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Multi-location veterinary · 12-month engagement · Illustrative compositeCascade Veterinary Group recovered the bookings four locations were missing online.
A 4-location Pacific Northwest vet group with strong word-of-mouth and a website almost nobody was finding through search or AI engines. Over twelve months Emaration's six-layer audit, a one-time migration sprint, and Content Ops Tier 2 recovered the organic-booking pipeline, fixed attribution, and surfaced ~5.7× first-year ROI. Composite engagement; the mechanics are real, the outcomes projected from industry benchmarks.
New-client calls were down. Nobody could say why.
A 4-location PNW vet group, $4–8M revenue, mixed companion + emergency. Marketing run by the practice manager plus a part-time admin. They'd spent eighteen months with a generalist local agency paying $3,000/month and described the result, verbatim, as "monthly reports we didn't understand and no leads we could attribute."
The owner could feel the upside waiting. New-client phone calls were down year over year. They couldn't tell whether the cause was the website, the search results, the economy, or all three. The two newer locations — opened in the last 18 months — weren't ringing. The website was the only thing tying the brand together — and the place where a few fixes could unlock the most new bookings. Multi-location vet groups have unique structural problems (location pages, schema, Google Business Profile mechanics), AI Overviews now answer 30–40% of informational queries directly (an open citation lane to win), and the prior agency had built generic content that wasn't indexed for the queries pet owners actually typed.
Baseline at intake (illustrative)
| Metric | At intake | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GSC clicks / month | 4,200 | Google Search Console |
| GSC impressions / month | 280,000 | Google Search Console |
| GA4 sessions / month | 9,800 | GA4 |
| Organic conversions / month | 142 | GA4 + call tracking |
| AIO-affected query share | ~32% | Manual SERP analysis |
| Core Web Vitals LCP (p75) | 4.2 s | PageSpeed Insights |
| 404 / 5xx per week | 1,200 | Server logs |
Known data-quality issues found in audit week one: GA4 form-fill conversions undercounted by ~25%, call tracking not integrated with GA4, and the fourth location's sitemap had never been submitted to GSC.
The six-layer audit, then the scoped fix.
Every Emaration engagement starts the same way: a six-layer audit delivered in 10 business days from intake. The fix list, the priority, and the line-item pricing all come out of what the audit surfaces — not a template. Here's how that played out for Cascade.
The audit ran ten business days. We crawled all four location subdirectories, ran Core Web Vitals on the templates, traced every redirect chain, and validated schema. We ran a multi-prompt probe across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini for the queries pet owners actually type — "emergency vet open now," "puppy vaccinations cost," "[breed] specialist near me" — and logged where Cascade was cited, where a competitor was cited, and where the AI engine made something up.
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Technical: redirects + speed
The 1,200/week 404 spike traced to a 2024 CMS migration that left ~800 legacy URLs un-redirected. Two location pages were noindexed by accident. Mobile LCP was 4.2 s. Fix: 301 matrix, meta-robots correction, redirect-chain consolidation.
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Content vs. competitors
80% of high-intent local queries had no dedicated landing content. Built location × service pages from the practice's existing client-email playbooks — voice the practice already used, just indexed.
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AI engine visibility (AIO)
Informational queries were being absorbed by AI Overviews. Restructured FAQ blocks with JSON-LD across location pages to recover brand mentions inside AIO responses. Added MedicalBusiness + VeterinaryCare schema.
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Measurement & attribution
GA4 + GTM + call tracking were misaligned, understating conversions by ~25%. Deployed server-side GTM in month 2. Connected GA4 to BigQuery so the owner could see per-location bookings and cost-per-booking without waiting for a monthly PDF.
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Vendor economics
Prior agency was charging $3,000/mo for roughly $400/mo of actual delivered work. We rebuilt the scope as a 14-line plan with line-item prices — three lines run by us, two by a vetted white-label SEO partner at cost, the rest in-house with a written checklist.
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Accessibility & trust
Location pages were unusable to screen readers (no alt text on staff photos, color-only signaling on emergency-services callouts). Full WCAG-AA remediation pass in months 2–3. Compounds especially with older pet owners.
Where AI did the work, where humans did the work
AI did this
- Brief generation (intent decomposition + content outlines)
- First-pass drafts from approved briefs
- Anomaly detection against baseline metrics in BigQuery
- Bulk schema markup generation
- Internal-link map suggestions
Humans did this
- Every published piece reviewed for voice, accuracy, and HIPAA-adjacent compliance
- Schema validation manually checked on each deploy
- Migration sprint hand-built and QA'd by Andrew plus a vetted sub-contractor
- WCAG-AA remediation human-tested
- Per-deliverable AI disclosure in every monthly report
Cadence was light by design: a 30-minute weekly check-in, a shared Looker dashboard the owner could open any time, and a Monday "what changed, what's queued, what's blocked" note. We explicitly did not do paid media (referred out), social (not a vet-vertical winner), or online reputation management (referred to a specialist).
