it down a little bit.

We've got dog vaccinations. OK. Dog vaccinations is still quite a big topic.

OK, puppy vaccinations. Everything you need to know about puppy vaccinations. That is doable in 600 words, I know, because I've done it, but it isn't easy to do in 600 words.

It's still quite generic, you can do it. But you could also do some of these options, which may just change the focus to something slightly different. So for instance, if you have had a load of people rejecting L4, you might want to do the vaccinations our vets recommend.

If you have recently had a parvo outbreak in the area and you want to make sure everyone has a 16 week parvo injection, then you might go for the puppy vaccination update. So there are different ways of phrasing it depending exactly what you want the focus to be on, and it's worth just bearing that in mind when you're writing your title. There's nothing wrong with starting with everything you need to know about puppy vaccinations, writing what you want to know, and then going back and editing your title once you realised what you've said.

Think about your audience. So you're going to write differently for a dog owner versus a breeder. Now I'm not saying you're only going to write for one or the other because obviously you can't control who's going to come up and read this blog or newsletter, but it's worth just bearing.

In mind, if you've got a first-time dog owner, because you're writing about puppy puppy vaccinations, your breed is probably not going to be reading about puppy vaccinations as much as we might want them to. Your first time dog owner is. So think about that when you're writing the article as well, and think about the language that you might want to use for those people.

Choose your subheadings. So it is actually amazing how many subheadings you need, especially for web content. So for about a 1000 word blog article, you want at least 4 to 5 subheadings, and the reason is that you don't want to go more than about 300 words between subheadings.

That's about 3 paragraphs, about 100 words each, . The general public is not very good at reading large blocks of text, and when we read web pages, we read about 18% of what's actually on the page. We think about how you or I might interact with the web page, I normally open it up, I scroll through the other insta, I find the one that's quite close to one of the questions I'm answering asking, and then I will scroll through or scan through that text until I find a couple of keywords that make me think that's the exact sentence I want to read.

And then if it is a sentence I want to read and it doesn't make sense, I read the whole paragraph, but sometimes I'll get my answer just by reading that one sentence. So what that means is if you have massive blocks of text with not enough subheadings, people can't easily find the information that they need. So lots and lots of subheadings, far more than you would think.

Questions work really well for subheadings, so you can do sort of a Q&A type type structure which works really well. When you come to choosing your subheadings, I would advise that you Google, and I do mean Google, you might use Bing or reco or whatever else, but Google tends to work better for this because they've invested a lot into their rich text, which is this people also ask thing down here, and various other rich text formats they've got going on on their results page. The people also asked is great.

It it's a really good way to just see what other questions people are typing into Google. So you can see here I've written vaccinations for puppies, and it's already brought up. Do puppies need 2 or 3 vaccinations?

It's quite a good question to be answering. It's a hard question to answer. I know, because I've been there, but it's quite a good question to be answering.

It's obviously something people commonly ask, and it's worth worth talking about in any article that you write. And also if you click on it, all of these, they do expand and create more, so that is worth bearing in mind as well. So now we'll go on to writing for readability.

You might be shocked here that the UK average reading age is commonly quoted as about 9 years old. So it's not even secondary school. 16% of the UK population is at or below level one, so they can read very short bits of text and find a single piece of information identical in form to the question or directive.

That has massive implications for how you write for the general public and your clients. This is an example of an OECD test, and this is a level 3 question. 50% of the American and something very close to that, I think it's about 59% of the UK public can't answer this question.

The question is on the left, the text is on the right. Here's us talking about a single piece of identical information. Because the text on the right doesn't have the exact same wording as the question on the left, they struggle with this.

And if you're sat there thinking, Am I being thick? No, you're not. It is incredibly difficult for some people to understand how this question should be answered, but I can guarantee you've got the right answer in your head.

It is easier than you think. So that's kind of shocking and does make you just think about how you're going to write for people that can't infer information like that, because as vets, we're very used to making inferences day in, day out, and we forget that most people can't. So writing for readability, my first piece of advice would be to remove all veterinary terminology, even if you think it's in relatively common use like gastrointestinal, just get rid of it.

If you desperately need to use it, perhaps because you're trying to. Explain it, then I would always use the common use term first. So gut, it's not technically correct necessarily, because I'm sure you're not just talking about the gut, but just use gut and then put in brackets and normally got speech marks I go for, I think that's a good way of writing it.

The gastrointestin or whatever it is that you're trying to teach. Same with arthritis. Most people don't know the term osteoarthritis.

