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Link Building for Pet Businesses: How to Be the Buzz of the Pet Community

ByCherrie Ann Balictar

Last updated on January 8th, 2025 at 08:59 pm

Have you been tirelessly publishing content on your pet website, optimizing it for SEO, and yet you’re still not getting the right visitors for your business? Or worse, Google thinks your website cannot be trusted. Ouch. 

Guess what, link building for pet businesses could be the missing piece of the puzzle. 

Link building, what’s that?

It’s like a popularity contest, this time online. When other websites mention and link to your pet business, it helps more people find you. It’s like leveraging other businesses’ traffic to boost your online presence.

Today, I will walk you through, step by step, how to make your website the talk of the town. 

Let’s get started. 

Don’t have time to read this post? Check out this case study by Ahrefs, where they helped a pet business grow from 0 to 3 million organic visits per month using their link-building strategies. 

Affiliate Disclaimer: Pet Content Solutions is a proud partner of the Amazon Services LLC Associates and other pet businesses. Therefore, this blog post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission for qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Funds go to chimken, veggies, and toys for my dogs Kuya and Bunso. Please read the disclaimer for more info.

Link Building for Pet Businesses: Overview

In a nutshell, link building for pet businesses can be achieved in just 4 easy steps. They are:

  1. Understanding Your Audience
  2. Publishing Valuable and Shareable Content on Your Website
  3. Understanding competitor backlink analysis
  4. Outreach and Relationship Building

Link Building for Pet Businesses: Deep Dive

1. Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience says a lot about how much you know your target market. As a pet business owner, your market is pet owners (and/or pet owners to be) who are passionate about wanting what’s best for their fur babies.

Therefore, you need to create content that appeals to them and look for other websites that are already doing good at it. 

Factors to Identify Your Target Audience

  • Pet Type: Dog, cat, bird, rabbit, guinea pig, fish, exotic animals, etc.
  • Demographics: Age, gender, and location.
  • Interests: Do they enjoy outdoor activities, traveling with their pets, pet training, pet fashion, etc?
  • Buying Behavior: Are they buying premium or budget-friendly products?
  • Online Behavior: Which websites, forums, or social media do they visit to buy products and services?
  • Pain Points: What problems do they have that your product or service can solve?

2. Publishing Valuable and Shareable Content on Your Website

Creating valuable and shareable content is key to attracting visitors and getting other websites to link to you. Here are some tips:

  • Write How-To Guides: Help pet owners with step-by-step guides, like “How to Potty Train Your Puppy in 5 Easy Steps” 
  • Share Personal Stories: Share heartwarming pet stories. Example: “How My Rescue Dog Changed My Life (and now I’m changing his)
  • Visual Content: Use photos and videos. Example: Create a video on “Homemade summer treats”
  • Create Listicles: Write lists or product recommendations like “Top 10 Dog Breeds for Busy Families” or “5 Best Pet Toys for Cats.” Lists are easy to read and share.
  • Offer Free Resources: Provide free eBooks, checklists, or templates, like “Pet Care Checklist” or “Puppy Training eBook.”
  • Stay Updated: Write about the latest pet trends or news. For example, “Newest Pet Care Apps in 2024.”

Read more: 52 Weeks, 104 Blog Posts: Blog Post Ideas for Dog Walkers to Grow Your Business

3. Competitor Backlink Analysis

Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks helps you see where they get their links from, so you can try to get similar ones. It’s like finding out where your competitors are making friends and then making friends with those same people. You can use Keysearch for this.

Easy steps to Analyze Competitor Backlinks using Keysearch

Step 1: Find Competitors

  • Identify pet businesses with websites similar to yours. Do this by typing your pet business in Google and see what appears in the search results. For example, “dog sitter Michigan”. 
  • Record the website URLs in a spreadsheet

Step 2: Use Keysearch

  • Go to Keysearch and enter a competitor’s URL.
  • Next, go to the Competitive Analysis section, and select Backlink Checker.
  • Then, open the filter and set it to Do Follow links. 

