Australian Veterinary Wholesalers

Australian Veterinary Wholesalers sells flea, tick and worming treatments, dental care, treats and supplies for dogs, cats and small animals — a catalogue where almost every purchase starts with a generic search for a product or a problem rather than for the store's name. 72% of its search traffic comes from those non-branded queries, so where the site ranks for them decides whether a new customer ever finds it.

At the start of the comparison period it ranked, on average across everything it appeared for, at position 41.9 — page five. In a category where the big national pet retailers occupy page one for nearly every product term, page five is not a weak position so much as no position at all.

The work covered the three things the report tracks: technical health, so the catalogue can be crawled and understood — the site now scores 88 out of 100; keyword coverage across the product range — it ranks for 1,166 organic keywords; and authority — 13,002 backlinks, a domain rating of 14 (up one) and a domain authority of 15, with a 1% spam score.

Over the last six months against the previous six, from Search Console, the average position improved by 28.3 places, from 41.9 to 13.6, and impressions rose 25.5% from 314K to 394K. The site went from page five to the top of page two on average, and it is now being shown for far more of the product searches that matter.

Clicks moved the other way: down 23%, from 3.31K to 2.52K, with click-through rate falling from 1.1% to 0.6%. We are putting that in the headline rather than leaving it out. Some queries that used to sit on page one — where the clicks are — now sit on page two alongside a much wider set of new rankings, and page two is seen far more than it is clicked. More visibility has not yet become more visits. The next stage is about exactly that: moving the page-two product and category pages the last few places onto page one, and rewriting titles and descriptions so that more of the people who see them click.