If you are thinking of starting a pet products e-commerce business in India, this study would be immensely helpful for you.

1. PET SUPPLIES INDUSTRY IN INDIA
Data Insights & Growth Strategy

2. BASICS
[See Annexure for understanding Search Intent and Research Methodology]
We’ll be focusing on only the keywords with Buying Research, Clear Buying, and
Navigational intent while drawing the insights. Information intent keywords would
be used to generate ideas for content only.
The ‘average monthly search volume’ metric is provided by Google Adwords. It is
not the actual number of searches performed in a month, but rather an indicative
number and should be treated as such.
This study covers 1480 buying and navigational intent keywords with total monthly
search volume of 351,370 which indicates a healthy market demand.

3. DATA INSIGHTS

4. Demand for Pet Supplies has Grown 3X
● 3X Jump in Demand => A Growing Industry
from ~120K to ~350K within 4 years
● Slight seasonality - minor peaks in March & July
● Dog, fish, bird and small animal supplies follow the same trend of 3X growth
Source: Google Adwords Time Period: Sep 15 to Aug 19

5. Demand for Cat Supplies has Grown 4.5X
● 4.5X Jump in Demand => Faster Growth than Overall Pet Supplies
from ~5K to ~22.5K within 4 years
● BUT - volumes are quite low
Doesn’t make sense to start a business in cat niche only
Source: Google Adwords Time Period: Sep 15 to Aug 19

6. 80% of Target Audience is on Mobile
● Think “Mobile First”
Instead of designing desktop website first
and adapting it for mobile
● Mobile App might be great
The audience is there, but your app needs
to have high utility and engagement

7. Highest Demand is for Dog & Fish Products
If we compare demand across popular
pets’ species:
● Dog Products = High Competition
Almost all pet supplies website offers dog
products
● Fish Products = Low Competition
Very few websites offer fish supplies despite
the huge volume
*The data for Dog and Cat products in this chart is
rationalized as per ANNEXURE-1

8. ‘Fish Tanks & Bowls’ has higher demand than ‘Dog Food’
● Comparing top product
groups across all pet
species ->
● Dog Product Groups
Dominate the List
As expected!
Detailed analysis in coming slides

9. INSIGHTS FOR DOG PRODUCTS

10. Dog Food makes up for ~50% of total Dog Products demand
● “Vegetarian/Vegan dog
food” should be a
sub-category on your
website
600+ searches and not covered by
majority of current players
● Next sections dig deeper
into the ‘other products’ to
understand the demand for
various product groups and
categories.

11. ‘Collar, Harness, Leash & Name Tags’ - Highest Demand
● Other than Dog Food, these
are the product groups with
high demand
● Most current players focus
primarily on food. So there
is good scope in these
items!

12. In-demand Dog Product Categories
⭐
● ‘Clothes’, ‘Bed’, ‘Name Tags’, ‘Tick & Flea
Medicine’, ‘Cage’, and ‘Deworming
Medicine’ are the top categories with
promising potentials that are not
offered by most websites as of yet
Planning your pet website’s category
structure?
Start with analyzing the drill-down of all
product categories across all product
groups within each species!

13. German Shepherd is the most popular Dog Breed
● Your website must have a “Shop By
Breed” section
● Highlight these top breeds on the
homepage itself and have dedicated
landing pages for each.

14. INSIGHTS FOR FISH PRODUCTS

15. Fish Tanks & Bowls is ~77% of total Fish Products Demand
It is a massive low-competition opportunity for your new e-commerce business!

16. Why such high demand for Fish Tanks & Bowls??
We had already seen earlier that it has the highest demand across product groups of
all pet species. The reason???
Source: http://www.alternatehealing.net/
● Fish Tanks are believed to bring
wealth and luck as per Feng Shui
and Vastu Shastra!!
● Both highly followed by Indians
● Your Fish products landing pages
should cover info from Vastu and
Feng Shui perspective to rank
higher and sell more!

17. Fish Accessories go hand-in-hand with Fish Tanks & Bowls
Aquarium accessories like
filter, heater, lights, pump etc
have decent volumes too.

18. “Flowerhorn” is the most in-demand fish breed
● Adding breed-specific
fish products would help
us acquire users who are
searching by breed
name.
● These users are ahead in
the buying cycle as they
know what they are
looking for and are easier
to convert in to
customers.

19. Top Brands for Fish Products
● Users with pet fish are
specifically looking for
these brands while
searching on Google
● These users are ahead in
the buying cycle as they
know what they are
looking for and are easier
to convert in to
customers.