Step 3: Identify Link Building Opportunities

  • Review your competitor’s backlinks and look for sites that might also link to you
  • Record the website URLs in a spreadsheet. Check their domain strength (DS) and find out how easy or difficult it is for you to reach out to them to get links. 

4. Outreach and Relationship Building

Here comes the hard part: making friends online to build backlinks. Let me tell you, this is not an easy feat. BUT, there are ways to do it for free.

Free Link Building Options:

  • Forums: Join forums like Reddit and Quora. Find questions to answer, and share a link to your website that answers the question.
  • Online Directories: List your business in directories with your name, address, phone number, and website URL.
  • Social Media: Share your URL on Facebook, Instagram, X, and Pinterest.
  • Publish on Medium and Linkedin.
  • Podcasts: Get booked as a podcast guest and have your website linked to theirs.
  • Guest Posting: Pitch blog post topics to pet bloggers, fellow pet business owners, and pet publications. Check if their website has a “Write for Us” link on footer. Otherwise, you can contact them directly by email or using their Contact Us form. 
  • Roundup Posts: Reach out to blogs that gather expert tips on a topic and offer your insights for inclusion.
  • HARO (Help a Reporter Out): Sign up and pitch to journalists looking for pet industry experts. If they use your information, they’ll link to your site.
  • Contests and Giveaways: Organize pet-themed contests to generate buzz.

Paid Link Building Options:

  • Hiring an SEO Agency: Work with an agency that specializes in link-building.
  • Buying Display Ads: Purchase ads from media publications that link to your site.
  • Press Releases: Reach out to media publications to create a press release for your pet business
  • Sponsored Posts: Pay pet bloggers to publish a post that includes a link to your site.

Read more: Local SEO for Pet Businesses: 5 Easy Tips for Easy Wins

Frequently Asked Questions 

Why Do Pet Businesses Need Link Building?

  1. Attract Unique Audience 

Pet owners always look for the best products and advice. Imagine a pet owner searching online for the best dog food. For example, if your website offers healthy homemade pet food recipes, pet owners will trust and visit your site if a reputable site like Petco links to you.

  1. Trust Factor 

People trust websites that other reputable sites link to. Imagine Pet+ Magazine links to your pet grooming service, new customers will feel more confident in choosing you.

  1. Heavy Competition

If your website gets links from established pet businesses like Chewy, you’ll get more visibility than your competitors.

  1. Niche Content

Pet care is a specialized field. Creating and sharing unique, helpful content about specific topics about pet care that no one has covered yet makes your site more valuable. Other websites will link to your specialized content, driving more visitors to you.

How Can Link Building Benefit My Business?

Link building combined with high-quality content is the perfect formula to make your website rank higher on Google. When trusted websites link to your great content, Google sees your site as reliable and valuable. This helps your website appear higher in search results, bringing more leads and sales to your pet business.

Does Publishing Content on My Social Media Platforms Count as Link Building?

It depends. If you’re only creating content on social media without linking back to your website, it won’t help much with link-building.

For example, if you posted a video or image of your dog on Facebook, without any links to your website, this does not count as link-building. It may get likes, and shares on the platform, but it won’t improve your website’s ranking or authority.

However, if you publish a blog post about a new product and promote it on Facebook with a call to action like, “The first 100 people to visit our website gets an early bird discount,” this is link-building. This helps because you’re using Facebook’s Domain Authority to boost your website’s ranking (Facebook’s DA is 96 out of 100).

What is Link Building Known As?

Link building is also called “backlinking.” It means getting other websites to link to your site. They help make your website look important and trustworthy to Google. Therefore, the more good backlinks you have, the higher your site can rank in search results. 

Is Link Building Illegal?

No, link building is not illegal. It’s a common practice used to improve your website’s ranking on search engines. However, some methods, like buying links or using spammy techniques, can violate Google’s guidelines.

