[Case Study] Peter’s Pet Shop: How reviews result in SEO value

Industry: Pet Shop
Headquarters: Cape Town, South Africa
Result: SEO value and brand awareness

The Company

Peter’s Pet Shop is a fictitious business that was created by Hellopeter’s marketing team to demonstrate how generating online reviews directly boosts Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) results. 

We believe demonstrating how something works is far more powerful than merely telling you, or asking you to believe us. The goal of this case study is to equip you with tangible evidence of the efficacy of the Hellopeter for Business Platform. 

Our findings demonstrate that using online reviews to positively impact SEO is not only effective but easy too.

The Challenge

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of our experiment, here’s a quick explanation of how Google (and other search engines) ranks online content. 

When deciding how to rank search results, Google looks at several different variables. Amongst others, these factors include the number of visits your website gets, the frequency and rate at which new content is created, and the click-through rate (CTR) to your website. 

The last variable is an important one, as your CTR tells Google the information on your website is valuable to your audience. Google will, therefore, rank this information (i.e.your website) higher than other search results.

It’s easy to see why creating and managing an SEO strategy can be tricky! What’s more, the traditional “hire an agency approach” often takes a fair amount of time before you see any satisfactory results. 

Many business owners are of the belief that SEO is something best left to the experts. We want to demystify the process and ultimately enable you to improve the online visibility of your businesses through your website (without needing to pay a hefty sum).

The Solution

Hellopeter receives 800,000 visitors and 20,000 reviews per month. As a result, Google sees our website as an information authority when it comes to customer service, products, and general services. Therefore,it ranks our website on the first page of Google search results in these specific category searches. 

In order for us to get Peter’s Pet Shop to rank highly in Google, all we had to do was write reviews, post them on our platform, and wait a few days for Google to index the new content on Hellopeter.

*As a business subscriber, you will receive a toolbox to help you collect, respond and display reviews your reviews.

The Result

Where there was previously no online presence for Peter’s Pet Shop, Hellopeter provided the business with a platform that made Peter’s Pet Shop easily discoverable. Once we started capturing reviews and responding to them, we started to see Peter’s Pet Shop slowly climb the search results pages and start to rank on page one for search queries such as ‘pet shop Cape Town’, ‘pet shop reviews’ and ‘pet shop product reviews Cape Town’ (amongst other keyword searches).

Without being linked to an authoritative platform (like Hellopeter), businesses can spend the best part of a year (and longer), as well as a lot of money, in a bid to achieve the same results. 

Thanks to the fact that Hellopeter is already an established and trusted online review platform, businesses big and small are able to “piggyback” off of our ranking, and get seen by millions of potential consumers.

Reviews on Hellopeter have helped over one million consumers make better choices. Had an experience you’d like to tell us about? Leave us a review here.