For an online-only businesses like tails.com, discoverability and engagement are mission-critical. But standing out isn’t easy in the field of dog nutrition. We’re a planet of dog-lovers. The web is full of content about canines – including plenty on how to make sure you feed your dog the right things.
Few can claim the authority of tails.com – but Google doesn’t yet study organisational charts to see who has qualified vets and nutritionists approving every blog piece. So we helped tails.com evidence its clout by optimising their content. Here’s how.
Being in the dog food business gave tails.com license to write about pretty much anything dog related. But not every subject was a good fit for the brand. Choosing content required a discerning eye.
The tails.com team led the way, finding the right questions (and answers) within the organisation. What questions are the customer experience team asked again and again? Which issues are the best fit with the company’s products and services? Which topics are rich in opportunity for demonstrating their thought-leadership? Answering all these questions, and more, led to a shortlist of the conversations they could add value to.
Once we got our paws on the topic list, our mission was to make the articles more comprehensive and informative than anything else available. This wasn’t necessarily about adding detail – although we often did. It was about creating distinctive, ownable content for every topic. Even those that had already been written about time and time again.
We researched. We cross-referenced. We interviewed tails.com’s subject experts. We discovered some belting insights and brilliant anecdotes – great for adding an authentic tails.com angle to every piece.
Time to outline the content. We used the brief as a starting point, but reframed it to include everything we’d learned in our discovery sessions. A few nips and tucks later, we’d expertly nestled the piece into the sweet spot between unique content, brand, user need and SEO.
Our goal was to lead the pack by appearing, not merely at the top of the list of search results, but as the featured snippet – the content Google pulls through to answer the user’s question on the search results page.
We used a veritable kennel’s-worth of techniques to signal to Google that tails.com’s content is accurate, informative and user-friendly. We optimised for everything from keywords and search terms to structure and supporting links to make each piece stand out from a sea of similar content.
The time we spent carefully crafting content for readers and search engines alike was time well spent. In a competitive market, we achieved the coveted featured snippet position for several of the search terms we targeted:
An SEO project is never done – the team will need to monitor how their content performs and watch out for any changes in algorithm or competitor content that could knock them down the rankings. But the most coveted position on Google is a pretty good place to start.
Beat your competition to the top spot by downloading The Blackad Guide to Optimising for Search.
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