7 Common Pet Copywriting Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Writing SEO-friendly and engaging content can be challenging for many UK pet business owners. Effective pet copywriting requires experience, skill and strategy to take your content marketing to the next level.
With so many tasks that need completing as a business owner, your content may be the last thing on your to-do list. Here are 7 common pet copywriting mistakes pet businesses make and how to avoid them.
1 - No SEO Strategy
Writing content for your business can be time-consuming and it’s tempting to focus on how the content sounds rather than the SEO benefit. This would be a mistake because you could waste hours writing blog posts, crafting beautiful content for your website or social media and find it has zero SEO benefit for you.
As a pet business owner, it’s important to educate yourself about SEO and how to write SEO-optimised content for your website and blog. It’s easy to research information yourself, take courses or get advice from an experienced pet copywriter so you can become more informed about how to write content that will actually bring traffic to your website.
2 - Not Answering Important Questions
Pet parents are searching the internet for answers to important questions about their pet. Your pet blog should answer the questions that your potential customers are searching for. This means searching for long-tail keyword phrases or questions that come up around your business, if you have a pet sitting business, some examples would be:
How much is a pet sitter per day?
What are the duties of a pet sitter?
How do I find a pet sitter?
What can I do with my dog while I go on holiday?
Are dogs ok when you go on holiday?
Can a dog be left alone for 3 days?
3 - Not Targeting Low Competition Keywords
Efficient and effective pet copywriting means targeting low competition keywords. Going after low competition keywords gives you a greater chance of ranking your content in Google because there are fewer people competing for that term. This is especially important for new or less established websites.
If you go after only high competition keywords, you could waste a lot of time writing content and find that none of it is ranking very high on Google.
4 - Not Checking Out the Competition
Good pet copywriting means being aware of the competition’s content. As a pet business you always need to be aware of your competition and what your competitors are doing well and not so well. It’s important to look at the blogs of successful pet brands in niches like yours and see what is working well for them.
It’s also important to stand out from the competition and not just become a cookie-cutter copy of another blog that you like. With so much content on the internet, your content must stand out and bring something new. Try to identify gaps that haven’t been talked about yet and make every blog post informative and valuable to the reader.
5 - Not Identifying Your Target Market
A persuasive pet content writer knows their target market and reaches out to them in their writing. It’s important for any pet business to know their target customer and their characteristics. This includes information like:
Age
Gender
Disposable income
Occupation
Location
Values
Lifestyle
Every piece of content you write should appeal to your customer demographic.
6 - Being Too Wordy
Unfortunately, people on the internet have very short attention spans. Compelling pet copywriting gets the point quickly without too much waffle. This is especially important for copy that describes services, packages or products.
People have very busy lives and are juggling multiple things at once, giving them very little time and headspace to make purchasing decisions. Potential customers need to know what you offer and how it will help them as quickly as possible.
Having a website and content that is easy to navigate makes the buying process easier and in turn increases conversion rates.
7 - Not Putting Yourself in the Customer’s Shoes
This seems like an obvious one but all too often businesses can get bogged down in the hectic nature of running a business and simple things may get overlooked. From a pet copywriting perspective, it’s always a great exercise to go back and read your content from the perspective of a customer that knows nothing about your brand.
It’s also a good idea to have an impartial person look at your website and give feedback on their personal experience. You will probably learn things you never thought of and find ways that you can refine your content to make it more customer-friendly.
You may be missing out important information in your content that potential customers want answers to. Just a few tweaks here and there could lead to more sales.
Final Thoughts on Effective Pet Copywriting Techniques
Good pet copywriting isn’t just about having copy that sounds great. It involves strategy and planning to refine the content and get it just right. Now you know the 7 common mistakes to avoid, you can write high-quality and engaging copy that captures your audience.
Whether it’s having a great SEO strategy, targeting low competition keywords or identifying with your audience, you have the tools to reach out to your potential customers in a way that speaks to them. This helps you increase your website traffic and sales.
If you need help with crafting compelling copy for your website or blog, you could always consider hiring a freelance pet writer. To read more about the benefits of this, see my blog here.
