Aligning SEO and Pet Store Websites
As a business owner or pet store owner, it’s understandable that you have different vendors and third-parties for different services. You’ve got various distributors, you’ve got a POS system, you probably have an accountant.
What happens when these parties need to work in sync? If they have no contact with each other, how does shared work get finished?
When it comes to pet store marketing, we run into many pet store owners that are using one service or company for their pet store social media, another for pet store SEO, another to manage their website, and another to do their Google Ads. So when you need to align your overall pet store marketing strategy, that onus falls on YOU, the owner! Juggling all of those moving parts, various people… it’s a lot!
Wouldn’t it make sense to consolidate and put your pet store marketing strategy in the hands of a single, competent, professional pet store marketing agency? That way everybody is on the same page when it comes to overall strategy and tactics, like aligning SEO and your pet store website.
In this article, we’ll provide a few tips on aligning your SEO with your website to make sure that you can get effective collaboration and positive results in your pet store SEO strategy. And if you’re looking to work with the best pet store marketing agency out there, contact us here at Pet Engine Marketing to set up a free 30-minute consultation and marketing audit.
Let’s dig in:
step 1: write unique title tags
Title tags might seem like a small detail and fairly straightforward, but they’re important in SEO. Optimizing your title tags helps you rank higher on search engines like Google, and a well-written and purposeful title tag can influence your audience to click through to your site. Google tracks this too, so even if your title tags are great but the content isn’t relevant to your audience, that will ding you from an SEO standpoint.
Tips for title tags
Platforms like Google and other ad spaces are looking for clarity. Clickbaity titles will not work. Here are a few tips on making quality title tags:
If you can, include numbers in your title tag. This can be percentages, digits, dates, data, pretty much anything. Just make sure that it’s relevant to your content!
Aim for your title tag to be between 50 and 60 characters. You have to provide some detail, but not too much, and you have to ultimately take up some real estate on the search engine results page.
Include a call to action on your page so that readers and visitors have a clear next step or other options forward. This could be a link, a button, a product, or otherwise.
step 2: optimize for page speed
If your webpage or pet store website loads slowly, you’re in a world of hurt. Today’s consumers don’t have the patience to wait for a dial-up website to load, and Google knows and experiences that as well. If lots of people click on your link, but you don’t get many landing page views, that’s an indicator of low page load speed.
Overall, website speed is a small part of Google’s SEO algorithms, but having a negative score on this can result in big issues for your SEO rankings.
Increasing page speed
This is a great opportunity for coordinated action between your pet store SEO strategist and your pet store website manager. If they are two different parties or people, as the store owner you need to make sure they get to know one another! If they are part of the same team, all the better.
Minimizing JavaScript and CSS on the website - Coders and website developers will often use extra spacing or organizational tools to make their coding easier. While this is beneficial for the site developer, it can be detrimental to load speed as it requires the browser and Google’s indexing crawlers more time to go through it.
Image compression - If your website developer has used primary source material or raw images rather than compressing them, this can cause sites to load more slowly and reduce your SEO success. Compressing images is a simple process and can be done without destroying the quality of the image. Use a tool like CompressJPEG or CompressPNG online for free.
Upgrade to HTTP/2 - This connection allows for multiples website responses to be received through one connection, whereas a traditional HTTP separates requests for each response. Basically, this means that HTTP/2 is capable of multitasking when it comes to page loading, whereas HTTP only loads one piece at a time.
step 3: focus on mobile-first
There are more users on Google using a mobile device than a computer these days. Mobile-friendly sites are no longer hard to find, they are a prerequisite for any web-building platform and can’t be ignored.
Most pet store marketing teams that build pet store websites don’t realize that Google generally uses the mobile version of your site to determine rankings rather than the desktop version of your site. Therefore, mobile layout, load speed, style, and functions are absolutely critical to your pet store SEO strategy.
Furthermore, providing a positive experience on mobile could be the defining factor in whether a pet parent purchases from you, contacts you, or subscribes to you.
Tips for mobile-optimized sites
A responsive site is a website that optimizes and changes when the media layout or screen size changes. You can test this on your desktop by shrinking or enlarging the browser window and seeing what happens to your pet store website. If the site shrinks appropriately and optimizes in responses to your shrinking, then your site is responsive. It’s worth digging in further to ensure that your buttons are usable, your navigation is easy, your content is accessible, and your text is spaced far enough apart to be legible. Our team at Pet Engine Marketing create responsive websites through Squarespace.
A mobile-separated site is typically comprised of a desktop version of your website on one domain and a mobile version of your website on another subdomain. Generally, we don’t recommend this unless the site is highly customized and optimized specifically for mobile users. Separating the mobile site from the desktop site can cause a high increase in additional work, sufferings in rankings, and the need for close alignment between the two when it comes to data, metadata, and available information.
In conclusion, if you want to properly align SEO and your pet store website, it’s best to have your resources working in tandem. Your best bet might be a website designed and published by Pet Engine Marketing, while we also handle and optimize for pet store SEO strategy. Check out our available services for more information on what we provide to pet store owners to help them drive revenue.
If you’re looking for additional pet store marketing resources, check out our Blog - it’s full of other articles like this, tutorials, how-to’s, tips, and more to help grow your pet store. You are also cordially invited to our growing community of pet store owners interested in improving their marketing on FB: THE Group for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses.
Hope to see you there, and hope you can get started improving your pet store SEO strategy through a new understanding of how it aligns with your website!