20. INSIGHTS FOR CAT PRODUCTS

21. Cat Food makes up for ~50% of total Cat Products demand
● Cat products have a
significantly smaller market
as compared to dog & fish
as seen earlier
● Next sections dig deeper
into the ‘other products’ to
understand the demand for
various product groups and
categories.

22. ‘Cat house, bed & furniture’: ~2X search volume of ‘cat toys’

23. Top Product Categories of Cat Products (except food)
● Search volume for cat
product categories are
generally quite low.

24. INSIGHTS FOR BIRD PRODUCTS

25. Bird Food makes up for ~65% of total Bird Products demand
● Bird products is again a
small vertical with just
13,320 total search volume.
● This is ~10% of that of fish
products.

26. Bird Product categories except food
● The only other significant
bird product group after
food is Bird Cage at 3370
average monthly searches
● Bird cage accessories like
Bird Stand, Bird Feeder, and
Bird Toys would make up
for good accompaniments
to bird cage

27. Love Birds is the most popular bird breed

28. INSIGHTS FOR OTHER PETS PRODUCTS
Rabbits, Turtles, Guinea Pigs, Hamsters

29. Food makes up for ~80% of total demand
● Combined search volume adds up to just 11,560 even smaller than that of Birds
● Among other products, Rabbit Cage stands apart with 1720 monthly searches

30. COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

31. Top-20 competitors
Click thumbnail to see full image
● Amazon India leads with 21% share, which is not
a surprise.
● Youtube follows with 9%, and gets most traffic
from “buying research” intent keywords.
● Petsmart and Petco are on 6th
and 7th
positions
despite being international websites.
● Petsworld, Marshalls, and Headsupfortails are the
only Indian niche-websites for pet products in the
top 10. Pupkart and Dogspot are also not far
behind at 13th
and 16th
positions

32. Brand Searches = Brand Awareness = Better SEO
● When a user directly searches for a
store brand instead of a product, it
means they are loyal to it, or atleast
have heard of it. This is a result of
brand awareness and excellent
service.
● Having higher brand awareness
directly impacts SEO performance
too and is a big factor in getting
more organic traffic from even the
non-branded searches.

33. GROWTH STRATEGY

34. 1. Enhance Breadth and Depth of Catalog
● In order to broaden the top of our user funnel and get more traffic from first time
users, we need to offer a much more comprehensive catalog.
● Plan catalog structure (product groups and categories) as per insights from
above slides. [contact for drill-down of data for comprehensive planning]
● Most websites’ catalog is currently dominated with Dog Food & Cat Food, which are the only product
groups that have a decent depth with variety of products.
● Dog and Cat products apart from Food are also present, but there is little depth and has a big scope of
improvement.
● Fish, Bird and Small Animal products are virtually non-existent.
● This means that we can’t directly compare a new website focusing on only food products with any of
the top competitors like Pets World India or Heads Up for Tails because they are much bigger stores.

35. 2. Optimize for Search Engines as well as Users
● User should be able to find what they were looking for, spend time on the page
and interact with the website.
Search algorithms, especially of Google, have evolved a lot over the years.
Merely stuffing keywords everywhere in the landing pages and creating backlinks on directories and
article submission sites doesn’t work anymore.
We still do need to target keywords in meta titles, meta descriptions and product description, but that is
just one of the factors
● Outstanding UX is a must
Site Search, Navigation, Fonts, Rich Images, Page Speed etc are all critical!

36. 2.1 Keyword-URL Mapping
● Identify which keywords are important for you, for which you want to rank.
● Ensure that each set of keywords is targeted on a unique URL (landing page)
only.
● If same keywords are targeted on multiple URLs, ensure that the redundant URLs
are removed and only one competing landing page is present.
● If important keywords are not targeted on any landing page, then we'll need to
create a comprehensive landing page for the same.
● Ensure keyword optimization on these landing pages.
● Keywords with Clear Buying intent (and some buying research intent keywords
too) should be targeted on the ecommerce pages – homepage, collection pages
and product pages. Keywords with Buying Research and Information intent
should be targeted in blog articles and videos.

