Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help you increase your visibility and attract more people to your pet brand when they search online.
Investing in SEO is the best way to reach more customers and grow your audience for the long haul. The key is to identify relevant search terms that you have a hope of ranking for, and to optimise your website and content so it gets found!
7 SEO tips for dog brands
1.Find relevant keywords to target
The first step in SEO, is understanding your target audience and researching the terms they type into search engines to find your products.
Do a brain dump of all your products into a spreadsheet and then begin finding alternative synonyms and phrases people would use to find them.
Next think about problems your audience may experience, that your product solves. This will help you identify long tail keywords, which are phrases or questions people type into search engines.
Then use a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest, Keywords Everywhere or Ahrefs to help you expand on the search terms you have and to give you data on them.
You will be able to see the estimated search volume, cost per click for ads, and the difficulty/competition level of these keywords.
What you’re looking for is the search terms with the highest relevance, lowest competition, and highest volume. It’s important to think about user intent when performing keyword research, there’s no point in scoring a page 1 spot for a search term that doesn’t match what you’re delivering.
It’s far better to target lower volume, high intent search terms that have a greater likelihood of converting into sales.
2. Use your keywords to boost SEO
Once you’ve identified the keywords you’re targeting, it’s time to start optimising your content. This DOES NOT MEAN stuffing keywords everywhere you can!
Use your keywords naturally, where they make sense. But try to include them (or variations of them) in the following places:
- Your product title
- Your product description
- Your metadata (learn more about meta titles and meta descriptions here)
- Headings
- Subheadings
- Body text
Hop over to your complete beginner’s guide to SEO here.
Your longer tail keywords and questions related to problems your products solve are brilliant blog content. Craft blogs to answer these and optimise them in the same way you would for your product pages, and you can start targeting traffic related to these.
Don’t forget to internally link to relevant products, so you can keep people on site and get them to your money pages!
3. Optimise your site for mobile
A huge proportion of people browse the internet on their mobile phones, and if your website isn’t providing a good mobile experience – people will leave. A high bounce rate is no good for your SEO or your sales!
Google and other search engines also want to see that your site performs on mobile. In fact, Google looks at your mobile indexing first. If your site isn’t optimised for mobile, it will hurt your SEO efforts.
A responsively designed website will adapt to suit the device a visitor browses your site on, making it a good experience whether you’re on a mobile, a desktop or a tablet.
When your site experience is positive for your users, they are more likely to stay on site longer. This sends positive signals to search engines which can also aid your SEO efforts and means people are more likely to progress to buying!
4. Improve your site’s load speed
Search engines are focused on satisfying the people using them – which means they want users to not only find relevant content for their search term, but to have a great experience on the website.
If your website loads slowly, this will have a negative impact on user experience and on your ranking ability.
Things that can slow your website down include:
- Large images and videos
- Bulky plug-ins
- Caching issues
- Low quality hosting
- Too many ads
You can test the speed of your website here.
If you need help speeding up your website, then get in touch with a web designer/developer who can guide you (or do it for you!)
5. Make your site secure
Your site security impacts on your rankings AND the safety of users visiting your website. Moving to a HTTPS:// makes your website more secure, as your data is encrypted.
Upgrading to a secure site protects your customer’s data and your website from security breaches. For an ecommerce site processing sensitive customer data, this is essential.
Protect your business and your customers from malicious attacks and save yourself the time, cost and headaches associated with security breaches.
6. Use internal links liberally
This is a biggie, not just for SEO but for retaining site visitors and reducing your bounce rate.
Linking to other pages on your website within your content helps users find relevant information, and helps move them through the stages of awareness.
These internal links also help Google to crawl and index your site, finding all your juicy content to consider ranking.
For example, if you have a blog about the best toys for strong dogs, you should then include hyperlinks to relevant products that you stock within the blog.
Here’s the biggest factor that people miss when linking to their products >>>>
Use your keywords to link to the products and make that the clickable anchor text – NOT ‘CLICK HERE.’
Like this:
7. Fix or redirect broken links
As your site grows, you’re likely to develop some old or broken links within your site. Not only can this hamper your SEO attempts, but it means you could be losing traffic.
You can use Ubersuggest’s free SEO audit to discover any broken links, along with other SEO issues on your site, so you can fix them.
Set up 301 redirects for dead content and send them to a functional page that will satisfy their search query.
This is a good opportunity to revisit old content which is either out of date, or could do with some SEO updates! Many ecommerce clients I work with have a raft of blog content that could be serving them a whole heap better. Updating this content is a quick win in your SEO bucket, it’s well worth spending some time on.
Hire an SEO copywriter
If you’d like some help with optimising your pet brand’s website for SEO, then calling in an SEO copywriter is a brilliant option. Choosing an SEO copywriter over a generic SEO company means not only will your content be given an SEO upgrade, but everything that’s written will be optimised for conversions.
Winning the traffic is one thing. Winning the sales off the back of that traffic is something else entirely!
Take a look at my SEO copywriting services and reach out if you’d like some help nailing your SEO (and conversions!).
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