They know the word arthritis. So I'd refer to arthritis and then osteoarthritis secondarily, and then revert from most of the article talking about arthritis again, because that's the one people are familiar with. Average sentence length, 12 to 20 words.

That's really short. It's actually really quite surprising. On Word with it's all its preset Calibri, size 11 or 12, whatever it is, that's just over a line's worth of writing.

So it's actually super short sentence length. Don't become robotic by going through and kind of making sure everything's below 20, but do just bear it in mind. If you've got more than 3 commas in a sentence, probably one of them needs to be a full stop and you need to restructure your sentence.

Use the active voice. As vets, we're always using the passive voice because we are taught to do that at vet school and because we like to avoid the blame a little bit by saying it is not known rather than I don't know, but using your active voice is quite important for clients. It makes it much easier for them to understand.

As we said earlier, you can't infer, so do say the core point often and try and repeat it in different ways. So if that previous example had had the latest time that children could arrive and the time that preschool starts and the time that the school gates close, da da da da da, one of those the owners would have been able to pick up on. So if you're talking about chocolate being toxic, don't forget to say that chocolate is poisonous, because if you're scanning for the word toxic, They might not read the word poisonous and realise it means the same thing.

Avoid large chunks of text, so we said earlier that I wouldn't do more than 3 paragraphs per subheading. Similarly, 3 to 5 sentences per paragraph is not more than enough. So this is where our sort of 300 words per subheading comes in.

If you've got a 20 word sentence on average, 5 sentences per paragraph, that's 100 words per paragraph, 3 of those, 300 words per subheading. Your content's not clear, unless your owners can find what they need and understand what they find, then use what they find to meet their needs. So if you want them to read about What they should do in the case of chocolate poisoning, they need to be able to go onto a website and find the answer.

They need to understand it, so that's where this readability comes in. And then they need to know at the end of that, there needs to be a really, really clear course of action for them to follow. And that might be, call us, it might be, we're super busy.

Please don't call us unless your dog is already vomiting. It might be whatever, but you need to make sure that you have a very clear course of action, otherwise your content's not clear. Once you've written it all and read it and edit it, the first thing I would do is take a break.

Words become very stale when you read them over and over again. It becomes very easy to miss silly mistakes. So do just take a break, go for a dog walk, go back to work, whatever, or ask somebody else to read it over is another good way of having a fresh pair of eyes, look at it.

Don't worry about spelling grammar. If you spot mistakes, fine, change them, but don't panic that you've got to get all spelling grammar sorted at this stage. What you really want to do is make sure, does your article make sense?

Does each paragraph answer the subheading? Do the subheadings follow the title, or have you written the title and then got a bit distracted by something else, in which case you could decide, do you want to change the subheadings or do you want to change the title? And often I change the title, it's probably easier.

So do the subheadings for a title? Do the paragraphs answer the subheading, and does it flow naturally? Sometimes when you're writing all your subheadings out to begin with, you end up putting them down in the order that you find them in, and it doesn't really make sense, especially by the time you've written the text, you realise you're diving all over the place.

So sometimes you have to just go in and move it all around so it makes more sense. If you're struggling with the flow, try reading it out loud and see whether that makes any sense to you, especially when it comes to your sentence lengths and things like that. Reading it out loud can make it a really big difference to working out whether.

Your article is making sense and fun to read, or whether it's super boring. And lastly, proofread your article. So check your spelling and your grammar.

Word does a good job, but Grammarly does a slightly better job in my experience. So you can get a free grammarly account, copy and paste in your article, and it goes through and picks out all the problems with it. If you are using Words, do just make sure that you've got the right language presets, and if you've already written your article and it is in the wrong language, you will need to highlight all the words you want to set to that language.

I find otherwise, if you click it, it just changes the language setting on exactly where your cursor is, rather than on the whole article. So do just highlight all the words and check your language is correct. You can also use professional proofreading services.

They're very easy to find online. We've in the past in an emergency gone to people per hour and websites like that to pick up a proofreader who's available there and then. So they are relatively easy to find, and if you are finding that you do more content, then that is sometimes a sensible thing to do.

So common pitfalls, complex terminology, we said it is probably my number one biggest bugbear when I'm working with new writers that we, I repeatedly have to remind them not to use the complex terminology. It's so tempting because we know those terms have been created because they are correct. So gastrointestinal because it describes exactly what we're talking about, but you've just got to bear in mind that most people don't know them, and for some people reading those long words is incredibly off-putting.

