How to Grow Your Pet Business with Strategic and Profitable Blogging
What good is blogging if it’s not going to generate revenue? In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about strategic and profitable blogging for your pet business.
We’ve been blogging for pet brands since 2015 and we’ve seen some crazy changes. However, one thing remains true - blogging is important if you want to succeed.
5 Reasons Your Pet Business Should Have a Blog
If you’re an e-comm business, you should absolutely have a blog. If you own a service based business or a brick and mortar in a small town, you may not need to. Not that it wouldn’t be at all helpful. But there are other areas of your business that will likely need more attention and get you a better ROI.
Let’s press on, assuming you own an e-comm business. Why is it important for you to maintain a blog?
It helps you rank in search. This is true, even amongst the search engine storms that toss brands from position 1 to 100, virtually overnight. If you’re blogging in a strategic manner, it will help you rank for keywords that are related to your products, thus claiming more share of voice for those terms.
Blogging builds trust. You sell to pet parents, most of whom view their pet as their fur child, or at the very least, a member of the family. They need to know you are worthy of their trust. By providing free content relating to your category, you build trust and authority with your potential and existing customers.
Provides content fuel. Your blog posts are both the kindling and wood on your content fire. When you blog about a topic, you now have fodder for social media, email, and video content.
Blog posts provide another avenue of capturing leads. It’s true most of your visitors are not going to convert on a blog post page immediately. However, these posts provide another opportunity to capture their email. Embedding an opt in or free content offer will allow you to push the contact down a lead funnel.
LINK JUICE! Did we say that loudly enough? Internal links back to your product pages are important signals to search engines to assign value to those product pages. This is turn helps you generate revenue.
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Now that you’re fully convinced you should be blogging and you’ve got your keyboard at your fingertips, who should write your blog?
Who Should Write Your Pet Business’s Blog
You essentially have three choices:
Your internal team (maybe that’s you!)
A marketing agency (like the team at Big Paws Marketing)
AI
Your Internal Team. Many pet brands have large internal marketing teams that can devote time to content creation. There are pros and cons for this option.
Pros:
It’s cost effective
Your team is already briefed on your messaging and objectives
Cons:
They’re already inundated with tasks
They may lack the strategic skills needed
One example we use on the regular is that of a supplement company. This worldwide brand has an internal marketing team. However, the blog posts they produce often have nothing to do with their brand. A post titled “7 So-Called Scary Dog Breeds That Aren’t Really Scary” ranks quite well. However, there is no connection to their brand. It’s merely an information page. CTAs at the bottom are weak and invite the reader to take several actions instead of just one, say for example, learning more about their calming supplement.
An Agency
Of course, as an agency, we’re all about hiring out your blogging! However, there is a word of caution here too.
We’ve seen SEO agencies decimate traffic and click through rates because they weren’t embedded in the pet parent culture.
As a reminder, we’re creating content that influences the way pet parents care for their beloved pets. It’s important to do so in a way that builds confidence and speaks to their challenges in an empathetic way.
AI or AI Assisted
Tori of Wear Wag Repeat recently told us during a podcast recording that she views AI like an assistant. It can’t replace her, but with certain parameters set, she can entrust it with small tasks. We couldn’t agree more!
To hear the full podcast with Tori, check out the Wear Wag Repeat episode where she interviewed our founder and CEO, Pamela Keniston
AI is creating content an amazing pace. It could create this whole blog post in under 30 seconds. But it can never create meaningful content that's relatable. As long as there are humans, there are stories to be told. And that’s really what we all want — to be understood with relatable stories.
So who will write your blog posts? There’s really no wrong answer as long as they can create engaging content. Whoever you choose, starting with keyword research is the first step to creating a viable blog post.
How to Do Keyword Research for Your Pet Business Blog
You know your category in the pet industry better than anyone. But the keywords you think people are using may not be quite the same as what they’re actually using.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing keyword research for your blog post:
Use a keyword research tool, like SEM Rush or Ubersuggest.
Using a spreadsheet, map out keywords that are related to your product. This could include the product itself (snuffle mats for dogs, cat vitamins etc), problems your product solves, ingredients in your product (for ingestibles), or conditions or behaviors related to your product. Use the magic keyword tool in SEM Rush to discern which keywords have the most search volume and lowest difficulty. You’re going to track ALL of these keywords and watch your ranking improve!
Now that you have your list of keywords, we’re going to choose the product keyword that’s related to your flagship product. Let’s say this is “snuffle mats for dogs.” This is our head keyword and it’s going to go in our title and sprinkled, in an organic way, throughout the post.
Next, we’re going to look for supporting keywords. These will become our subheadings and FAQs. These might include “what are snuffle mats for dogs?” or “are snuffle mats safe for dogs?”
Now that we have our outline with our head keyword as a title and our supporting keywords as subheadings, we can write the content!
Keyword research is a critical first step in creating blog content.
9 Essential Elements for a Well-Crafted Blog Post
By now, you’ve probably figured out that writing blog posts are not simply about writing about anything pet related and hitting “publish.” As you create your content, here are some essential elements if you want engaged eyes on your content, as well as visibility in search engines.
Storytelling. Don’t tell me how snuffle mats are helpful to engage my dog. Show me how one dog who used to destroy furniture out of boredom, now spends that time snuffling. Use the story arc: establish context, build tension, reach the climax of the story, resolve the tension, show lessons learned. We can do this within even a 2-3 sentences or with a story woven throughout the post.
Compelling copy. Well-written content will move the reader through the post without telling them to move on to the next point. “Keep reading to find out…” is a phrase that irritates our core here at Big Paws. If the content is engaging enough, they’ll keep reading without being told to. Remember to keep your paragraphs short as they will appear much longer on mobile, where 90% of readers reside.
Images and video. No one wants to read a wall of text. Images and embedded video help the reader move thoughts along with visual aids.
Calls to action. As previously noted, these should be specific to your brand goals. Do you want them to take a quiz? Learn more about a product? Get in touch? Be specific and use only one CTA.
Internal links. This is so incredibly important. Remember, the goal of your pet business blog is to generate revenue. And while it’s unlikely that your blog posts will convert upon one visit, since they’re largely informational pieces of content, linking back to relevant product pages assigns higher value to those pages in search engines.
Alt text. This is the little bit of text that describes an image to visually impaired readers. If you can include your keyword here in a natural way, great! If not, don’t force it.
Meta description. This is the blurb that appears below the title in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and has a lot to do with your click through rate. Use your head keyword here and try to evoke some curiosity while letting the reader know what to expect.
Categories. It’s important to assign your blog post to the proper category. Think of your website like a big file cabinet. The cabinet is your product, the drawer is your category, and your files are the blog posts.
URL. Your URL , or slug, should be truncated and make sense. Rather than “the-best-dog-beds-according-to-7-dog-moms,” we’re going to use “best-dog-beds.”
What to Do After Your Post Publishes
Now that you have this amazing blog post, don’t just sit around and wait for readers to find it! Promote it using:
Social media
Email
Paid ads
You’ll also want to take note of how your keyword positioning changes post-publishing. It may take weeks or months to begin to rank, but when it starts to take off, you’ll be glad you were position monitoring.
The Final Woof
Blog posts are an incredibly effective way for pet businesses to get more traffic, generate revenue, build authority and trust, and assign value to product pages.
Need some help getting started? Our team at Big Paws Marketing has been blogging in the pet industry since 2015. We’ve got a paw up on what works! Book a free, no-obligation call with our founder and CEO, Pamela Keniston to get started.