Petco Love, a nonprofit organization on a mission to help save animal lives, hired me in April 2021 to fortify their web presence and support the growth of new digital platforms.

That same month, Petco Love launched one of those platforms: Petco Love Lost, a national lost and found pet database dedicated to reuniting lost pets with their families using facial recognition technology.

Launching a brand new website meant we needed to optimize our articles and landing pages to fortify our organic search engine visibility.

BACKGROUND

Goals: First 6 months

 

Keyword ranking

200

Rank on Google for over 200 relevant keywords

 

Page 1 ranking

50

Rank for over 50 keywords on page 1 of Google

 

Organic traffic

50%

Increase organic search traffic to Lost.PetcoLove.org by 50%

 

Featured snippet

﹥1

Trigger in Google’s featured snippet for at least one relevant keyword

 

Software & tools

    • WordPress

    • Agility CMS

    • JIRA

    • Figma

    • Microsoft Excel, Word & PowerPoint

    • Google Analytics

    • Google Ads

    • SEMrush

    • Google Search Console

    • Google Keyword Planner

    • Google Docs & Sheets

    • Grammarly

    • Miro

    • Slack & MS Teams

    • SharePoint

Making relevant, optimized content

When I first joined Peto Love, the team had already put the nuts and bolts into Petco Love Lost and launched the website within my first month of joining.

By month two, I started formulating an SEO strategy for our published content, including on-page optimizations, defining relevant keywords, auditing technical SEO, formulating a backlink strategy, etc.

SEO strategy

  • Benchmark current SEO performance

    To understand how Petco Love Lost is currently performing, we’ll need to benchmark our current SEO performance.

    Now that our site is gathering 3+ months’ worth of search data to use as a benchmark, we can start setting goals to forge our SEO and content optimization strategies.

  • Audit existing content

    We’ll analyze each piece of content with an SEO lens to determine the most appropriate keywords to target.

    We’ll also identify opportunities to build out the content to be more search-friendly, potentially re-engineering live content.

  • Analyze on-page SEO

    We’ll run an On-Page SEO Checker analysis for each landing page & article, then use recommendations to optimize for keyword-rich content:

    • Title tags

    • Meta descriptions

    • Headers (H1/H2/H3)

    • Internal links

  • Analyze competitor’s SEO

    To get a feel for how competitors in the lost pet sphere are succeeding, we need to analyze top competitors ranking 1-10 on SERPs for “lost and found pet”.

    By building our SEO foundation and content optimization strategies, we’ll identify top-performing keywords, content, and topic gaps to discover areas of opportunity from our competitors.

  • Establish goals & KPIs

    Teaming up with marketing and analytics, we’ll establish goals & KPIs for the Petco Love Lost site that we’re targeting within the first 6 months after launch:

    • Organic traffic

    • Conversions (reunions & sign ups)

    • SERP rankings

  • Define primary keywords

    We’ll define our primary keywords, then create a keyword map of “lost pets”, including:

    • Grouping keywords into categories

    • Defining potential URLs and subcategories

    • Collecting related search questions to “lost pets”

  • Audit Technical SEO

    Once we launch Lost onto Agility, we need to make sure our site is readable to search engines and optimized.

    We’ll work with our dev team to ensure SEO best practices concerning mobile-friendliness, core web vitals, page speed, and site architecture are sound.

  • Create a content strategy

    Knowing our goal isn’t to generate tons of content to target high-volume traffic keywords, we’ll look for opportunities to create key content within landing pages. We may identify a handful of articles to drive traffic, but it’s not at the core of our strategy.

    Using our keyword map as a guide, we’ll focus on highly relevant keywords to identify content gaps and define our content strategy.

  • Ongoing SEO

    There are a number of other SEO best practices we can look to address while our freshly launched site/content marinates in Google’s index.

    It will likely take a few months to see the fruits of our pre-launch labor in order to assess next steps on existing content.

