PET STORE
seo
Want to improve your pet store SEO & SEM results? You’re in the right spot! At Pet Engine Marketing, we are able to provide pet store search engine optimization and search engine marketing as a standalone service and as part of our Full-Service Pet Store Marketing Partnership. You can always book a free call to get an audit, some quick recommendations, and a meeting with one of our pet store marketing experts absolutely, 100% free. Just contact us to set that up!
Pet Store SEO
The Basics on Search Engine Optimization for Pet Stores
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a massive sub-industry of marketing and one that thousands of marketers dedicate their days, years, and entire careers to. Understanding the latest search engine updates and algorithm changes, and optimizing to continue to bring the best results for clients. What results, you may ask?
“93% of all online experiences begin on a search engine, with 32% of these resulting in a click on the first organic result.”
Optimizing your online assets for search engines means that you show up more frequently and higher on the search engine results page for relevant search queries. So for instance, if you performed a Google search for “pet stores near me,” as a pet store owner you would want to show up first or second in order to bring the most pet parents into your store. Otherwise, they’ll go somewhere else: local competition, online retailer, or otherwise. This also applies to groomers, daycares, dog walkers - any service or product in the pet industry or anywhere. Having a higher score in the eyes of Google’s algorithms, crawlers, and indexes means that your pet business shows up higher for those search queries.
Why is SEO important, and worth paying for? Well, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. One of the hallmarks of a healthy pet store website is consistent, qualified organic traffic. SEO is one of the only marketing channels and investments that, when done correctly, continues to pay dividends long into the future. Even if you were to “turn it off,” it’s like a snowball rolling downhill. It will eventually stop, but you’ve already put together a decent chunk of snow and given it a push.
There are various different practices and strategies that go into your overall SEO strategy. This can be broken down into three areas:
On-site optimization
Technical SEO
Off-page SEO
We’re going to dig into each of these areas for your benefit here, so keep reading for keep scrolling to find the information you need to succeed in your SEO campaigns.
On-Site Optimization:
One of the three major pieces of proper search engine optimization consists of applying your keyword research to your content on your website. Here are some pet store SEO tactics to strive for and some others to avoid when it comes to optimizing your pet store website.
DO’S
Create quality content that provides solutions, original data, or unique experiences.
Organize your content with headings and subheadings.
Provide internal links where relevant or necessary.
Optimize your images: this includes alt tags, compression, file names, file types, and proper image resolution.
Optimize and update your website metadata, page title tags, and URL structures.
DON’TS
Create thin, short, or useless content that is otherwise not pertinent to the audience that you are striving to interact with.
Duplicate content or other time-saving/cost-cutting measures. Google won’t necessarily penalize you for this, but you won’t gain anything as they will go with the source content 99% of the time.
Keyword stuffing: use your keywords in a natural, non-robotic way. Incorporate them in a way that is understandable to your readers.
Publish without going through your SEO checklist!
Technical SEO
Technical SEO consists of the sometimes tedious, detail-oriented, beyond-the-scenes website work that benefits your website and website rankings on search engines. It’s critical that you have a working, healthy partnership with your pet store website manager or developer so that you can successfully overcome SEO challenges.
There are many areas within technical SEO that should be addressed: your code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc), your domain, your sitemap, structured and schema markup, site crawling, mobile optimization, indexing, site and page load speed, and more beyond that.
“76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit the business within a day.”
To keep things simple, here are some common issues on websites within the “technical” side of SEO that will prevent you from ranking higher on Google:
Broken links: Both internal and external links should be functional.
Mobile optimization: Most newer drag-and-drop website editors work really well for pet stores and nearly all of them automatically optimize for mobile with responsive design. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized site, you’re hurting your pet store SEO results.
Page load speed: Improving page loading speed can be done by compressing images, reducing unnecessary code, bundling files, and reducing redirects.
A true expert in technical SEO can improve these metrics and more, which in turn will help your pet store rank #1 on Google in your area and bring in more revenue!