37. 2.2 Create Helpful Rich Content for Landing Pages
● Let’s take the example of PetsWorld.
● Their homepage, category pages, collections and product pages - all have rich
content present. Their blog is also much broader with actually helpful content.
● This helps them rank on highly broad keywords like "boxer dog price in India" (for
which they rank 1).
● Ranking on such keywords is not directly helpful in increasing sales, but the
more a website ranks on a breadth of keywords, the more it becomes relevant to
Google for ranking on other related keywords in the same industry

38. 2.3 Ensure technical well-being of website
● Remove Content Duplication [implement proper canonical tags]
Duplicate pages (same content, different URLs) are a major issue as they create “cannibalism”. Each set
of keywords should be mapped to a unique URL.
● Optimize Internal linking for “Shallow Click Depth”
Every page on the website should be accessible to a user within 3 clicks from the homepage. It can be
achieved by internal linking of pages via collections like “related products” on each product page.
● Any coverage issues reported in Webmaster to be heeded timely
These are issues like “URL indexed, but not submitted in sitemap” etc. You need to take care of it
through weekly reviews of coverage health. Based on this, ensure that the sitemap and robots file are
up-to-date.

39. 3. Create brand awareness with Emotional Connect
● There are around 400 monthly searches for "petsworld" and "pets world india".
For "heads up for tails", the number is 2900.
● Higher brand searches signify brand awareness and are directly helpful in
acquiring new customers through SEO besides customer loyalty and retention, of
course.
● We need to give a strong reason to our customers to keep coming straight to our
website and continue buying from us or just learn about new ways to take care
of their pets.
● A simple thing that Heads Up for Tails does for emotional connect:
10% discount to owners of Indie dogs! That’s enough reason for Indie dog parents to order everything
from HUFT instead of searching on Google.

40. CONTENT STRATEGY

41. CONTENT IS STILL KING
● We have been talking about only the buying intent and navigational intent search
queries in this report till now. That doesn’t mean that information intent
keywords are not important.
● In fact, if we are able to satisfy a user who’s searching for information by
providing them exactly what they need, they are more likely to become a higher
LTV customer.
● Similar to a keyword-URL map for buying intent keywords, we need to target
information intent keywords on landing pages. The difference is that instead of
product/category pages, these will be targeted on content pages.
● Content pages would be of two types - critical content and general content

42. CRITICAL CONTENT TO BE PUT ON WEBSITE
● Search queries like: german shepherd diet, german shepherd food list, german shepherd
puppy diet indian, german shepherd food chart, german shepherd homemade food, german
shepherd puppy diet, gsd puppy diet need to be answered in a “German Shepherd
Care Guide”.
● This would not be blog article, instead it would be a proper landing page on the
main website. Petsworld has made some guides like this, but they are directed
more towards buying a new pet in the first place (not products).
● Your guides should provide all the help to the user like: what to feed, what not to
feed, diet chart, nutrition required (protein, fats, micronutrients, etc), exercise
required, and so on.
● And at the same time subtly recommend some of your products.

43. CRITICAL CONTENT - EXAMPLE
For example: [completely fictional]
“German Shepherds require 2 hours of moderate exercise, like, walks everyday. Since
they are large in size, their protein requirements are high.
They are not prone to get fat, so homemade food with oil, ghee and carbs can be
given to them. However, to ensure their protein requirements are met, protein
supplements are recommended.
Here are some protein supplements available in our store: product-1, product-2 etc.
Alternatively, you can try XYZ dog food which is created by expert pet nutritionists
specifically for German Shepherd breed.
Here’s the link to learn more about this product [link to the product]. ….. GSDs are
meat lovers. Here’s a vegetarian food guide for GSDs:”

44. FIND AS MANY TOPICS FOR CRITICAL CONTENT AS YOU CAN
● Similar guides should be made for other popular breeds of Dogs, cats, birds,
fishes and so on.
● Similar guides can also be made for products/care other than food and nutrition.
EXAMPLES:
1. Training guide for Labradors to cover these keywords: labrador dog training,
labrador training, how to train a labrador, how to train labrador dog, labrador training videos,
how to train a labrador puppy, labrador puppy training and suggest training products like
feeding bowls, toilet training, leashes, muzzles and so on.
2. Grooming guide for Labradors – (talk about tick and flea, what grooming can
be done at home, frequency and so on)
● This should be the first priority in creating content.

