Following up on our brief definition of SEO on last week’s Freesource post on AnswerThePublic, we’ve got an Insider post for our community members on why SEO is necessary for pet stores. Search engine optimization is more important than ever nowadays and it’s critical for (almost) every pet store to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every pet business. Of course, we’ll back it up with data!

What is SEO?

To put it super simply, Search Engine Optimization is a way to improve your website so that it will appear closer to the top positions in the search results of Google. An SEO campaign takes time and effort but is perhaps the most powerful way to increase organic (unpaid) traffic to your website.

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (Source: Search Engine Journal)
75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines. (Source: HubSpot)

Users, such as pet parents, trust search engines and having your pet store present in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching increases brand trust and credibility, therefore increasing your chances that they visit your store or purchases online.

In a saturated market, SEO can put you ahead of your other local pet store competition. If two stores or websites are selling similar items to similar audiences, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more visitors and make more sales. That’s why SEO is necessary for pet stores. Want to beat out your competition? Let’s get started on your pet store’s SEO campaign.

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If you want to learn more about SEO and get deeper into how to start doing it yourself to improve your pet store’s marketing and website ranking, keep reading. It’s about to get technical.

Going Deeper into Pet Store SEO

For the sake of simplicity, SEO can be broken into 3 areas: technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO. We’ll go a little deeper into how all of these apply to your pet store’s website and marketing strategy.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content of a website or with website promotion methods. It has to do with settings you need to configure to make the job of search engine crawlers easier. Usually, once you get your technical SEO correct, you may not have to deal with it again. These settings are things like using SSL security, having fast website load times, being mobile-optimized, using a sitemap, and registering your website with Google Search Console, among other things. At Pet Engine Marketing, we build websites for pet businesses that include all of these pieces, among others. We deliver you an SEO-optimized website, standard.

On-Site SEO

The main focus of on-page SEO is to provide search engines with enough signals so that they can understand the meaning and context of your content. For example, if you’re a pet store, you wanting to be putting out content that’s relevant to your customers and your pet store’s audience. It is at this stage that you deal with website structure, SEO keywords, title optimizations, headings, internal links, image SEO, structured data markup, and other techniques that can send the right signals to search engines.

If followed correctly, on-page SEO will also improve the usability and credibility of a website or blog.

Off-Site SEO

In general, when a user types a search query, search engine algorithms look to find the best pages that can satisfy the intent of the user. Pages that are good candidates appear in the first positions of the search results. One of the factors to determine the position of a page in the results is the number of places it is backlinked or linked to via another website. If other websites are linking your content, it’s a sign that it’s good, relevant content.

Backlinks are a signal of trust and depending on where the links are coming from, they can greatly affect your ranking position. If the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites, your ranking will be positively affected. Good content will get you natural links which in turn will give you high rankings and traffic.

Conclusion

Alright, let’s get our head out of the weeds here and back to the main point. SEO is necessary for pet stores because almost everybody in today’s younger, modern audience starts their search for pet stores on a search engine. If yours doesn’t come up first, your chances of gaining that customer’s business dwindles. To sum it up, search engine optimization or SEO is a way to optimize your website so that search engines will understand it better and give you higher rankings on the search engine results page.

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