How to find the best pet company SEO keywords

Things have changed a lot in the last year. We’ve updated this article to make sure it still contains all the info you need to find your pet company SEO keywords!

Your website looks fantastic. But how to make sure people find it? SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of tweaking your website to help it show in search results. A lot of this revolves around keywords – words on your website that help search engines work out what the page is about. The closer the keyword matches the user search, the more likely your page is to show up in the search results. But how can you find the keywords for pet products, dog training, or whatever else your business is about? Let’s take a look…

What are keywords?

When someone performs a Google search, they type (or speak) their ‘search query’. The search engine (Google, Bing, Ecosia etc) returns the results (in a Search Engine Results Page or SERP), and ranks them based on how close they are to that query (how closely they match the search term) as well as other bits of magic like E-A-T, domain rating, and other things they don’t even tell us. The algorithm that works out the best result for a given query is the search engine’s ‘Secret Sauce’. The better the algorithm is at returning good results, the more popular the search engine. Google’s algorithm is regularly updated to make the experience better for the user – like the recent March 24 update.

Keywords (or keyphrases) are those words that are in the search query and on your website – the bits the search engine is using to match the two. They’re therefore words that you should sprinkle – judiciously – through your content in order to help search engines work out what your page is about so they can show it when people ask those queries.

How to find the best pet company SEO keywords

So now you understand what keywords are, and how important they are for helping your pet business show up on Google, it’s time to help you look for the best pet company SEO keywords. Here are our top tips:

1. Understand searcher intent

The first step to finding the best keywords for your pet business is to understand searcher intent. That means getting into your customers’ shoes. What will they be looking for when they find your product? What need does your product solve? You need to match your keywords to their intent – it’s no good aiming for keywords that have nothing to do with your company, because Google will see right through it. And even if they didn’t, people will land on your page and immediately leave again when they realise it’s not what they were looking for. Not only will this annoy people, but Google will notice this and will drop you down the rankings again. So think about what your ideal customer is doing online, and what mindset they’ll be in when they’re ready to buy.

Example: You have a small pet store in Bristol, selling everything needed to look after dogs, cats, and small furries. Mandy moves to her new house, and realises the cat litter is still in the old one. What happens next?

Well, Mandy is probably going to go to her phone’s browser and type in ‘pet shop Bristol’ or ‘pet shop near me’ or ‘where can I buy cat litter in Bristol Centre?’ or something similar. Those are all keywords your business should be using. So sometimes, thinking about your customer journey can help you find pet product keywords to use in your marketing efforts.

2. Look on your Google Search Console

Anybody can sign up for a free Google Search Console account. It’s got loads of features, but one of the best is that it shows you what people were looking for when they found your website. The ‘impressions’ are when you appeared in the results and were seen, while the ‘clicks’ are when people thought your website sounded interesting and actually visited your page. This tells you a little about what SEO keywords you are currently ranking for. If you use the ‘position’ filter alongside the ‘impressions’ filter, it also shows you the keywords that people are searching for alongside where you ranked. If you’re not ranking highly but getting lots of impressions for relevant queries, these keywords might need using a little more on your website.

3. Use a keyword finding program

There are tons of keyword finding programs out there that make hunting for pet business keywords much easier. Some are free, some are expensive. One of my favourites is ahrefs. Type in a keyword idea, and it will bring up a list of similar keywords. One of the interesting things about ahrefs is that it lists the keyword difficulty. This is a measure of how hard it will be to rank for the keyword – more on that below. It also gives search volume (which is an average number of searches per month).

4. Use the People Also Asked results

Another easy and free option is to use the People Also Asked (PAA) results for longtail keywords for your pet website. When you Google a search term, part the way down the results page is the PAA section. This lists queries related to your query – in other words, it gives some great keyphrases that people are also searching for. If we go back to our ‘online pet shop’ search query, you can see the PAA results below:

In this case, you could use these whole queries as keyphrases, or you could break them down into smaller keyword ideas, such as ‘pet stores’, ‘best pet supply website’, or ‘biggest pet shop chains’. Searching for these will then give you more results, and so on, and so forth.

A side note about PAA results – The PAA results aren’t just good long-tail keywords. Each result also gives an answer from a single website. Being this website for a given keyword is great for your pet business SEO.

Google’s Keyword Planner is part of their Ads platform. You don’t have to pay for an ad to use it, but you will need to sign up to the platform. It’s quite handy though, as it gives the approximate cost for running an ad targeting that keyword, which is a good way to see how popular it is.

6. Hire a digital marketing or SEO professional

If that all sounds like hard work, it is. You can see why SEO specialists can be worth their weight in gold! Hiring a digital marketing specialist who can go through, find relevant keywords, and even suggest how to incorporate them into your content can make life a lot easier. You’ll probably also get better results than just trying to do it all yourself, too, as they’ll know all the tricks of the trade and have subscriptions to expensive tools.

