PET STORE
Websites
Does your pet store’s website make you cringe? Do you not know how to update it, or no longer have contact with the original designer? Does it not represent your store, who you are, what you stand for, and who you serve?
If all of this sounds familiar, you’re in the right spot! At Pet Engine Marketing, we are able to provide pet store websites as standalone products and pet store website maintenance and management 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 WEBSITEs
Introduction to Pet Store Websites
When we are looking to work with a pet store, we want that pet store to be community-focused, have great reviews and customer service, be passionate about what they do, be compassionate towards pets and animals, and have a desire to grow and help more pet parents. We love working with those pet store owners, and it can be so discouraging when we see that pet store’s website inadequately provide the right information, branding, and opportunities for visitors and customers.
In fact, your website is one of your primary selling points, and pet parents today are making decisions to buy from you or buy from someone else within the first ten seconds of visiting your website.
Is your pet store website up to scratch? How much money per year are you leaving on the table by not having a modern website?
What does a modern pet store website need?
There are a number of critical items that a modern pet store website should include. Pet store websites should:
Be Mobile Optimized
Optimize for Search Engines
Integrate with Social Media
Provide Multiple Conversion Opportunities
This isn’t everything, but these are the big ones based on our own experience working with pet stores around the United States and in Canada.
Mobile Optimization
“74% of mobile website visitors say they’re more likely to return to a site if it’s mobile-optimized.”
We currently live in a world where the majority of web traffic is coming from mobile devices. Mobile devices surpassed desktops and computers a few years ago. Mobile optimization has never been more important, and it plays a huge role in your search engine optimization efforts as well.
Almost everybody you know has a smartphone these days, so it’s important that your website is responsive.
At Pet Engine Marketing, we have experience operated and maintaining various websites on different platforms, but we particularly enjoy working on websites that have been built with popular providers like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, eTailpet, or Shopify. These platforms have a responsive design that optimizes based on what type of device is on the website and is the current best practice for website design.
Optimization for Search Engines
If your website isn’t indexed by Google, then it won’t show up as well on search engines. This in turn makes it harder for pet parents to find you, and you lose money when they choose to go to a different pet store or purchase a product online.
If your website isn’t structured properly, and doesn’t have the right sitemap uploaded, and neglects alt tags and meta descriptions, or doesn’t optimize for mobile, Google will ding you (for all of these) and your performance will be restricted.
The modern pet store website needs to have SEO capabilities, regardless of whether you are running pet store SEO campaigns or not. You can improve your search engine results by having multiple pages that are relevant to your audience and utilize keywords that help your SEO efforts. Here are a handful of pages that the modern pet store website truly needs:
Home Page
About Page
Services and/or Products Page(s)
FAQ Page
Testimonials/Reviews Page
Contact Page
Blog Page
“57% of businesses who blog have generated a lead from it.”
To go even deeper, we recommend providing more pages for newsletter signups, your birthday club, pet store events, grooming or training scheduling or booking, local partners, privacy page, job openings, or nutritional info hubs. All of these pages help build credibility and trust in your website in the eyes of pet parents that find you online.
And yes, you do need a blog! Blogs are great for your search engine optimization campaigns, and are a healthy way to reflect and put your thoughts out there! They can also generate a ton of visits and conversions.
Social Media Integration
If you’re going to be creating content, your website should include social media sharing buttons and multiple opportunities for visitors to discover and follow your own social media feeds.
Producing great content only goes so far if you aren’t given your audience the opportunity to share what they’ve learned!
Your pet store website should look and feel great! This might seem vain, but it really is a necessity, and we’re looking to create a unified brand experience from what the customer experiences in your store, to what they see and interact with on your social media, to what they see and convert with on your website.
Last but not least, people need to know how to reach you! Customers are using social media platforms and inboxes for customer service issues or purchases/signups and making things more difficult for your customers online is not a good way to operate.
Multiple Opportunities for Conversion
We’re talking about best practices for websites here - what makes people convert and hit that “sign-up” or “make a call” or “add to cart” button?
Branding: Branding is a big term that really just means “everything is working together.” We’re talking about messaging, offers, colors, layout, and style. Consistent branding improves conversion rates and creating that unified experience will help customers connect with your business and convert into customers.
Images & Graphics: Graphic content should support text and it should be appealing to your audience. So much communication is done visually and your brand makes judgments and assessments in the span of several milliseconds. So take the time to think about what your audience wants to think about, see, and feel when they visit your pet store’s website.
Page Goals: Websites and their pages serve different purposes. Some are informational, some are solely designed around converting. But there are a variety of ways to push people to convert, whether that’s through contacting your store, following your social media page, buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or scheduling an appointment. Provide the right conversion opportunity at the right times on the right pages.
Forms: Most websites have standard forms that encourage visitors to contact without having to make extra steps. Avoid forms that are too complex or long and get to the important stuff: what information do you need, what would you like, and what would make this easier for a site visitor?
Testimonials & Social Proof: Using testimonials and social proof can dramatically increase conversions, and if you’re not using it, some customers will actually think it’s missing. They build credibility in your business and influence other pet parents to become customers. If you don’t have reviews or you don’t have good reviews, then you need to work on it!
“92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer. 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know.”
Next time you’re looking to update your pet store’s website, consider these five areas to improve in order to increase your conversion rate.
It might also help you to start the process of creating more ways for local pet parents to convert, and by that, we mean starting up a newsletter for your pet store email marketing campaigns, or a birthday club that they can sign up for. Increasing your marketing channels will increase your impressions and opportunities for conversion!
Understanding THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR Pet Store Website
Other than the eyeball test, how does one track the effectiveness of your website? How do you know what’s good or bad?
As your pet store marketing agency, we track and provide analysis on your pet store website. We’ll do our best to optimize and upgrade pages to improve performance, and we’ll make sure you know what’s happening and why we do it. We also run monthly audits on every page of your website that can scan and quickly locate duplicate content or titles, missing meta tags, broken images, bad sitemaps, and server errors. Here are some of the metrics we look at in order to best understand the effectiveness of your website.
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.
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 improve the results from your pet store website.
additional PET STORE Website 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!
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.