Search Engine Optimization: Petwellbeing.com

Original, Spiderable, Profitable:
The Search Engine Optimization of Petwellbeing.com

The Client

Founded in 2005, PetWellbeing.com sells holistic pet medication online.

The Challenge

PetWellbeing.com' s goal was to double Google traffic and sales in 3 months, but their homepage, category pages and product pages were not ranking anywhere near Google's top ten. In fact, most of the product pages were ranking so poorly there was concern about a Google penalty.

PetWellbeing's management had engaged an SEO company in the past and had been wholly disappointed with the quality of expertise, and the level of service received. They had been burned by their bad experience and didn't know who to trust. But they also knew that they were missing a huge opportunity to increase their revenues and build their brand and needed to engage an experienced SEO team who could deliver top rankings and ROI metrics.

After a lengthy evaluation process, VKI Studios was selected to lead the SEO engagement.

The Solution

The first thing VKI Studios did was implement an SEO Audit & Action Plan. The audit discovered almost 100 different issues and turned up some pretty interesting details.

• The site was making some minor 'on page' mistakes with respect to title tags, keyword density and internal link structure. All easily fixable.
• The site scored well for number inbound and outbound links, directories and 'off page' elements, which should have indicated higher rankings.
• The site was not taking advantage of Google's webmaster central program. Missing an opportunity to work with Google to improve diagnostics and indexing of the website, including Sitemap submission and reporting.

The process seemed simple, but soon an unexpected problem arose.

While trying to determine why the site's product pages were performing so poorly VKI Studios discovered that almost all of the product descriptions had been copied word for word by other websites. This was a critical problem. Petwellbeing's pages were being hidden in the "omitted results" section, while the websites that had copied their content were showing up in the Google!

After fixing the prioritized recommendations, VKI Studios determined that the best way to untangle the website from the duplicate content issue was to do a complete re-write. Within the week their copywriters were working overtime.

Within 6 weeks VKI Studios had implemented all of the fixes to Petwellbeing's 'on page' elements, re-written all of the content, contacted Google to alert them and implemented an ongoing link acquisition strategy.

The Results

Once Google re-cached the site and cleared the duplicate content penalty, visits multiplied overnight.

• SEO related traffic went up 125%
• SEO related revenue went up 92%
• SEO related transactions went up 84%
• SEO related keyword searches went up 159%

Now nearly all of PetWellbeing.com's pages rank in the top 10. Based on this success and VKI Studios ability to quantify the return on investment, the engagement has been expanded to include marketing strategies for the client's videos, wiki, and PPC campaigns.