Run a Complete SEO Audit on Your Pet Store Website — Before You Fix Anything

This audit framework is written for independent pet store owners, multi-location pet retail operators, and anyone managing the website for a pet shop who suspects organic traffic is underperforming but isn't sure why.

You don't need to be an SEO specialist to run this audit. You do need access to Google Search Console (free), a basic crawl tool like Screaming Frog's free tier or Ahrefs' site audit, and about two to three hours of focused diagnostic time.

What this audit will tell you:

• Whether Google can properly crawl and index your site
• Whether your Google Business Profile and local citations are working in your favor
• Whether your content is targeting the right keywords with enough depth to rank
• Whether other websites are linking to you in a way that builds authority
• Which problems are urgent versus which are lower-priority maintenance items

What this audit will not tell you is exactly how long ranking improvements will take — that depends on your market's competition level, your domain's age and history, and how quickly you can implement fixes. In our experience working with pet retailers, markets vary significantly: a rural pet store auditing a thin competitor landscape has a very different timeline than an urban shop competing against Petco, PetSmart, and five independent rivals.

Run this audit before spending money on content, links, or any other SEO work. Building on an undiagnosed foundation wastes budget and sometimes makes problems worse.

Technical issues are the most common silent killers in pet store SEO. A site can look fine to a human visitor while being largely invisible to Google's crawler. Start here before evaluating anything else.

Crawl Your Site

Run your domain through a crawl tool and look for: broken links (4xx errors), redirect chains, pages marked noindex accidentally, and duplicate content caused by URL parameter variations or www vs. non-www conflicts.

For most small pet store sites (under 200 pages), the free tier of Screaming Frog covers this. Export the full crawl and sort by status code — anything other than 200 needs attention.

Google Search Console Checks

• Coverage report: Are pages being indexed? Are any submitted URLs marked as 'Excluded' or 'Error'?
• Core Web Vitals: Is your site flagged as 'Poor' on mobile? Slow-loading product pages hurt both rankings and conversion.
• Manual actions: Has Google penalized the site for any policy violations? This is rare but critical to rule out.
• Sitemaps: Is a sitemap submitted? Are the URLs in it actually indexable?

Mobile Usability

Most local pet store searches happen on mobile. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test on your homepage, a category page, and a product page. Text that's too small to read, clickable elements too close together, or horizontal scrolling are all ranking-impacting issues, not just UX complaints.

HTTPS and Site Security

Confirm your site serves entirely over HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings. A security warning in the browser before a visitor reaches your store page is a conversion killer and a minor ranking signal.

Severity guide: Crawl errors on key pages = high severity. Slow Core Web Vitals on mobile = medium-high. Missing sitemap = medium. HTTP on a secondary page = low.

For most independent pet stores, the majority of new customers come from local searches — either Google Maps results or organic 'near me' queries. Local signal gaps are, in our experience, the single most common ranking blocker for pet retailers who haven't worked with an SEO specialist before.

Google Business Profile (GBP) Completeness

Open your GBP listing and check every field:

• Categories: Is your primary category set to 'Pet Store'? Secondary categories (e.g., 'Pet Supply Store', 'Aquarium Shop') add visibility for niche queries.
• Business description: Does it mention your key services and the neighborhoods or city you serve?
• Photos: Do you have at least 10 current photos including your storefront, interior, and product areas? Listings with more photos consistently attract more clicks, per Google's own guidance.
• Hours and attributes: Are your hours accurate, including holiday exceptions? Attributes like 'pet-friendly' or 'curbside pickup' can surface your listing in filtered searches.
• Products and services: Have you populated the Products section with your key offerings?

Citation Consistency

Pull your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data from the major directories: Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Facebook, and pet-specific directories like BringFido. Inconsistent address formats or old phone numbers create trust signals that work against you. A tool like BrightLocal's free citation checker gives you a starting snapshot.

Review Volume and Recency

Count your Google reviews and note the date of your most recent review. A listing with 40 reviews where the newest is 18 months old signals stagnation to both Google and potential customers. Audit the content of recent reviews — do they mention specific services or products? Reviews that include relevant keywords provide an indirect local relevance signal.

Location Pages on Your Website

If you have one location, does your homepage and contact page include your full address in text (not just an image or embedded map)? If you have multiple locations, does each have its own dedicated page with unique content? Thin or duplicate location pages are a missed opportunity and occasionally a ranking penalty risk.

For deeper remediation guidance on local signals, see our local SEO page for pet stores.