Off-page SEO
Even if you’re doing all of the right things for your on-site and technical SEO strategy, that doesn’t guarantee that it will rank - by the way, there are no guarantees in marketing! The last piece of your pet store SEO strategy has to consist of off-page SEO, or building authority through links, citations, and listings.
Getting your content linked to other external websites, especially other websites with high domain authority (a metric created by search engines to measure how “trustworthy” a site is based on traffic, pages per session, average session duration, and other traffic data), can be incredibly powerful in improving your website’s ranking.
Generally, backlinks are earned, paid for, or placed. By doing good work and providing quality content, your work naturally gets linked as you are recognized as an expert in the field. You will find that many of our blog articles reference and link some of these expert third-party sources. These links help both parties but primarily helps the third parties. Search engines seek to discount the influence of paid links in organic search results.
Backlinks should send quality traffic to your site from other websites that are within your industry or are relevant to your audience. If you’re an expert in your field, backlinks should also naturally increase over time.
There are a number of ways to build high-quality backlinks and to create citations that are trustworthy in the eyes of Google’s crawlers:
Publish a blog and write on it regularly.
Work with partners that have overlap with your customers or clients to build each other.
Create quality content based on personal experiences, original data, or something that is timely, location-specific, new, or visually appealing.
Build resource pages and collections.
Get involved in your local community with events, sponsorships and scholarships, donations, loyalty programs, jobs and internships, competitions, and partnerships with other local businesses.
Be newsworthy and get digital PR on your business.
Business listings on popular apps and platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business, Waze, Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, Yelp, BBB, Manta, Yahoo, AngiesList, NextDoor, Yellowbook, and so on. There are literally hundreds to choose from!
TRACKING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR Pet Store SEO STRATEGY
This is what it all comes down to, right? Is my SEO provider just taking my money? Or am I actually getting some return on investment here?
At Pet Engine Marketing, the way we track and provide data is what sets us apart. We are your pet store’s marketing partner, and while we handle a number of your marketing tasks for you, the partnership comes in hiding nothing. All of your critical data is made available to you on a dashboard that you have access to 24/7.
So, what critical data is worth looking at to judge the effectiveness of your SEO? We keep an eye on a handful of different metrics such as:
“53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search.”
Conversion rate: Your website’s conversion rate comes down to a ratio of conversions over the number of unique visits in a given time period. You could have a variety of conversions including a purchase, signup for an event, a new subscriber, the creation of an account, or even time spent on a specific page.
Time on page: How long are your site visitors spending time on your page, or on your site? Usually, more time spent on the site is better, but not all the time. If your visitors found what they wanted right away and converted, that might only take them 10 seconds.
Pages per visit: If the goal of a specific page is to lead people further down the funnel to a conversion, then understanding the behavior flow on your website and whether people bounce from that page is an important metric.
Bounce rate: A “bounced” session indicates that your visitor came to a single page and left without going any deeper into your website. Depending on the context, this can be important, or it might not be. To use the same example, a visitor that finds the product or answers that they’re looking for and leaves wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Traffic: Using tracking tools and dashboards, we are able to isolate and identify where people are visiting your site from. This is usually broken down into categories so that we can measure how much of your traffic is coming from sources like your pet stores SEO, SEM, social media, email marketing, event marketing, direct search, partner referrals, or others. Watching your traffic over time, and specifically, your organic traffic in relation to your SEO campaigns is a strong indicator of success or failure.
Rankings: Where you rank for specific keywords or search terms in your local area is probably the defining metric on whether your SEO efforts are working or not.
At Pet Engine Marketing, your account manager has their finger on the pulse of these metrics, campaigns, strategies, and knows what to prioritize in order to get the results your pet store wants from Google.
additional PET STORE SEO & SEM RESOURCES
Looking for more pet store marketing help?
Take advantage of THE group for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses on Facebook, a growing community of petpreneurs focused on growing their business. We cover industry news, marketing updates, exciting tools, provide feedback on campaigns, and support each other’s pet business, as well as provide some regular freebies for you to use on your page’s social media accounts!
If you’re a pet store owner and you think it’s important that you are ranked on the first page, or in the top three results, of Google in 2021, you’re going to find this article worth reading to improve your pet store SEO results.