Pet Drugs Online: +21% Organic Category Growth

Pet Drugs Online is one of the UK’s largest online pet pharmacies. It came to us with two ambitions: make organic search compete with paid on traffic and revenue, and build genuine value-added content into a site designed to sell products, not answer questions.

Pet pharmacy is a “your money or your life” market. Google applies its strictest quality standards to anything touching health advice, and rewards sites that demonstrate real experience, expertise, authority and trust. Pet Drugs Online had the products and the clinical credibility. Almost none of it was legible to a search engine.

The site’s structure had grown rather than been designed, leaving deep, duplicated URLs Google struggled to interpret. It was also competing with itself: head terms like “flea treatments for dogs” were contested by two or three of its own pages, so none of them ranked properly. And the informational content that builds topical authority sat on a separate subdomain, doing nothing for the pages that actually sold.

VetUK and Pets at Home both held more organic visibility, with deeper content behind their category and brand pages.

Services: SEO, Content
Industry: Pet Supplies / Ecommerce

Across 2021, organic sessions reached 2.83 million, up 14% year on year and 38% on two years prior, with organic revenue up 15%.

From Q3, as the content layer came online, growth accelerated to 24% YoY in traffic and 16% in revenue.

Full-site visibility closed the year at 41%, a 2.2% quarterly gain and the largest in its competitive set, across a quarter containing multiple algorithm updates the site was unaffected by. Organic conversion rate rose 12% year on year by January 2022.

Then the May 2022 core update rewarded sites with deep, intent-matched content and clean technical foundations. Pet Drugs Online gained 10% in full-site visibility and 10% in branded visibility. In the quarter that followed, dog category sessions grew 21% year on year and 30% on the previous quarter; revenue to the dog landing page rose 64% and dog prescriptions 57%. “Worming tablets” and “flea treatment” both broke into the top three.

Algorithm updates don’t create winners. They reveal who did the structural work beforehand.