How To Optimize SEO for Dog Trainers

When someone wants help training their dog, what do they do? In most cases, their first move is to head to Google and look up something like, “dog trainers near me.” When people in your local area do that, does your business appear in their search results? If not, you’re probably missing out on a lot of business.

That’s why SEO for dog trainers is so important. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it refers to a digital marketing strategy where you optimize your website content to rank in relevant search results. The goal is for people in your target audience to discover you in their dog training-related searches and eventually become customers.

The question is, how can you make that happen? What all goes into SEO for K9 trainers? Well, there are several tactics you can use to improve your SEO, including:

1. Target long-tail keywords
2. Earn reputable backlinks
3. Optimize your page speeds
4. Make your site mobile-friendly
5. Use HTTPS on your site
6. Create a Google Business Profile
7. Track and analyze your results

We’ll go over each of those tips in more detail below, so keep reading to find out more. And, to get more helpful digital marketing info sent straight to your inbox, be sure to subscribe to Revenue Weekly, our email newsletter!

1. Target long-tail keywords

Maybe the most essential step when building a K9 training SEO campaign is to target relevant keywords. Keywords are the terms users type into Google when they make a search, and if you want to rank in those searches, you need to include keywords in your website content.

For dog training companies like yours, the best keywords to target are canine-related terms, especially those about dog training. Keywords like “dog trainers in [your city]” and “how to train a dog” are a great start.

But there’s one other thing you’ll notice about those example keywords. They aren’t just dog-related — they’re also long-tail keywords. That means they’re several words long, as opposed to being single-word terms like “dog.” Long-tail keywords are more specific, meaning they’re better at reaching your precise audience (and they come with less competition).

2. Earn reputable backlinks

Another vital part of SEO involves links. If you want users to visit a particular page (and if you want that page to rank higher in search results), you’ll want other pages to link to it. You can kick off that process by using plenty of internal links, where you link between different pages on your own site.

But you’ll also want to earn some links to your content from other websites. Those links are called backlinks. What you really want are backlinks from reputable, dog-related websites. When Google sees a reputable site in your industry linking to you, it will assume that your site is reputable as well. That means it will rank you higher in search results.

So, how do you earn backlinks? Well, the simplest way is to find some authoritative websites out there that focus on dogs (or dog training, specifically) and look for broken or missing links on those sites. When you find some, you can contact the site owners and recommend that they replace those links with fresh ones to pages on your site.

3. Optimize your page speeds

No one likes to visit a website that takes forever to load. That’s particularly true of dog owners whose canine companions are currently urinating on the carpet while they desperately search for someone to train them out of it! They want to find a trainer fast, and they don’t have time for slow-loading sites.

For that reason, you’ll want to make sure your site loads quickly. But there’s another (arguably more important) reason — Google will penalize your site in rankings if it has issues loading. Optimizing your page speeds is essential to improving your dog trainer SEO campaigns.

You can improve your page speeds by:

• Caching web pages
• Limiting redirects
• Minifying code
• Compressing images

4. Make your site mobile-friendly

In 2025, most Google searches happen on mobile devices, not on computers. Because of that, websites need to be optimized for mobile to get much traffic. That’s especially true since Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it ranks sites based on their mobile versions — even in searches made on desktop computers.

If you want your site to have any shot at ranking, it needs to be optimized for mobile as well as for desktop. The best way to do that is to use responsive design, which is a type of web design that rearranges the elements on a page to fit the screen where they appear. So, a page on your site would look slightly different on mobile than on desktop.

Here’s an example of a homepage on desktop:

And on mobile:

5. Use HTTPS on your site

No one wants to go somewhere they don’t feel safe, even if that somewhere is a website. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the case for a lot of websites. A lot of sites use a basic HTTP protocol, which isn’t inherently bad, but doesn’t feature a particularly high level of security. For your website, you’ll want to use HTTPS, which is the more secure version of HTTP.

That’s especially true if your website allows users to sign up their dogs for training. No doubt the signup process requires them to input some personal information, and you don’t want them to feel like that information might not be secure. To keep people on your site and encourage signups, use HTTPS.

6. Create a Google Business Profile

Not every dog trainer SEO tactic happens on your website. There are also other places where you can improve your search rankings, with the main one being a Google Business Profile. If you don’t know what a Google Business Profile is, it’s basically an online profile for your company that displays basic info like your location and contact info.

Google Business Profiles are important because they can show up in local 3-packs. What’s a local 3-pack? It’s a set of three business profiles that shows up in response to local business searches. That means that if someone searches “dog trainers near me,” they’re likely to see a set of three dog training business profiles in their area.

If you want to be one of those businesses, you’ll need to set up your profile. Make sure to fill out as much information about your company as you can, including things like:

• Business name
• Hours of operation
• Location
• Photos from your business

7. Track and analyze your results

Finally, no SEO for dog trainers would be complete without monitoring the results of your campaigns. You need to keep up with how your site is ranking, how much traffic you’re getting, and which keywords and pages are driving the most traffic and engagement.

To track that type of info, you can use tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console. These will help you see lots of detailed datapoints about your rankings and traffic. Using that information, you can then reoptimize your campaigns to be more effective. Patch up weak spots in your SEO and look for ways to replicate strong points.

Partner with WebFX to boost your K9 training SEO

The tips on this page are a great start, but there’s still more that goes into SEO for K9 trainers. If you want to build the best SEO campaign you can, your best bet might be to partner with a professional SEO agency like WebFX.

With over 29 years of experience with SEO, we know what it takes to drive successful campaigns and send your site shooting up in rankings. You can partner with us for our K9 training SEO services to earn more revenue in the long term.

Interested in working with WebFX? Just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!

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