Pet Blog Posts WITH Keyword Optimization vs. WITHOUT [Comparison]

Hi, I'm Tori Mistick from Wear WagRepeat and today you are listening to a very special edition of the Wear Wag Repeat podcast because I'm actually doing a video and an audio podcast at the same time. This is a topic that I want to cover because it came up on the hot seats call in my membership Wear Wag Repeat society just last night. One of my members asked me a question about pet blogging. We've been covering a lot of content about SEO,

which is search engine optimization. Keyword research, how to do internal linking to help your blog, um, get more visits and and keep people on the page for longer. We've been covering all kinds of topics related to blogging for your pet business or blogging as a professional pet blogger, like me. And so last night on our call, one of my members asked me a question. Tori, how do you really know that keyword research is worth it?

Uh, do you have any information comparing a blog post that you did without any keyword research versus a blog post that you did with keyword research? And I happen to have a really great example, so I thought I would do this special edition. of the podcast with a visual part on YouTube and also the regular audio part of the podcast. And I'm also publishing this on a day that my podcast doesn't usually come out and that's because I just thought this was such an urgent, important topic,

an important question to cover. Um, especially because we are- So during up for September where I'm going to be hosting a pet blogging challenge in Wear Wag Repeat Society that is going to include tons of accountability, extra co-working sessions, extra demonstrations. I'm going to be sending out twice a week writing prompts to help you

get ideas for what to- talk about. There are going to be blog post audits and of course there's going to be prizes for the people who stick with it and meet their blogging goals over the month of September. So I'm really excited to do that in Wear Wag Repeat Society which is my monthly membership and that means that if you want to do the blogging-. Challenge you can join for just a month of September uh and decide if the membership is the right fit for you or if you just

want to do the challenge. That's totally cool as well. So here is kind of like a taste of the kind of stuff that we talk about inside of Wear Wag Repeat Society. So this question was-. Do you have an example of a blog post that was done with keyword optimization and one without and kind of what the results were? So here are two examples that I have. Okay. First up is this blog post that I did called Keep it Keep it. Keep it. This is a blog post that I wrote some time in the last year

and it's pretty long. Both of the blog posts I'm going to be showing you today are about 2000 or 3000 words. So I tend to be pretty wordy in my blog posts and these are no exception. And that's another reason why I thought they would be a good comparison because they're both super long. So they've got a lot of words in here. This particular post does have a lot of keywords in it, I guess. We've got dog mom, dog mom, guilt. Umm. All kind of stuff related to being a dog mom.

But this is a blog post that I wrote because I was passionate about this topic. I was, I don't know, something inspired me, something lit a fire under me and I decided that I was gonna write a really long detailed blog post more of like a crease. And I ended up finding a lot of really great research around it and I was able to link to other people I interviewed on my podcast and expert research. And um it's a really great blog post. There are bullet points, there's format.

There's editing, there's headings, there's all of the elements that a blog post should really have in it in order to be optimized for people to find it for readability, etc. However, this blog post I did not do any keyword research. I just wrote about this topic because I was passionate about it. So when it first was published, I shared it on my email list and I shared it on social media. I shared it with the people whose research was included as part of the blog post.

And so when we look at the Google Analytics for it, which is this page right here, um if you're watching watching the video. You can see the Google Analytics. But I'll kind of explain if you're just listening what this looks like. There are a lot of hits right at the beginning, right when I published it. So there's a huge spike in traffic. The day and the day after I published it. And then there's a little trickle after that. And then it goes dead for a while. And there's a little.

You little trickle again after that. In total, this blog post according to Google Analytics GA4, which I have mixed feelings about. But according to my Google Analytics, this blog post has had 117 views. So that's not nothing but it's not a lot, right? Um and so we can see on the Google Analytics here that there's a huge spike at the beginning when I shared it with my email list and on social media and then really just a small trickle after that.

Now, let's compare that to another blog post that I published about a year ago. This is a blog post titled, Indoor and- I'm sure until ends up bigger. So this is a blog post that I did a lot of keyword research for to make sure that I was hitting all the topics that people were searching for so that my blog post could be as helpful as possible. So, for example, one thing that I knew- that came up when I was doing my research is people wanted ideas for enrichment for dogs in kennels.

