Learning SEO as the owner of a pet business can be incredibly confusing. You try searching for "local SEO" and discover massive lists of strategies and to-dos that you can barely understand. Even worse, all of the content you discover seems to be written for SEO experts and marketing industry diehards.

If you've come across this article, breathe a big sigh of relief.

Although we are SEO experts, we know that most people aren't. This post is designed to break down whitehat SEO for pet business websites into very simple action steps. 

At Easy Busy Pets, we offer marketing help to all of the customers of our pet business software. Use this article as your guide, and (if you're a customer), ask us any questions you have. 

When you rank your pet business in local Google search results, you get regular traffic and customers for free. No ads!

We've separated the actions you need to take into three main categories:

• Overall website best practices
• On-site SEO
• Off-site SEO 

Let's get started.

1. Overall website best practices

Before we begin SEO optimizing individual pages of your website, you first need to understand the importance of your entire website's structure and content.

Website structure and menu

Your website should be structured in a way that allows you to separate out your important keyphrases per page.

(Website structure simply means the number and type of pages you have - and how they're organized.)

Google needs to understand what you're trying to rank.

Here are some examples of how you can structure your website for easy SEO results:

• A pet business that operates in one city - Put your target keyphrase such as "Sacramento dog walker" in the homepage of your website.
• A pet business that operates in one city with multiple neighborhoods - Put your target keyphrase in your homepage and make sure to add the neighborhoods as secondary keyphrases. If the neighborhoods are quite large and have a lot of search volume (we'll cover that in the keyphrase section below), then you could make a separate page for each major neighborhood or suburb.
• A pet business that operates in multiple cities - When you operate in multiple cities, you should not put a local city name in your homepage. Instead, create one page for each city. Optimize your homepage for your generic service such as "dog walking services" and optimize each city page appropriately, such as "dog walker Sacramento" and "dog walker San Jose."
• A pet business that plans to open in multiple cities - If you plan to open in multiple cities later on, make your life easy and create the right foundation from the get go. Use the strategy above, and optimize your homepage for something more generic. Then create a subpage for the city you currently operate in. Later, you can add on additional cities, without worrying about confusing people who come to your homepage, or losing traffic when you later use your homepage to point people to the right city pages. 

Of course, you might also want to have a contact page and an about page, but those are the important SEO considerations.

Topical authority 

With the right website structure in place, you need to build topical authority. You can do this by adding your target keyphrase and secondary keyphrases on other pages. For example, you might add "Sacramento dog walkers" on your about page, and "Sacramento dog walking services" on your contact page.

You can also build topical authority by giving tips on your blog. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. Just write one blog per quarter to start building your site's authority. Make sure that every blog is relevant to your service, whether that's grooming tips or cat care tips.  

Below, we'll cover more about keyphrases and where to put them. For now, just know that your most important keyphrases should be used in multiple places on your site, not only the homepage.

2. On-site SEO

In this SEO category, we're talking about how to optimize individual pages of your website.

You need to pick the right keyphrases and put them in the right places.  

Primary and secondary keyphrases

If someone was searching for your service, what would they type?

Here are some examples: 

• Pet sitter New Orleans
• Cat sitter Toronto
• Dog walker New Jersey

In an SEO research tool like Ubersuggest, look for keyphrases that have at least a search volume of 30. Hopefully the keyphrases that match your services will have much higher volume. For example, "dog walker Sacramento" gets about 170 searches per month.

You should also research secondary keyphrases. These are search queries that are very related to your main target keyphrase. These keyphrases don't need their own page, but they should be used in multiple pages on your website. For example, "Sacramento dog walkers" and "Sacramento dog walker" don't need to be separate pages in the way that "Sacramento dog walkers" and "San Jose dog walkers" do. Secondary keyphrases should simply be sprinkled on your core pages.

Where to put your keyphrases 

So where do we put these keyphrases?

They need to go on the page (the content that website visitors read) and in the backend of your website.

When you build your website with Easy Busy Pets, a complete pet business software, you can easily add the keyphrases in both places.  

For primary keyphrases, here's what you need to do:

In the page content:

• Headline or subheadline
• 2-3 times in body text 

Behind the scenes (called the meta data, if you're an SEO geek):

• Page title
• Meta description
• Keyword tag 

For secondary keyphrases, just put them once or twice on your homepage or relevant city pages. You can also put them once or twice in any other page you have, or in a blog (to build the topical authority described above).

Page length and quality

Length matters for SEO. Make sure that your website pages are at least 800 words long. For an easy way to bump up the length of your pages, add testimonials.

To make your pages higher quality, don't just add a big wall of text. Break up your site with images, sections and columns, icons, etc.

Check out Catbuddy, a website built with Easy Busy Pets.

Our final category is off-site SEO. Unlike your website architecture and keyphrase targeting, off-site SEO happens (you guessed it) off of your website.

Essentially, you need to build links to your website from other websites to show Google that your website can be trusted, and that it is the best website to rank for your target keyphrases. 

Listing websites

As a small local business, you can list your website on online directories like Google, Yelp, Bing, and Yahoo. Add your business to listings related to your city and to pet businesses too. 

You can search your competitors in an SEO tool like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs to see what sites are linking to them. You'll find many online directories and business listing websites. Just copy what they're doing and make a profile on these sites too! If competitors or your city aren't that savvy, just search what pet businesses in other cities are doing. 

Backlink building

You can also build backlinks with digital PR. SEO and PR connect because when you write a guest post or get featured on a podcast, you'll get a link to your website. This link tells Google that other websites are endorsing your website.

You can use Ahrefs to find how many backlinks competitors your competitors have.

You'll need higher quality content and more backlinks than they have to rank your site at the top for your target keyphrases.

Take the right actions in all three categories (website structure, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO) and you'll be ranking and getting free traffic in no time.  

Easy Busy Pets is the #1 software for pet business owners. Learn more.