Therefore, ethical practices like creating great content and building genuine relationships with other pet businesses is the best way to go. This will help you avoid penalties and ensure your site benefits from link building in a positive way.

Why is Link Building Relevant?

Link building is relevant because it helps your website rank higher in search results. When other trusted websites link to yours, it shows Google that your site is valuable and trustworthy.

Therefore, link building helps improve your website’s visibility, attracts more traffic, and builds your online reputation.

Why is Content-Based Link Building Effective?

Content-based link building is effective because it focuses on creating valuable, high-quality content that others want to link to. When you produce useful guides, interesting articles, or engaging videos, other websites naturally want to share and link to them. 

This not only brings more visitors to your site but also tells Google that your website is a one-of-a-kind source of information. Plus, content used for link building has long-term benefits because great content stays relevant and continues to attract links over time.

Additionally, you can edit and refresh your content to keep it up-to-date, ensuring it remains valuable and link-worthy.

What Are Link Building Services?

Don’t have the time to do link building for your pet business? You can hire an SEO agency to do this for you. These services use various strategies to create high-quality backlinks, such as guest posting, outreach to websites, publications, and journalists.

By hiring a link building service, you can save time and ensure that your link building is done correctly and ethically. 

Final Thoughts

Link building for pet businesses is my least favorite part of an SEO strategy because it takes so much effort to get links. It’s always about “what’s in it for me?” If your website doesn’t have much content or authority yet, you’re likely to get little positive feedback from your outreach. This is something I struggle with right now.

My first course of action is always to focus on creating content on my website. 

As I mentioned earlier, link building is like a popularity contest. If you want to be popular, you have to act like it, dress like it and hope the popular girls in your class let you join their group.

For me, publishing content on my website is my version of “acting like it, and dressing like it.” 

In the end, it’s not always about standing out; it’s also about exerting effort to belong in the industry you’re in.

So, build your brand by publishing high-value content, improve your website’s user experience, and THEN pursue those valuable links.

I hope you find it helpful. Let me know what you think. 

Read more about pet blogging and how to make more money from your website

My Go-To Content Marketing Resources

✅ Everything I offer – Visit my store to checkout my curation of digital assets and services to simplify and amplify your online marketing needs.

✅ Keysearch – The best and most affordable SEO keyword research tool on the market.

✅ Keyword Chef – Find the best keywords for your pet business with ease. Choose from monthly subscriptions or pay as you go.

✅ Frase – Supercharge your content creation with Frase! Optimize your blog posts for SEO and boost your rankings effortlessly.

✅ Astra – Another top theme choice that makes your blog look professional and load quickly. This is the first WordPress theme I used when I discovered blogging professionally in 2018. Still one of the best themes out there.

✅ Interserver – In my opinion, the best web hosting service in the planet. I’m a happy paying customer since 2018. Use coupon code CHERRIEBALICTAR and get your first month for just $0.1. (Read more)

✅ Namecheap – Secure your perfect domain name at a great price. Because every pet business starts with a great domain! I get all my domain names here. (Video tutorial here)

✅ Legal Bundles – Protect your pet business with legal templates. Start your business with with peace of mind.

✅ Payhip – The best platform to sell your pet business products and digital downloads. Easy to use with powerful features.

✅ AI- infused Blog Post Templates by Nina Clapperton – Looking to skip the time-consuming part of formatting blog posts on WordPress? I highly recommend Nina Clapperton’s AI-Infused Blog Templates for Effortless Content Creation. Write professional-looking blog posts with a single click – just add photos and hit publish.

Cherrie Ann Balictar is the founder/CEO of Pet Content Solutions—a content marketing agency that helps pet businesses generate website traffic, leads, and sales through engaging, professional, and value-driven content. She is also a lipstick junkie, frustrated singer, and fur mom to Kuya and Bunso.

Learn more