Popular pet retailer expands organic reach through local specialty pages

Tools used

• Local Pages

A renowned pet retailer, with more than 1,000 locations across the United States, prioritizes their local marketing presence to ensure their products and services are seen in search. A long-standing partnership with Rio SEO ensures their hundreds of local listings, including parent and child listings (which they leverage to showcase their specialized services), are always up-to-date and display accurate information.

Along with ongoing listings optimization, the pet retail brand also was in need of user-friendly, localized specialty pages to showcase the myriad of services they offer. Since implementing specialty pages in the fall of 2015 for the services they offer, the brand in turn has seen:

• YoY increases in mobile organic sessions
• YoY increases in desktop organic sessions
• Increases in on-page actions taken
• Improvements in quality of web page traffic
• Improvements in local marketing metrics, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, including increases in:
  • Total searches (+62%)
  • Total views (+42%)
  • Total actions (+47%)

*Represents YoY growth from 2019 to 2020

The value of specialty pages for multi-location brands

Organic marketing plays a crucial role in the competitive search landscape. Creating hyperlocal, customized content can help local marketers create a winning search strategy that drives quality leads to your storefronts. Optimized local pages enable brands to:

• Improve the user’s experience
• Helps users find relevant information for the store location closest to them
• Helps users find information related to a specific service they’re seeking
• Maximizes organic traffic
• Improves local rankings
• Improves long-tail keyword visibility

The pet retailer, however, offers a multitude of services that require individualized attention to improve ranking for each service. For example, the pet retailer may want to optimize their local landing page for “dog grooming near me”, but also offer in-store vet services, training services, and more.

Each page can only rank for one keyword and only has one set of meta tags, schema, and block copy to optimize for. This limitation can impact the search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities to rank higher for each of the aforementioned keywords.

To avoid missing potential conversion opportunities, Rio SEO recommended the pet retailer deploy and optimize specialty pages to improve their local rankings for highly-relevant search terms related to the services their company offers.

Specialty pages positively improve organic search traffic & conversion metrics

The pet retailer has seen substantial increases in their organic search traffic and conversion metrics year-over-year. When comparing 2019 organic search traffic data to 2021, each of their specialty pages has seen drastic increases over the two-year period, as evidenced in the below results.

Pet training speciality page performance

+66% increase in organic traffic

Pet grooming speciality page performance

+64% increase in organic traffic

Vaccinations speciality page performance

+61% increase in organic traffic

Aquatics speciality page performance

+68% increase in organic traffic

By adding additional CTAs on their specialty pages, the pet retailer increased both interest and conversions in their services. Below is a snapshot of the tens of thousands of actions that were performed on their specialty pages, indicating searchers are looking to take action and have high-intent when landing on the page of a specific service they’re looking for.