The after-hours page for a vet practice: who answers, and where to go

Do you see emergencies yourselves, and when?

The page opens with that answer, in one sentence, ahead of everything else: "[Practice name] sees emergencies during opening hours, [Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.]. Outside those hours, call [Emergency hospital name] at [number]." Write it for the owner who reads nothing more, and use the same words wherever the arrangement appears: the top of this page, the contact page, the footer and the phone recording.

Then give the week hour by hour, as a table. An arrangement that changes at 7 p.m. and again at 10 p.m. is easier to follow in rows than in a paragraph, and a row is easy to change on the day the arrangement changes.

A practice that runs its own overnight service puts its own address in every row of the last column and says so in the first sentence. A practice that never sees emergencies says that plainly too: "We do not see emergencies. At any hour, call [hospital] at [number]." Either sentence gives an owner something to do, and so does the table under it.

The emergency hospital you refer to, as it describes itself

When you refer after hours, the hospital's details are the ones an owner acts on, so give them in full: its name as the hospital writes it, the street address in text, the phone number, and its hours as the hospital publishes them, with a link to the hospital's own page. The last part matters because your page is repeating another business's facts, and the honest form says whose they are: "[Hospital name] lists its hours as [hours] (checked [date])."

Say when the referral applies: every night after [time], weekends from [time], public holidays, or only on nights when no one from your team is on call. If you refer to more than one hospital, say which one for which hours or which animals, such as the one that sees exotics. And say what passes between the two, where it is your practice's arrangement: whether you send the animal's history when an owner tells you they went, and how you follow up the next morning.

Check the hospital's own page on a schedule, [monthly], and whenever its recording or its site changes. A hospital can change its hours or move, and a stale line on your page sends an owner to the wrong door with your practice's name on the instructions.

Write both addresses out. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026), 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse anywhere on their three main pages; the figure covers every trade together, with no veterinary cut. On an after-hours page the address that has to read cleanly is the hospital's as well as yours: street, town and postal code as text, not only a pin on an embedded map.

What the page tells an owner to do first

Call. The first instruction is a phone number and who will answer it: "If you are worried about your animal, call us at [number] before you set out. Outside our hours, call [hospital] at [number]." The person who answers can ask about the animal and tell the owner whether to come in, and where, as your practice's phone policy allows. The team can also be ready by the time the owner arrives.

What the page leaves out is as deliberate. It carries no list of symptoms, no "go straight to the hospital if", no home treatment and nothing about what an animal may eat or be given. A page cannot examine an animal, and a list invites an owner to judge from it, in either direction. Anything clinical happens on the phone or at the door, with a member of the veterinary team.

Two practical lines belong under the call instruction. Ask the owner to say which animal it is when they call, so a practice that does not see reptiles can send a lizard's owner on at once. And say what to do if the line is busy or goes to a recording: "If no one answers, go to [hospital], [address]."

What an after-hours visit costs, stated as a basis

Cost is one of the few things an owner can check before setting out, so the page gives the basis rather than a quote. Every figure below is a bracket for your own.

• After-hours exam: [amount], on [weekday evenings after 7 p.m., weekends and public holidays].
• Whether that replaces the regular exam fee or is added to it: [which].
• A deposit before treatment: [the amount, or how it is set], and when it is taken.
• Payment accepted after hours: [the methods].
• [Hospital name] sets its own fees: see [its page, if it publishes them].

If treatment after the exam is estimated the same way as in the day, say so in a sentence and link to the page where your estimate policy is written (what an owner can check before a first visit covers that page). Do not copy the hospital's fees onto your page. They are the hospital's to publish and to change, and a copy on your site goes stale without anyone noticing.

Holidays and the other nights the arrangement changes

A public holiday can change both halves of the arrangement, your hours and the hospital's. Put a dated line at the top of the page in the weeks before ("On [holiday, date], we are closed. [Hospital] lists its hours that day as [hours]."), take it down the day after, and make the same change on your Business Profile and in your markup.

On the Business Profile that change is special hours, which Google's guidelines allow "for particular days, like holidays or special events". In the markup it is an openingHoursSpecification with validFrom and validThrough set to the holiday's date and opens and closes both "00:00", the form Google's local business documentation gives for a business closed on those dates.

Other nights change a row rather than the whole week: the on-call veterinarian is away, the hospital closes a wing, a new recording goes in. Change the row on the day. What an AI assistant's answers say about your hours can be checked line by line, with the hour written into each question, as measuring a practice by animal, service and hour describes.

The same arrangement on the Business Profile and in the markup

The Business Profile carries your regular customer-facing hours, in the guidelines' words, and special hours for the days that differ. Three more rules from the same guidelines apply at night. The number is your own: they ask for one under the business's direct control and rule out numbers that refer callers to another business's number, so the hospital's number belongs on your page, not on your profile. The name is the one on your sign, with nothing added, so "24 hour emergency" goes in the hours and the text, not the name. And a department that operates as a distinct entity, with a name and a category of its own, gets its own profile with its own hours.

The markup repeats the page in JSON-LD. The practice's node is typed ["VeterinaryCare", "LocalBusiness"], because schema.org places VeterinaryCare under MedicalOrganization and gives opening hours to places; the overview for veterinary practices explains the pair. With the second type the node can carry the LocalBusiness fields Google documents, and its openingHoursSpecification holds your own hours and nothing else.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": ["VeterinaryCare", "LocalBusiness"],
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/#practice",
  "name": "[Practice name]",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "telephone": "[main number, with country and area code]",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "[street and number]",
    "addressLocality": "[town]",
    "addressRegion": "[state or province]",
    "postalCode": "[postal code]",
    "addressCountry": "[two-letter country code]"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
      "opens": "[08:00]",
      "closes": "[19:00]"
    },
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": "Saturday",
      "opens": "[09:00]",
      "closes": "[13:00]"
    },
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "opens": "00:00",
      "closes": "00:00",
      "validFrom": "[the holiday, YYYY-MM-DD]",
      "validThrough": "[the holiday, YYYY-MM-DD]"
    }
  ]
}

The referral stays in the text. None of the properties Google lists for a local business describes one, and the hospital's hours are not yours to mark up. If you run your own after-hours service with its own number and hours, Google documents a department property for that case: a nested item with its own telephone and openingHoursSpecification, named in its format as the practice's name followed by the department's. If the practice itself is open around the clock, the structured data says so in the form Google's documentation gives: opens "00:00" and closes "23:59", every day.