Now typically if I were speaking to someone I would say enrichment for dogs when they're created or enrichment for created dogs or something like that. However, in my keyword research I noticed that people were specific- Pacific. Typically searching for enrichment for dogs in kennels. So I made sure in my blog post to use that exact specific language. I also made sure to include my main target keyword which is indoor enrichment for dogs in the very first paragraph.

It's in kind of I guess what you would consider the third paragraph. And then if we look down to the very first heading, my first H2 heading, I have indoor enrichment for dogs specified right in that heading. As I look through the blog post it is formatted, it's got bullet points, it's got headings, it's got sub headings, just like the other one except this one is . optimized for keyword performance.

So my second uh heading which is an H3 heading is enrichment for dogs and kennels, specifically calling out what people are searching for and giving them great suggestions like music enrichment, dog TV enrichment, and some recommendations that I have. So to avoid using toys in your dogs crate because it could be a choking hazard. So this is a very long blog post that gives you

a lot of great ideas. It also talks about dog puzzle toys, uh snuffle mats, lick mats, busy box which is one of my favorite things uh and all kinds of other ideas. So this is a completely keyword optimized blog post, um you'll see it's kind of similar in in look and feel to the other one, but this one I specifically wrote with the goal of people discovering it through search in search engines. So now let's look at the Google analytics for this blog post.

For this one we can see I published it um maybe nine months ago or so and when I first published it it had a trickle of traffic. It had a little bit of boost and then it really kind of went back to a trickle and then recently within the past couple of months it really started to climb and now it is one of my top ten blog

posts on my blog. I published it about nine months ago and just in the last uh couple of months this summer it has really gained momentum and it is getting a lot of traffic from organic search. In total this blog post has had two thousand seven hundred and fifty seven views that's compared to the blog post that was not optimized for

search. The Keeping Up with the Jones's Dog Dog Mom Guilt one that has 117 views compared to this optimized one that has two thousand seven hundred and fifty seven views. So the difference here is that it has a slow build traffic and then it really kind of shot up because it gave Google and all the different search engines enough time to crawl my site for the search terms to start to really gain in popularity. similarity. And for the search engines to gain trust that my blog post

was a really great resource. And that trust is built by how much time people spend on my blog post, how many links they're clicking within it, if I'm helping them or if they are coming there and seeing that it's not helpful and leaving immediately. So that's what you want to avoid. So I just thought this was a really great example of showing you two great blog posts, both of which I'm very proud of.

I love this one about keeping up with the Joneses and I also love this one about indoor enrichment for dogs. I'm proud of both of these posts. They're a similar length. They both have different elements on the page that make them optimized. But for one I did thorough keyword research and for the other one I really just wrote about what I was passionate about in the moment. For the keeping up with the Joneses I did do research but not keyword

research. I did research into data and statistics about dog owner guilt and I learned a lot through that. But ultimately what we can see from the data is that that is not a topic that people are really searching for. Or if they are searching for it they're not discovering my blog post. So So I hope you enjoyed this example.

If you are listening to this on the podcast feed and you want to see the actual visual examples of this please go over to my YouTube channel where wag Repeat or search Tori Mistick on YouTube. I'll put the link in the show description for this episode as well. Uhh and you can check that out. While you're over at YouTube why not give me a little subscribe so that I can continue to grow my channel and help pet parents and pet pros live their best life.

If you are curious about learning more about pet blogging and how you can use this not just as a professional pet blogger. But as a pet business owner to get more traffic to your website and more sales from your website please check out the blogging challenge I'm doing in September. It's going to be happening in the membership which is really affordable to be a part of. And it's going to include just an over

the top level of support. And accountability and recent resources for you so that you can really spend the month of September setting yourself up for success through the end of the year. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wear, Wag, Repeat podcast. If you have any questions at all you can always find me at Where, Where, Where, Repeat. Again, I'm Tori Mistick. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and I will talk to