Seasonal Trends 
Visibility Vs Authority 
Link Acquisition 
Content Performance 
10 minutes
Reading time
20 pages
Length
Updated May 2018
We’ve produced a 2018 Pet Supplies Retailers Market Performance Report.
The report helps leading pet suppliers to understand their place in the market better, seeing how they perform compared to competitors in their digital landscape.
Featuring the top websites in this market, we’ve produced an analysis that ranks them based on performance areas for individual brands. This means a brand could be topping the chart for SEO Visibility but sits lower down the rankings for Brand Reach and social scores. We also look at Link Authority and the keyword opportunities within the Pet Supplies landscape.
Don’t worry if you can’t see your company in the lineup – our data is sourced across the whole industry, so if you ask we can provide it for you. We only publish the highest performing websites to give a topline view of the sector, but our research spans the whole market.
We don’t only source our data to produce a report, we also analyse it so that we can understand the market more clearly. We’ve highlighted our findings from the report and discussed them in more detail here. This will give you a more detailed look at the Pet Supplies market to use alongside the report.
Pets at Home remains the market leader despite a small 8% drop in visibility. Their visibility is much higher than everyone else in the market.
Zoo Plus has managed to retain their 2nd place position even after losing 38% of their visibility last year.
Fetch and VioVet have had small losses of 3% and 9%.
Making up the top 5 is Omlet who gained 29% visibility and moving them into the top 5.
Other winners in the top 10 include:
Unfortunately, Monster Pet Supplies has lost a massive 89% of their visibility, shifting them out of 2nd place and out of the top 10.
The highest competition keyword is ‘pet shop’ which, due to this being a Venice marketplace, brings up a lot of local results. We’ll explain this in more detail further on.
However, Petshop.co.uk has managed to maintain position 1 for this keyword so well done to them.
Pet Planet has used paid ads to place them at the top of the results for ‘cat carrier’ twice.
They also feature in position 5 for the term with a nice title tag and meta description.
They should look at tidying up their URL structure as the listing currently ends in /category.asp?dept_id=542.
The best practice is to have the correct folder structure, e.g. /cats/cat-carriers as this shows Google topical relevancy between folders and acts as a funnel for search engines.
Is also allows users to see their path making it a better journey for everyone.
Key opportunity areas:
Since 2012, the Venice update changed the way Google looks at local markets. Taking a user’s location into consideration, the search engine now populates results that appear most relevant to their location and query.
This is great for small businesses but means the competition can be harder than it was before.
It looks like this is a Venice related market, so a blended organic and paid strategy is required when it comes to search.
Set up rank tracking to see where you rank well for each location in the UK. Sites that rank well organically can be excluded from your search campaign.
One of the best ways of attracting high-quality links is with a strong content marketing campaign. Google still uses links as one of their biggest ranking factors, which is why they’re so important.
Pet Planet is leading the links with a huge average number of links per month of good quality.
They have an A-Z list of guides on dog, cat and small pet breeds which are the main source of links – their one on Scottish Terrier dogs has over 2.5K.
The guides are rich in information about the breeds and are split up under clear titles to make them easy to follow.
Throughout the guides, there are links to their product pages. However, this could be improved by including shoppable content images.
Omlet has the 2nd highest number of links of the highest quality.
A lot of their links are going to product images – given that they sell a chicken swing this is not too surprising!
However, like Pet Planet they also have guides for different animals on everything from feeding and cleaning to keeping them safe.
Each section of the guide has a ‘next’ button, and you can choose which part of the guide to read from a list at the side, improving the user experience.
We particularly like Pets Corner’s digital magazine, Petopedia.
It covers all different pets, answering FAQs with in-depth information.
However, they could gain a lot more link equity by placing this as a subfolder rather than a subdomain on their site.
Moz’s Rand Fishkin claims that moving a subdomain to a subfolder almost always increases search traffic.
Social media isn’t just a place to check out your friends’ holiday snaps. It’s also one of the biggest platforms to promote your brand, its ethics and show your customers what you’re all about.
Pets at Home is top of the social charts with the highest number of brand searches and biggest owned social score. It’s clear to see why when you look through their social feeds.
Here are some things we loved:
PetShop.co.uk is next in the social chart.
Their posts mostly consist of product promotions and offers which don’t usually invite people to engage.
Posting more frequent competitions and more varied content could encourage more customers to get involved, like and share their posts.
We’re also a fan of Lily’s Kitchen’s social accounts.
They post and retweet customer pictures of their pets enjoying their products.
They also post feelgood adoption stories, promotional codes and competitions.
Their brand tone of voice and aesthetic runs through everything they do. Well done!
Challenge us if there’s anything in here you think you need assistance with or if you want us to run through the report with you.