Content issues in pet store SEO typically fall into one of three categories: wrong keywords, thin pages, or cannibalization. Each has a different fix.

Keyword-to-Page Mapping

List your highest-traffic pages from Google Search Console (Performance → Pages). For each page, identify the primary query it ranks for (Performance → Queries, filtered by page). Then ask: is that the keyword this page was designed for? In our experience, many pet store category pages rank for brand or navigational queries rather than commercial queries like 'dog food delivery [city]' or 'reptile supplies near me' — which means they're not capturing purchase-intent traffic.

Thin Content Check

Review your key category pages and your homepage. A category page with fewer than 300 words of unique descriptive content — beyond just product listings — is considered thin by most SEO benchmarks. Google rewards pages that give context: breed-specific feeding guides on a dog food page, water chemistry basics on an aquarium supplies page. Thin pages don't necessarily get penalized, but they rarely rank above competitors who have invested in helpful content.

Cannibalization Check

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com [keyword] for your top three or four target keywords. If multiple pages appear for the same query, Google is uncertain which to rank — and often ranks neither well. Consolidating or differentiating those pages is a high-use fix.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Back in your crawl export, check title tags across your key pages:

• Are any title tags missing or duplicated?
• Do category page titles include the target keyword and your location?
• Are title tags truncated in search results (over ~60 characters)?

Meta descriptions don't directly affect rankings, but a well-written meta description improves click-through rate, which affects how much traffic you get from your existing ranking positions.

Backlink authority is the most competitive and hardest-to-fake element of SEO. For local pet stores, you don't need hundreds of links — but you do need the right ones.

Baseline Authority Check

Run your domain through Ahrefs' free website authority checker or Moz's Link Explorer free tier. Note your Domain Authority (Moz) or Domain Rating (Ahrefs) score. Neither metric is perfect, but a score below 10 on a site that has been live for more than two years suggests very little link building has occurred.

Link Profile Quality

In whatever tool you're using, pull your top 20 linking domains. Ask:

• Are these real websites with traffic and editorial content, or thin directory spam?
• Do any links come from local sources — your chamber of commerce, a local news site, a community blog?
• Are there links from pet industry relevant sources — a dog trainer's website, a local veterinary clinic, a pet rescue org?

Local relevance and local geography matter significantly for local SEO link building. A link from a national pet industry blog is valuable, but a link from a well-regarded local rescue organization or veterinary practice often drives more local ranking impact.

Toxic Link Check

Look for patterns of links from foreign-language spam sites, link networks, or purchased link schemes. If a previous SEO agency built links for your site, review what they built. Google's spam systems are sophisticated enough to devalue most low-quality links passively, but an active manual action from an obvious scheme can be damaging. If you find a cluster of clearly manipulative links, document them — this becomes relevant if you pursue a disavow file.

Competitor Link Gap

Run your top two or three local competitors through the same tool and compare their link profiles to yours. This gap analysis tells you what realistic link targets look like for your market and category.

After completing all four diagnostic steps, you'll have a list of issues. Not all are equal. Here's a simple severity framework to prioritize remediation:

High Severity — Fix Within 30 Days

• Pages marked noindex that should be indexed
• Google Search Console manual action or significant coverage errors
• Google Business Profile unclaimed or critically incomplete (no hours, wrong address)
• Site not served over HTTPS
• Zero local citations or severely inconsistent NAP data

Medium Severity — Address Within 90 Days

• Core Web Vitals failing on mobile
• Thin content on primary category pages
• Title tag duplication or missing tags across key pages
• Keyword cannibalization on high-value queries
• Review count low or no recent reviews

Low Severity — Ongoing Maintenance

• Secondary pages with suboptimal meta descriptions
• Minor redirect chains (two hops)
• GBP posts not being used regularly
• Link profile below competitor baseline but without toxic links present

When to Handle It In-House vs. When to Hire

Simple fixes — correcting noindex tags, updating GBP hours, standardizing citations — are reasonable to handle internally with basic guidance. Where the diagnostic work gets harder is in prioritizing across a long list of mixed-severity issues, interpreting crawl data accurately, and building a content and link strategy that reflects your specific competitive market.

If your audit surfaces more than three high-severity issues simultaneously, or if technical problems like redirect structures and crawl budget are involved, working with specialists typically accelerates timelines and avoids the compounding mistakes that come from fixing issues in the wrong order. You can get a professional SEO audit for your pet store if you'd prefer an expert assessment rather than working through this framework alone.