Ranking First – Dog Training Singapore

Table of contents

• Keyword Research
  • Who is our target audience
  • What is our target audience searching
  • Keyword Optimisation – Conclusion
• Steps to Rank your Site!
• Social Media Marketing
• ATC Page vs Blog
• Conclusion, Thank You!
  • Dog Trainers
  • Dog Training
  • Dog Training for Dogs
• Thanks Again!

We’ve recently successfully ranked first for a valuable commercial intent keyword – dog training singapore and we’d love to share how we did it

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a term that is thrown frequently when it comes to SEO – but really, it just boils down to figuring out:

• Who your target audience is
• What are they searching

Who is our target audience

For Pet Coach SG, the target audience should be simple – anyone in the market for engaging a dog training service in Singapore. Those who have recently got a puppy, those whom are wanting additional enrichment for their dogs etc.

So immediately, we think of the following:

• Dog Training
• Board and Train
• Enrichment for dogs etc.

To shortcut our process, we also know that Waggies is currently our main competitor – he appears top for most dog training queries. To further understand what queries are being searched by our target audience (the audience that the warmest – closest to engaging a dog training service), we checked out Waggies.

What is our target audience searching

When we spy on Waggies, we immediately see that 82% of traffic reaches their main landing page! See the screenshot below for reference:

When we inspect the keywords that are being routed to Waggies Landing page, we noticed the following:

• Dog Training
• Dog Trainer
• Dog Training For Dogs
• Dog Training Singapore

These keywords have high commercial and local intent, meaning that users that are searching for these terms are in the market to engage in dog training service.

We included the keyword Dog Training Singapore because we feel that SE Ranking made a mistake in their traffic count assessment. When we checked Ahrefs or Semrush – the search volumes for Dog Training Singapore was much higher at 500 and 1300 respectively.

See Ahrefs results:

And then see SemRush’s results:

Keyword Optimisation – Conclusion

Based on the above, we obviously gunned for Dog Training Singapore – that’s where the eyes are! So the next step is to rank on the first page for it ^^!

Steps to Rank your Site!

The standard steps apply, and I’ll compress it here (detailed article for each step will be provided separately):

1. Create a blog post, informative for audience whom are intending to engage dog training
   Note: The reason we had the blog post was because we didn’t have a dedicated service page yet, because our dog training centre was not yet up – we were mainly doing private consultations (which misses the search intent of Dog Training Singapore)
   • We proceeded to obtain links via blogger outreach. We actually teamed up with Link Panda for this activity!
     If anyone needs high quality, relevant links – will highly recommend these guys. They love SEO, they are honest and they know what they are doing.
   • We also did outreach via HARO, Qwoted – and have had good success here
     Note: HARO is no longer available now, but we continue to have great success with Qwoted :)
   • We tried blasting out emails, and obtaining cold leads. But the success rate was too low to be considered productive, so we culled this approach (1/500 email got a backlink ><)
2. Subsequently, we obtained a location – Animal Training Centre. Now we create a landing page for the animal training centre, and start ranking it for Dog Training Singapore
   • The same link building approaches were used above

3. Monitor both pages – theoretically, they should work fine because blog serves informational intent and the service page serves commercial intent. But alas, it was not meant to be – the pages were cannibalizing each other.

4. So, we killed the blog and redirected all traffic into the Animal Training Centre Page. This consolidates all the link juice and also makes it clearer to Google which page is trying to serve the commercial search query Dog Training Singapore
   • Why kill the blog? The Animal Training Centre service page was performing better. We’ll elaborate later in this article
5. Monitor – she ranks first now :)

This is a super exciting milestone for us because not only did we reach our target for ranking on the first page for a valuable keyword, we’re actually in first position.
And obviously, we will keep working and we hope to remain there!!

Social Media Marketing

We also have a very strong presence in social media, especially instagram. That probably helped Google understand social proof and that we’re real – if you guys are curious or want to follow us for dog tips, check out Pet Coach SG Instagram here!

ATC Page vs Blog

Why kill the blog, there were a few reasons to do so

1. Firstly, the ATC page was simply doing better
   • Higher clicks, and click through rates
   • Higher average engagement time for the ATC page (1m 09 seconds)
   • Lower average engagement time for the blog post (41 seconds)
2. 80% of the pages in the first page SERP are service pages. So we figured that that’s what the Audience really wants

Hence, the decision was clear – kill the blog, keep the landing page.

Conclusion, Thank You!

Thanks for reading this far, if you made it. But yes – we’ve managed to rank number #1 for Dog Training Singapore. What an achievement.

And for those who asked, what about the other keywords? Don’t worry, we’re there too ;)

Dog Trainers

We rank second for Dog Trainers keyword:

Dog Training

We rank second for Dog Training keyword:

Dog Training for Dogs

We rank second for Dog Training for Dogs keyword:

Thanks Again!

So yeah – there we go, appreciate your time reading. And any feedback is welcomed!

I’m at the stage where I realised that this SEO stuff is a bottomless pit. Very happy to hear and learn new things from everyone out there :)

Cheers Walakaka