What would move, by how much, over twelve months.
Every figure below is projected from published industry benchmarks for multi-location veterinary practices and Emaration's audit methodology, not measured from a single real engagement. Numbers are illustrative.
| Metric | At intake | Month 6 | Month 12 | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSC clicks / month | 4,200 | 6,800 | 8,400 | +100% |
| GSC impressions / month | 280,000 | 360,000 | 410,000 | +46% |
| GA4 sessions / month | 9,800 | 14,200 | 17,500 | +79% |
| Organic conversions / month | 142 | 245 | 318 | +124% |
| AIO-affected query share | ~32% | ~28% | ~25% | −7 pts |
| LCP (p75) | 4.2 s | 2.1 s | 1.9 s | −55% |
| 404 / 5xx per week | 1,200 | 80 | 30 | −97% |
| Average position (priority queries) | 8.3 | 4.1 | 2.7 | −5.6 |
Organic conversions / month (illustrative)
Projected from baseline (142/mo) to month 12 (318/mo). Illustrative.
AI-engine citation share — before / after
Before vs. day-90 illustrative probe, local + service-intent queries. Projection.
Time to first measurable win in this composite: ~3 weeks (post-migration sprint, 404 volume drops ~92%, GSC clicks rebound within 14 days). What was harder than projected: an inherited fourth-location CMS instance the practice manager had forgotten about, and one location page that needed a full rebuild rather than a fix-in-place. What was easier: AIO restructuring with FAQ schema produced brand-mention recovery faster than the model assumed.
What it would cost. What it would return. What goes to charity.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Onboarding audit (deliverable yours to keep) | |
| Migration sprint (one-time) | $7,500 |
| Content Ops Tier 2 — $5,000/mo over year 1 | $60,000 |
| Year-1 total client investment | $67,500 |
| Projected Year-1 incremental new-client revenue | ~$385,000 |
| Projected Year-1 ROI | ~5.7× |
Revenue model: +176 incremental monthly conversions × $180 average first-year value per new client (verified per-practice service mix). Numbers are illustrative until measured.
What Cascade got that the prior agency wasn't delivering.
| Thing | Prior agency | Emaration |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly reports they could actually read | Vague | Scorecard + baseline + anomalies + voice notes + what's queued |
| Attribution clarity | Broken | sGTM deployed; conversion undercount fixed |
| Vendor cost disclosure | None | Sub-processor list public; vendor cost in monthly report |
| AI disclosure | None ("we use AI tools") | Per-deliverable: what AI did, what humans did |
| Accessibility | Ignored | WCAG-AA remediation; AI imagery only with visible disclosure |
| Friction question at QBR | Never asked | Asked verbatim at M3, M6, M9, M12 |
| Charitable receipt | None | Monthly EOCS receipt with named programs funded |
What would change for the team running the practice.
"We can finally tell what's working. The monthly report is the first one in two years where I read it and didn't have follow-up questions for our vendor. The fact that they tell us what their AI did and what their humans did — and what they spent at the vendor level — is the kind of honesty I didn't know I could ask for."
— Composite practice manager voice, assembled for illustrative use only. Replaced with a verbatim, written, signed real-client quote the moment a real engagement closes.
What this engagement would fund.
Emaration commits 10% of net profit to Emaration's Outreach and Community Support (EOCS) — the charitable arm Jordan leads. Every client engagement carries a per-engagement receipt the client can see and share.
Projected Year-1 EOCS contribution from this composite engagement
~$5,860 — calculated as 10% of net profit attributable to this engagement (Year-1 Emaration COGS ~$8,400 against ~$67,500 client investment, ~87% gross margin, EOCS share applied to net).
Programs funded (illustrative):
- Hearing Loss Association of Oregon — 8 captioning-device contributions
- One accessibility audit for a Portland-area animal-welfare nonprofit
EOCS amounts and named programs in published receipts will be verified from real engagement financials, not modeled. The figures above are illustrative.
What will be in this case study when a real engagement replaces it.
When this composite is retired, the real version will publish: redacted GSC delta screenshots, the real GA4 chart export, a read-only Looker Studio link, an audit PDF excerpt, the deliverables inventory log, the real signed-and-dated EOCS receipt with named programs funded, and the verbatim, written, signed client quote — with consent per Emaration's case study template.
Retirement criteria: (1) a real multi-location veterinary engagement that has run at least 90 days, (2) real baseline + delta metrics, (3) written client consent to publish, (4) a real verbatim client quote. Replace this file, do not edit it.
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