Assuming the reader has previous knowledge, so unless you're writing a follow-on article for one you've already done, you should never assume that your reader knows anything at all. So start from scratch when you're explaining things. Imagine you've got your your new dog breeder who a dog owner who went out and bought a puppy on Facebook and picked it up last night and has turned up in your surgery.

That's the level you need to be aiming for. Unclear structural weaving narrative. I get this a lot as well when people return their articles to me, especially the first few that they're writing.

So often what happens, as I said, is they've written their subheadings and then they've tried to write it, and then it's kind of just gone a little bit off-piste and it doesn't quite follow. Sometimes you just need to move around those sections or take a look or maybe rename some subheadings if you work out that your paragraphs aren't actually speaking about subheading at all. When your structures are unclear like that, it can make it very difficult for people to find the information they need.

And if you go back to that thing of scrolling down till you find the subheading that answers your question, if you did that and then you read the paragraph and the paragraph wasn't on the same thing as the subheading, it'd be very frustrating. You'd probably just go to a different website rather than carrying on looking up and down that article for the information you need. Too long in too much detail, so sometimes you don't need the 13th sign of feline arthritis.

Think about what people can put up with reading and probably with bullet points, I would say 4 or 5 is is generally enough unless there really is a very good reason for adding 10. Or too long. I mean, like I said, 1000 words is pretty good for a blog article.

I probably wouldn't go any more than 1200, maybe 1500 if you've got excellent subheading structure. Anything under 700 you want to avoid as well. So it kind of is very much a sweet spot.

And poor punctuation and grammar. As we've said, the vast majority of people are not going to be noticing your poor punctuation and grammar because they're concentrating on trying to get the information they need. Having said that, if your sentence is very difficult to read because it has too many commas, or you Kind of forgotten what tense you're writing in and gone all over the place, it does make it quite hard to understand sometimes, and it can be frustrating for people.

So you'll get away with the odd mistake, but if it's recurrent throughout the article, then it is off-putting. So do just bear that in mind. And that's actually it.

So, I'm going to hand back over and we're going to have get people to have a little look and see if you've got any questions going on. But thank you very much for listening. I hope you all found it useful and hopefully you'll get some written communication done, done, which is I think quite hard, hard for some people to get their heads around, but yeah.

Joe, thank you very much. That was absolutely fascinating and a real eye-opener to some of the things that you sort of think of. 000, no, we, oh, maybe I should do and yeah, you're right.

I think most of us will be logging on to our own practise websites. Those who didn't do it while you were speaking will probably do it when we finished and just go back and go, hm, yes, you're right, that person doesn't work for us anymore. So that is quite a big thing.

There was one comment that came through, which was, I think, just a, a desperate cry of, of where we're all at in private practise at the moment. Was somebody wrote something along the lines of, given that we're so busy at the moment, Who's got time to start blogging, you know, and I think that's a, a perfect line for you to to promote your company because that's exactly why there are people like you, so that people like us on the ground who are swamped, don't have to do it. That is absolutely true.

That is what we do, but I would also say that don't There's no point in starting a blog and doing a bad job of it. You might as well wait till you've got a bit more time, ha ha. But you know that may be a distant future, but at the moment, I appreciate that when I decided that we would talk about this back in, I think it was February, things were slightly different and No one was quite as manically busy as they are now.

But if you do think that blogging would help, particularly if it's going to help with updating. So when you think about your receptionist's time and your nurse time, if they're answering the phones as well, there are some things you can do to try and get their time. Back.

So if they're answering the phone and answering questions that could have been answered by your website, then maybe your website needs to be working harder for you and doing that for them. So yeah, absolutely, we do do that kind of blog writing for companies, a lot of the vets that we write for are mobile vets. I think they have a slightly More difficult time of finding clients, perhaps they're slightly more marketing focused and SEO focused because of that.

So they are more likely to understand the value of their blog and come out and find us. But we do write for Becks all over the world, and the most recent client that we took on, he said, Oh my God, it's like a weight that's lifted off my chest. Oh, thank goodness.

OK, this is great. And the great thing is we're all vets, so we're not going to write something stupid or harmful. We're going to try and take time to understand how your practise works and what you want your clients to know, and then we're not going to write, Oh yeah, it's fine for your dog to eat a loaf of raisins, as long as you feed it an egg afterwards.

We're all vets, so we know where you're at. That would be less funny if it wasn't true, isn't it? Well, you did say plan what you're going to do.

