How to Optimize Your Dog Website for the Search Experience
With more pet owners in need of dog services than ever before, it’s important for dog service businesses to optimize their website to capitalize on increased search volume around their offerings. In this blog, we discuss:
- What is SEO
- Why SEO is important for pet businesses
- How to optimize your dog website for maximum search visibility
The pet industry has picked up tremendously in the past three years and has become increasingly competitive. From daycare to boarding, grooming to training, pet owners are on the hunt for new providers. As such, search volume within this industry has skyrocketed.
How can business owners capture this increased search volume and redirect it to their own websites? By optimizing their websites for SEO, pet businesses can more easily target people actively searching for their services. Read on to find out how it’s done
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to increase visibility on the search engine results page (SERP). When optimizing for SEO, the goal is to increase visibility in search for the most popular searches related to your business.
For example, let’s say you operate a doggy daycare in Charlotte, NC. After researching target keywords, you notice that “doggy daycare near me” has a monthly search volume of 60,500. By making changes to your site focused on high volume phrases like this, you are increasing your likelihood of your page appearing on the SERP during any one of those 60,500 monthly searches.
Why is SEO Important for dog service businesses?
SEO is a long-term process that allows you to have more visibility over your competition when executed correctly. When done right, SEO allows you to target people actively searching for your goods and services. That means your business is better able to reach people in the moments that matter most, increasing your chances of conversion with those already in the mindset to make a purchase. In this way, optimizing for SEO can significantly increase your bottom line.
On-Site Optimization
On-site optimization involves the things that are changed on the website that assist with Google crawlability. These optimizations usually include:
Site Structure
Proper site structure allows Google to effectively crawl your site and understand how to index it. Creating a page for every service and implementing a clear URL structure is paramount to good SEO. For example, if you offer, boarding, daycare, and grooming, each of these services should have a page on your site with unique content.
To level up this optimization, give your site URLs a parent/child hierarchy. What does this mean? Take all of your service pages and nest them in a parent dog services page. For example, your nested URL structure would look something like this:
business.com/dog-services/dog-daycare/
business.com/dog-services/dog-boarding/
etc..
Optimized Pages
Since each service or focus will have it’s own page, that page will need to have a singular keyword group. Including keywords and phrases helps maximize visibility within those key terms. But what should you optimize?
Your keywords should be optimized in the following:
- Title Tags
- In every headline
- Throughout the content. Appropriate and relevant content should appear on each page with clear answers to common questions about your business.
*Pro Tip: Don’t over optimize, or “keyword stuff.” over optimization has the potential to have your website penalized by Google.
Blogging
Blogging local, relevant, and informational content is an excellent way to continue to bring traffic to your site.
Image Optimization
Every image on your website should be optimized with an alt tag. Image alt tags and alt descriptions is the written code that is crawled for a bot to understand the context of your image.
Be sure to also optimize your image file names. Rather than naming your image file “Dog-image-1.jpeg” a more SEO appropriate file name would be “dog-playing-at-dog-daycare.jpeg.”
Site Speed and Usability
Additionally, site speed should be carefully considered. Your website’s speed has a direct impact on it positions against your competition. According to Google, websites that make just a one-second improvement to their speed can increase conversions among mobile users by up to 27%. Make sure your website is fast, loads quickly, and is responsive across the desktop and mobile user experience.
Off-Site Optimization
Along with your on-site SEO optimizations, you’ll need to have an impactful off-site strategy as well. There are three main ways that pet businesses can implement off-site optimization within their SEO strategies:
Social Media
Keeping up-to-date on your social media and engaging with clients validates your website for stronger SEO health. Providing direct links to and from your platforms and using social as a content distribution platform also helps with search exposure.
Google Business Profile
Every dog business should have a Google Business Profile that’s been fully optimized with service listings, images, and accurate business information. Be sure to solicit reviews from past customers to increase visibility and trust for your profile.
Link Building
This is the hardest part of the optimization strategy but is also one of the most important. Get links to other websites to increase your domain authority and brand awareness by forging strategic partnerships and sponsorships.
Get started
As aforementioned, SEO is a long-term process that takes time to master. The most important thing is to take the first step towards getting started. If you’re looking to increase your visibility on the SERPs with a stronger SEO strategy, we can help. Our team has developed many SEO strategies for pet businesses throughout the United States and Canada. Contact us online to get started!
