As a pet business owner, your biggest goal is obviously to grow your customer base to build a following and loyalty. Finding these customers used to be a little simpler and less technical. Posters, newspaper ads, and word of mouth were what used to get you on the map. Now, in the 21st century, these strategies still exist and work but the Internet has obliterated speedy acquisition records with data to continue to improve future marketing.
We’ve gone through the basics of SEO, and now it’s time to learn why upkeeping SEO is vital to your business growth. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing. Every second, machine learning gets smarter and smarter to value the content of your website. That means, your website should be always optimized to stay relevant to search engines. There are three areas to focus on: freshness, link-building, and technical SEO.
Freshness
Search engines crawl throughout websites looking for active or dead websites. Active websites are always prioritized and more likely to rank. “Dead” websites are ones that are rarely updated both front-end with content and keywords as well as have little link-building that shows search engines that if other sites don’t trust it, then it shouldn’t be considered a valuable website.
So, when it comes to content, it is always important to stay on track of scheduling ensuring that there is always new content on your website for search engines to find. Always match your content to the potential search query such as “how do I get more followers for my dog.” Content should be relative, trendy, and easy-to-read. However, over-posting irrelevant content may be detrimental to your website as search engines would consider it spam depending on the richness, freshness, and uniqueness, which takes time to create.
Links
Link-building makes the base of SEO algorithms and act as pathways from site to site. Linking to other valuable websites creates a sign of trust and credibility to the algorithm. This means that not just any link will do. Algorithms will quickly skip over websites with dead links or no links at all. Ideally, a website will have links throughout its website as well as to other substantiated websites to improve its crawlability and credibility.
Choosing links should be based on your pet business and other relative industries. For example, a new dog collar business can link to an existing dog grooming business that already has a solid following. This doesn’t just help your website’s ranking, but creates more traffic channels to funnel more targeted customers to your business.
Technical SEO
Here comes the tricky bit. Your goal should be to make your content both user-friendly and bot-friendly. These include upkeeping:
• Anchor text – This is the text you use to link to other pages, which shows search engines the final destination page.
• Alt text – Used for the visually impaired to describe images and allows bots to better understand the images on your page.
• Title tags – Unique text for each page on your website that appears with search results.
• Meta-tags – Used in the HTML of the website and cannot be seen on-page
• Meta-descriptions – Unique descriptions summarizing the contents of the page.
Conclusion
All of these little details refine your website in order to be seen by search engines as well as the people you want to see your content. Though you do not need to keep updating every day, regular maintenance will ensure that your website remains active and relevant to search engines. Readability, usability, and credibility give your business the best chance to be found online.
Here at StreetDog Marketing, we want to see your business succeed, and our team can handle your SEO tactics, so that you can worry about running your business. Contact us for a personal consultation.
