The Vet Retired, the Phone Went Quiet, and the Receptionist Got Handed the Internet

Twenty-Six Years Behind the Same Desk

I have answered the phone at the same veterinary practice in Bloemfontein since 1999. I know which Labradors will eat anything, which cats need two people and a towel, and which farmers will pay on the day and which will pay in April when the cheque from the co-op comes in. I know the sound of a car pulling in too fast, which usually means a snake bite or a dog hit on the road, and I know to have the back door open before they reach it.

What I did not know, until about eighteen months ago, was anything at all about the internet, other than how to send a photo to my grandson.

Dr Venter Hangs Up His Coat

Dr Venter started the practice in 1987 with one room and a secondhand autoclave. Everybody in our part of town knew him. If your dog was sick, you did not search for a vet, you phoned Dr Venter, and if you did not have his number, your neighbour did. When he retired, the practice was bought by Dr Naledi Mokoena, who had worked with him for six years and whom the animals adore, even the bad-tempered Jack Russell from Brandwag who bites everybody else.

The first month after Dr Venter left, the phone rang as usual. The second month, a bit less. By the fourth month I was doing crossword puzzles between calls, which I had never once done in twenty-six years. The regulars still came. What stopped were the new people, the young couples with their first puppy, the families who had just moved to Bloemfontein for work at the university or the hospital.

The Meeting in the Tea Room

Dr Mokoena called me and the two nurses into the tea room on a Thursday after closing. She had a printout from the bank and a face I recognised from when she has to tell someone bad news about their pet.

"New clients are down by almost half," she said. "I think people were finding us through Dr Venter's name. Now they search on their phones, and we do not come up."

One of the nurses asked what we came up as. Dr Mokoena turned her laptop around. She had typed vet near me into Google, and there, on the screen, were three practices I had heard of and two I had not. We were nowhere. It was like walking into the town hall and finding someone had taken your chair.

Then she looked at me. "Tannie Rina, you know this practice better than anyone. Will you help me sort this out?"

I said yes before I understood the question.

The Vocabulary Lesson

My grandson Ruan is twenty and studies something with computers at the university. I bribed him with a pot of oxtail on a Sunday and asked him to explain everything to me as if I were seventy and slightly deaf, which is close enough.

He told me there were two ways to show up on Google. One was paying for an advert so you appear at the top with a small word next to you that says sponsored. The other was making sure the website and the Google listing were good enough that Google wanted to show you anyway, without paying per click. He called the second one SEO, and I made him spell it for me twice.

I wrote everything in the back of the appointment diary, in pencil, under a heading I underlined: THINGS I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YET. That list was very long for about three weeks.

Finding the Listing Nobody Owned

The first thing I discovered was almost funny. There was a Google listing for our practice, with a map pin, but it still had Dr Venter's cell number on it, a photo of the building from before we painted it, and opening hours that were wrong on Saturdays. Some people had left reviews. One said, "Lovely vet, shame they never answer the phone." They were phoning a cell phone that was sitting in a drawer in Dr Venter's holiday house in Clarens.

Getting that listing back into our hands took me eleven days, two phone calls to Clarens, a postcard with a code on it that the postman nearly delivered to the pharmacy next door, and more patience than I usually reserve for the cat with the towel.

When it finally showed the right number, the phone rang that same afternoon. A young woman with a kitten that would not eat. I nearly cried, which I did not tell her.

Knowing What I Could Not Do

I am good at many things. I am not good at building websites. Our website was made by Dr Venter's nephew in about 2011 and it looked it. I could fix the listing and ask our clients for honest reviews, but I knew the rest was beyond me.

Dr Mokoena and I sat down and wrote a list of questions to ask anyone we might hire. Ruan helped. I insisted on one question that I have since learned is the most important: "Will you explain to me, in plain words, what you did this month and what changed?" I have spent twenty-six years explaining medical things to frightened people in plain words. I did not see why anyone else should be excused.

Asking Around

I did what I always do when I need to know something in Bloemfontein. I asked people. I asked the man who owns the hardware store, the woman who runs the guesthouse on our road, and a client who has a small physiotherapy practice. The physio told me she worked with a digital marketing agency and that the part she valued most was not the clever stuff, it was that somebody finally picked up the phone when she had a question.

I learned there are people who will promise you the moon. One man who phoned us told me he could get us to number one on Google in a week. I had been reading enough by then to know that is like a vet promising to cure old age. I thanked him and put the phone down.

When the advertising side came up, Ruan told me to check whether whoever we used was a Google Premier Partner, because it meant Google itself had looked at how they ran accounts. I did not fully understand it, but I understood the principle. It is the same reason I check a locum vet is registered with the council before they touch a single animal.

The Slow Part

What nobody tells you is that this side of things is slow. The adverts brought a few calls almost at once, mostly from people searching late at night with sick animals. The other part, the website and the content and all the patient work an SEO agency does, took months before I could feel any difference at the front desk.

I measured it the only way I knew how. I kept a tally in the appointment diary, a little star next to every new client, and I asked each one, "How did you find us?" For the first two months the answer was mostly, "My neighbour." By the fifth month I was hearing, "I just searched for a vet," and I would put a second little mark next to the star, a tiny g, for Google.

What It Gave Back

We are busy again. Not crazy busy, but the kind of busy where I am not doing crossword puzzles. The young couples are back with their first puppies, and they take photos in the waiting room and some of them end up on our listing, which I have learned is a good thing.

I still keep my tally. I still ask everyone how they found us. I still have the list in the back of the diary, and most of it now has a line through it. The heading is still there, though, underlined: THINGS I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YET. I have decided never to rub it out. At fifty-eight, I quite like having something left to learn, as long as somebody is willing to explain it to me in plain words.