So whoever wrote that anonymous comment, there you go. Use Joe in the meantime and then plan to do your own blog from about 2025 when this madness settles down. Me back to practise and I'll try and relieve some of the pressure.

Joe, when you were talking about content on the web page and that you were talking about evergreen content and Hillary made a comment and said, what is evergreen? Would you just like to explain that to her? Yeah, absolutely.

So Evergreen is kind of as it sounds, it's content that doesn't go out of date. So it's things like disease information. So realistically, our understanding of canine arthritis will change, certainly for the pet owner, it's going to change very minutely.

You can update static pages, that's fine, but it's not a constantly evolving situation. And like I said, even when it is a constantly evolving situation, it probably is on a level that our pet owners don't need to understand. So evergreen content is stuff that's not going to grow out of date quickly.

It's it's not like the pancytopenia thing that flashed up and disappeared into nowhere again, and no one really knows what's going on. It's very much the stuff that we know, the content that's going to be out there forever, the evergreen content. Yeah, and a bit, a, a great example of what's not evergreen is what you were talking about about that website with, pictures of people that had left the practise, sort of when you started, as it were.

That's the antithesis of of evergreen. So, yeah, Hillary, I hope that makes sense to you. I did like your point number one on the slide that's up there now.

Avoid complex terminology. I, it, it's something when I mentor young vets, I also say to them, when you talk to clients, make sure you're speaking English, not speaking veterinary. Because we understand it and if we're talking to colleagues, you know, you can drop in all these.

Abbreviations and BID and whatever else and and unfortunately, clients will never go, Hang on, whoa, whoa, whoa, what what was that that you're talking about? Because they don't want to be embarrassed and make them feel like an idiot. So they would rather just pretend, not know, and then move on to a different website, which is actually speaking English instead of speaking medical.

Absolutely. And and that's the danger actually there in our consult rooms and then they go home and start googling because they haven't understood what we've said. And again, I said I had best students.

I often use the example that I had a new grad start at one of the practises I was at, and he came out and said, rushed out the back with the dog in his arms, going, We've got to induce vomiting. And I had to make him turn around and go, we've got to induce some. This was what he said, and I said, that's not informed consent.

You've got to get back in there and explain what you just said, otherwise that's not informed consent. And it's exactly that sort of thing, and we do it without meaning to because we've been taught these great terms and we know what they mean, but it's just worth bearing in mind people, not everyone does. Yeah, and that's exactly what happens.

You know, we spend so much of our life. About this stuff, that we kind of want to use it, but it's not appropriate when we're talking to clients to be using that stuff because, you know, you, you're mentoring young vets and you stand at the back and listen to their consult. And they do a great job.

You understand exactly what it is and then you quickly nip round to the back of reception, and they, the owner comes out and the reception says, so what's, what's going on with Fluffy? And they go, I don't know, you think, you know, you think that's not what they said, but it's because we're speaking medicine and this is exactly the same, the, the message is, you know, speak to the people. What was that statistic you used about the level of people's reading and writing and understanding?

So the average reading age in the UK is commonly quoted as about 9 years, but 16% of the UK population is below a level 1. Or at or below level one on on this test that they do that OE OECD, the one that I showed the example of. They do that all around the world and they compare literacy rates.

And actually, the UK has quite a good literacy rate. Our numeracy rate is much lower than many other countries, but our literacy rate's pretty good, and even we have, you know, a significant proportion of the population can't infer information when it's written. Yeah, it's really important that you put in the time and that is going to.

Yeah, exactly. Fantastic. Well, Joe, we have gone through all the questions.

Hillary did say thank you very much. You did explain and covered what she was looking for, and she also said that she's going to be spending a bit of time, re-looking at her website, and, she thinks it may be along the lines of a programme of Ashes to Ashes. So, good luck with that one, Hillary.

But Joe, it's my pleasure to be able to thank you for spending your time with us tonight and also to thank MWI for their sponsorship to bring you to us, and for the insights that you have given us, and, certainly food for thought of where we should be looking and thinking about going in the future with our, our, communications with our clients when it comes to writing them down. Yeah, it was, it was lovely to be here and if anyone needs any help, I'm not going to super sell my services or anything, but if anyone just needs to talk about what their website looks like, I'd be more than happy to help anyone out. It's, it's kind of a little geeky thing of mine that I quite enjoy, so.

Fantastic. Joe, once again, thank you and to everybody who attended tonight. Thank you very much for your time.

I hope you found it as insightful and interesting as I did. And from myself, Bruce Stevenson, it's good night.