Top and Common Mistakes Pet Business Owners Make when Launching Their Website

Most business owners leave their website as-is from the time it was first launched without knowing the impact it would have on their online visibility and engagement. Some would say “I don’t make money out of my website, why invest in it”. In the first place, you believed that your website would bring in revenue for your pet business but at some point, you stopped promoting it so it didn’t get to the point where it will be a money-making machine. That is the most common answer which is also the most common mistake. It takes time to reach the top results but when you’re there, all customers see is you. 

Don’t fall into that trap. Read on to discover other common mistakes and how to address them.

Not Updating the Pages

Since we talked about it already, let’s start with the bad habit of leaving your website pages outdated. It not only makes the site visitors ger uninterested in revisiting it but it loses the trust and credibility among your customers if they see the same thing over and over. Most importantly, it will sink in the search engine results as the spiders will see it as a no longer valuable online resource. 

An easy way to find out what customers look for in your website is through analytics. Here, you will learn about what they visit the most, giving you a solid understanding of what to prioritize more and focus on. This applies to both content and design of your website. And yes, your website’s design needs to be updated too, regularly.

Overpopulation of Page Content

There are a lot of things we want to say about your business. We get that because everyone tends to do so, specially when the ideas are pouring nonstop and you just have to write it down there. That’s great! The downside is, if site visitors see they are in for a novel, they will scroll and might not read on then leave. This increases the bounce rate, an internet marketing metric that is used to measure the number of users who visited your website, scroll, and then leave instead of continuing to the next page. In other words, they find your website uninteresting. While you love all the words that are in there, your prospects might not. Only write what they need to know to drive them to call or send you an email.

Too Little Text

And of course, the opposite of overpopulation is underpopulation. Normally, a website will be filled with images if the text content is less. Customers tend to scroll faster when they see only images specially if they find them irrelevant. Too little text also makes Google spiders disqualify your website for indexing if there is very little content to crawl. So how are you going to balance it? Let’s put it this way: every image you put there needs a text description even if it is in the gallery. The minimum number of words per web page for Google to index them is 700. If you are below that, you need to continue writing. You can start by writing what the customers need to know about your products and services and fill in to meet the minimum requirements for word count.

Forgetting about Keywords

As we mentioned in the past articles, keywords make you searchable on the internet. And adding them to your website’s copy can get tricky. Of course, you want to be creative with your website’s content but you need to integrate those relevant keywords. 

It is very important that when writing your website’s copy that you have researched the trending and most relevant keywords already. And you have to come up with sets of them so you can play around with adding them to your website. Remember, the maximum number of times you can use a keyword on a page is TWO (2) times. More than that, Google will flag your website as one that uses “Black Hat SEO”, which is a set of steps to increase a website’s page rank but violates the search engine’s terms of service.

Our tip: write down your website copy first. If you can integrate the keywords while doing so, that’s great! If not, come back after you’re done with the writing and replace the words that can be replaced by the keywords. Don’t be afraid to restructure your content to accommodate the keywords. It will help you in the end.

Using Low-Quality Images

We have a bunch of websites using images that are poorly lighted, with poor composition, and very low resolution. It’s just a no-no. It’s a website and it’s the first thing people will see when they interact with you. You want to make a very nice first impression, right? 

Don’t just get on your phone and start taking pictures that you want to use. Instead, plan out a series of shoots that you can do on your own. If you have a little bit of time, read or watch tutorials about how to take better photos even with your phone. If you have access to a professional pet photographer, that will be your best bet. If the budget is tight, you can buy stock images or even use the free ones.

Poor Content Flow

The layout of each page of your website matters a lot to the users. It is one of the main factors that influence the browsing experience of your customers. The way a page layout is designed contributes to how easily site visitors will find the information they need from you. We have seen a bunch of websites that have tried to display it all together on one page or have sections that have confusing flow. These things matter if you are trying to make that first impression. And that’s one of the main reasons why you put up a website in the first place.

There you have it! If you have a thing or two to share, please mention them in the comments.

We’re happy to offer a 1-on-1 consultation for 30 minutes, for FREE. Reach out to us and let’s talk about the next best pet services website that the internet will ever see.