SEO for pet sitters can be boiled down to one simple idea: make your website easy for visitors. Make it easy for them to find your site, view your site, and get around your site. The following tips will help you prioritize what to do first to jump start your efforts.
To help your site gain the most traffic, you need to have a few basic things in place, and even though it’s late in August, here’s my list of the most important SEO tips for this year:
2017’s Top Six SEO Tips
1. Location – Your street address (not just your town) must be listed in your Google Business listing. As I mentioned here, these listings are the first place Google looks when people either search on your business name or your service category. As a result, visitors (and Google) depend on the information that’s seen there. And as I wrote here, it was noted earlier this year that when answering a search for a local business, Google looks at proximity first (so they present closer businesses at the top of search results). Because of that, those businesses whose address is physically closer to a searcher’s location will be presented first. So you should consider listing your street address, even if you don’t service clients there.
2. Mobile-friendly – Your site needs to be legible on mobile devices. That’s it, that’s all. If folks have to adjust your site to view the good stuff, they won’t do it. We’ve all gotten used to seeing information provided on happy, simple screens with fonts that can be read and photos that don’t need to be magnified. Google prefers these, as do your visitors. If you’re not sure if your site is mobile friendly, check out this tool. And if you’d like to keep your site but want an easier way to make it mobile, check out Dudamobile, a tool that will do most of the design for you (or contact me and I can help).
3. Contact info on top – A great way to help your site visitors is to make sure your contact information, including your email and phone, are listed on the top of every page. This is THE way others will find you. If they have to work to make the connection, they likely won’t do it. If you make sure you have your phone and email address where they’re easily seen, and hopefully even clickable, you will make your site experience efficient for everyone.
4. Good content – Your pages should have easy-to-read text with friendly images, and your text should not have grammatical errors. There should be enough information on every page, and it should have a outgoing tone. The text should be your own creation, and you should provide as much information about your service as possible (try to think of all you’ve been asked at Meet and Greets and include that in your site). Google gave some more insight on content here.
5. Good navigation – Your website should be a accumulation of all information about your site, so your menu bar needs to show that. All important pages need to be visible without having to click, and the menu bar should be visible on every page. Visitors should always know how to get from page to page, and page names should be obvious and reflective of their content
6. Alt tags with keywords – Your site should have a nice number of images (so at least one on every page), and every image should have an alt tag (which is a small description that shows up when your photos doesn’t load). This is a great place for you to insert keywords in context. So instead of typing “dog walking” you could insert “Bob’s Pet Sitting walking black Labrador.” This will help your SEO and will help Google see that this is your specialty.
Bottom Line
The above tips are the best ways to attract website visitors. They provide your website visitors with a good experience and make Google happy. When these tips have been implemented, your site will be remembered and bookmarked because you provided all the info your visitors needed. If you’re limited on time to work on your site, this is a good group to start on. Good luck!
If you need help editing your site, optimizing your Google Business listing, or for any other services, please contact me at Amy@petsitterseo.com.