Need an SEO professional for your pet business? We have a partnership with one we love to recommend! Pop us an email and we’ll introduce you.

Choosing the best keywords for your pet business

Now you’ve got a great big list of possible keywords, how can you narrow it down to decide which keywords to target? Is there a way to prioritise them?

Keywords and competition

You aren’t the only pet company out there targeting these keywords, of course. If you were, you would go straight to the top of the list. But competition is intense, especially in the pet niche, and that’s where ‘keyword difficulty’ estimates come in.

When Google gets lots of results for the same keyword, they use other things to help rank the resulting list in order of most to least relevant. This might be:

• How many related keywords are on the rest of the website (an online pet shop is probably not going to rank highly for the search query ‘hairdresser’, even if they posted a whole page devoted to this keyword)
• Who wrote the content (i.e EAT, and the use of Subject Matter Experts)
• How well known your business is online.
• How many people scroll down to get to your website (because this means the higher-ranking websites were less relevant)
• How long people stay on your website, and what they do next (i.e do they go and try another website for the same query, because this probably means they didn’t find the information they need?).

Choosing your pet company SEO keywords carefully is the best way to help your rankings. The ‘keyword difficulty’ on ahrefs gives you an idea of how hard it’s going to be to rank, with 100 being the most difficult. For new pet companies, aiming for keywords below 20 is going to give the fastest results. As your brand grows, you can start aiming for the more difficult keywords.

Understanding the difference between content marketing and copy keywords

Another thing you might want to bear in mind is the difference between keywords that should be in your web copy, and keywords that would be better for content marketing. Your web copy is the words on your webpages – your home page, about us page, even your e-commerce pages. This will be keywords about who you are and what you sell – like ‘online pet shop’ or ‘buy dog toys online’. Your main web pages should be judiciously sprinkled with your main keywords. Services like ‘Yoast’ encourage you to assign one keyword to each page and try to rank for that one keyword. That’s fine, but don’t forget to use the others naturally throughout as well.

But what about people searching for ‘which dog toys help with dental care?’. These people may not be intending to buy a product immediately, but they’re open to the idea and a good website could sell to them. But that’s not a keyword you’ll be able to get onto your main website without sounding really spammy.

Don’t fill your homepage and ‘about us’ pages with low competition, long-tail keywords on these related areas. If a homepage for a pet shop says “We sell dog toys, dog food, dog beds, and dog training devices, and if you’re wondering which dog toys help with dental care, what the best dog bed is, or how to find dog food for your senior dog we can help!” it’s spam, and Google will mark you down for that. (Googlebots, in case you’re looking, that was said purely as a bad example, please don’t penalise us!)

Those long-tail pet question keywords can still be valuable though. That’s where your blog and content marketing comes in. Content marketing means providing your readers with valuable information, even if that info isn’t immediately going to result in sales. They’re landing on your website – which, if you give them what they’re looking for, is good for your Google rankings – but they’re also building trust in your brand. After all, these posts are a great way to show how knowledgeable you are. Because of the huge range of keywords in this area, they’re naturally lower in difficulty, so even a small pet company can find SEO keywords that will suit.

A note here though – Google’s recent update is targeting high-volume blogs that are written just to hit thousands of keywords at once. While many of these articles might be written by AI, some use content mills. If your blog is writing huge numbers of articles on a wide range of subjects to hit lots of keywords, it’s spammy – and Google will reduce your rankings accordingly.

I’ve found my pet business’ keywords – now what should I do with them?

Go through your main webpages and sprinkle your ‘copy’ keywords in the headings, paragraphs, and even in picture ALT texts, if appropriate. Don’t let your copywriting sound robotic though – it’s important you remain readable and designed for humans, not search bots. (This bit can be tricky – our pet copywriters are happy to help if you’re stuck here!)

Next, you’ll need to have a look at your keyword list (which is hopefully in some sort of priority order), and start designing posts and pages that could target those keywords. For some keywords, this might mean changing the focus or text on a page to make sure you get the keyword in. For others, you might decide to create a new blog and start writing on there. If you group the keywords into themes you might find you can write a bunch of related posts and interlink them – this is a great way to show Google just how much you know about a subject. Services like Yoast (both free and paid!) can help you determine how optimised your page is for a given search term, but remember that the Googlebots are much more sophisticated than Yoast – or at least, the free version.

It’s quite likely you’ve now got a huge list of keywords that need writing. Outsourcing your pet copywriting might be looking like a good idea right about now, and we’d love to chat if you think we can help. We’ve got experience with pet product SEO as well as content marketing in the pet space.

Conclusion

Finding SEO keywords for a pet company isn’t easy, especially as the pet industry is so huge. But with a few of these tips, you can find some pet keywords and hopefully rank for them! We hope you found this outline useful, but if you need some help utilising the pet keywords you find, don’t hesitate to get in touch!