Google Ads

Along with running our organic SEO strategy, I also set up our first Google Ad campaigns. With our goals identified — conversions (which we attributed to estimated reunions of missing pets with their owners), website traffic, and sign-ups (creating an account) — I led our campaign launch, which included:

  • Conducting keyword research related to lost pets, cats, and dogs

  • Strategizing, planning, and setting up our responsive text ad campaigns: ad groups, ads, creatives, naming convention, budget, and keyword groups

  • Collaborating with Petco to create a non-competitive negative keyword list

  • Utilizing Google Ad insights, bid simulator, and competitive analysis to optimize our campaign performance

Creatives: Google Responsive Text Ads

Website architecture and sitemap

A partial screenshot of Lost.PetcoLove.org’s visual sitemap (created in Figma)

With the launch of our new website, we needed to make sure we addressed any nonoptimal or missing elements.

Using a mix of Figma, Word, and Excel, I outlined our website architecture and created a visual sitemap.

Our goals were to:

  • Re-assess our website architecture

  • Analyze pain points in our user flow

  • Identify improvements in our URL structure

  • Communicate proposed improvements with senior leadership

IMPLEMENTATION

With our strategy laid out, I led our SEO agency into collaborating on an ever-growing SEO list of Asana tasks, setting priorities, and executing both critical tasks and low-hanging fruit.

Starting with on-page optimizations, we got into the nitty-gritty of how to shape our articles and landing pages to shine in Google’s search results.

Blog editing

After our Sr. Copywriter drafted 16 blogs, I was asked to go through each, editing and proofreading as needed.

Here’s what I did:

  • Edited for grammar, structure, and cohesion.

  • Defined and implemented target keywords via SEMrush.

  • Updated metadata.

  • Audited outbound links, updating broken/irrelevant links, and researching/adding credible links.

An example excerpt from the original blog doc. Left: Original blog copy. Right: My editing notes.

blogs + landing pages

On-page optimizations

As our core content, blogs and webpages were our primary focus for optimization. After going through a few rounds of edits, our blogs were ready for publication.

 

Other content examples

  • Petco Love Adopt: Marketing Your Foster Pet Article

    As we strategized our branch of Petco Love Adopt — where we planned to detach any adopt content from the main Petco Love website — we decided to craft a handful of articles based on videos of previous impact stories.

    Working with our copywriter, I edited for SEO, grammar, and structure (see comments in Google Doc).

    This meant researching keywords, analyzing content currently ranking on 1st page for those keywords, identifying content gaps, and optimizing the meta description/headlines.

    See article

  • Petco Love: How-to for WordPress Publishing

    Each year, Petco Love’s marketing team launches their Love Stories campaign, where pet parents share their adoption stories — or what we called Love Stories.

    To guide our external Content Producer contractors, I created this how-to doc to train them on WordPress publishing. Our WP environment had several custom elements, so this doc was necessary to share these nuances and best pratices.

    Note: The linked doc only shares an example of the how-to’s first 3 pages.

    see how-to

  • Petco Love Care: FAQs

    In a campaign where we donated free vaccines for pets, I helped managed content on our new microsite, Petco Love Care. Along with collaborating alongside dev and marketing to get the site live, I strategized and edited the content in our Agility CMS.

    To help users navigate our donate page on the microsite, I wrote FAQs based on our customer success handbook and feedback from both the customer service and marketing teams.

    I also wrote FAQs for the main Petco Love website, focused on the organization, donations, and fostering.

Results: First 6 months

 

Keyword ranking

750+

Ranked on Google for 750+ keywords, exceeding our goal by over 275%

 

Page 1 ranking

120

Ranked for 125+ keywords on page 1 of Google, exceeding our goal by over 140%

 

Organic traffic

50%

Increased organic traffic by 75%,
exceeding our goal by 25%

Featured snippet

3

Triggered in Google’s featured snippet for 3 relevant keywords,
tripling our goal

 
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