45. BLOG ARTICLES
Here, everything goes. Examples:
● What to do if my dog has diarrhea?
● Why dogs eat grass?
● Rabies symptoms in dogs
● Vaccination schedule for dogs
● Gifts for dog lovers

46. BLOG PLANNING
To get the most value out of a blog, we need to follow some basic guidelines.
Create a reader persona
Understand the aim of having a blog
● Merely having a blog just because everyone else does is not enough
● The aim of blog is to increase the top of the funnel by creating landing pages for research-intent
keywords.
● Each article should resonate with the thinking and pain-points of our target audience and offer them
great solutions to create engagement.
Plan a category structure for your blog
Create a posting schedule
Quality > Quantity
Less articles, but high value

47. BLOG PLANNING - continued...
Have experts write or review your content
● Google only ranks content that it deems to be written by a qualified ‘person’
● Thanks to the ‘Medic’ algorithm update that gives high value to ‘E-A-T’ of a website
Write insightful articles only
● “Top 10 Tips for XX” or “10 Reasons Why Your ..” type of listicles don’t help
● Try to publish original research, surveys, industry-insights, and other such unique content that adds
value to users as well as the industry as a whole
General Guidelines for Writing an Article
● A typical blog must be of atleast 1000 words. However, great blogs are usually 2000+ words.
● Try to use the suggested keywords atleast 2-3 times each, but not forcefully.
● Use short sentences and each paragraph must not be more than 2-3 sentences.
● Articles should be readable on a mobile device.
● Keywords present in section headings and titles have higher weightage.
● Use images/GIFs/Videos to make the content media rich.
● Divide the content into smaller sections for easy readability
● Try to answer the user’s question in the first paragraph itself to earn a position in 0 results

48. WRAPPING IT UP
There’s still a lot left to be taken care of but everything can’t be stuffed into a
presentation.
You can contact me for help/queries/suggestions
Contact Details:
Piyush Udai
piyush@webphantoms.com
+91-9818972938

49. THANK YOU!

50. ANNEXURES

51. ANNEXURE-1: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Step-1: DATA MINING
First we need to identify relevant keywords for our business that people are
searching on Google. The category structure of our website and competitors’
websites gives us the initial ‘seed’ keywords, like: dog accessories, chew toys etc.
These seed keywords are then used to generate the ‘long tail’ keywords with the help
of Google Adwords, like: dog accessories online, cute dog accessories, etc.
This is a long and iterative process, which finally gives us a comprehensive list of
relevant keywords and their corresponding metrics, which are:
● Average Monthly Search Volume - Higher search volume indicates more demand
● Cost Per Click (CPC) - Higher CPC indicates higher commercial value
● Competition - Higher competition indicates more difficult to rank for

52. ANNEXURE-1: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Step-2: DATA CLEANING
Once we have the raw data in an Excel sheet, the next step is to remove the keywords
that are vague, irrelevant, or are too broad to have any commercial value. In Your
website’s case, we removed all search queries that were made by users who don’t
own any pet as of now.
For example: Pitbull Fight, Persian Cat, Cute Cat Videos, Tibetan Mastiff etc.
Though such keywords have huge search volumes but the audience is far behind in
the purchase cycle.

53. ANNEXURE-1: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Step-3: MAKING SENSE OF THE DATA
Next step is to group keywords together on the basis of common factors. We have
grouped keywords on the basis of following attributes:
● Species (Dog, Cat, Hamster)
● Breed (Labrador, Arowana, Cockatiel) – subset of Species
● Brand (Pedigree, Heads up for tails)
● Product Group (Dog Medicine, Aquarium Accessories & Equipment)
● Product Category (Dog Deworming Medicine, Aquarium Filter) – subset of
Product Group

54. ANNEXURE-1: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Step-4: DATA RATIONALIZATION (where required)
A lot of users searched for general queries like "pet food online", "buy pet
accessories", “pet collars” etc.
Such searches would usually be made for dogs and cats. They can be for small
animals too, but the percentage would be negligible. However, they are certainly not
for fish and birds.
So we can attribute the keyword search volumes of such searches to dog and cat
searches based on their relative weights to get a clearer picture. The weights come
out to be 0.86 for dogs and 0.14 for cats based on the data.
Example: The product group “Pet Food” has 58780 total searches, while “Dog Food” and “Cat
Food” have 59550 and 12800 respectively. The rationalized total searches for “Dog Food” would
be (59550 + 0.86*58780) = 70400 and for “Cat Food” would be (12800 + 0.14*58780) = 14570

55. ANNEXURE-2: UNDERSTAND USER’S SEARCH INTENT
Search Intent signifies where the user who has performed the search is in the buying
lifecycle.
We will mark-up each search query in our database with the most appropriate intent
out of the following 4 types of search intents.
● Information Intent
● Buying Research Intent
● Clear Buying Intent
● Navigational Intent

56. ANNEXURE-2: UNDERSTAND USER’S SEARCH INTENT
1. INFORMATION INTENT
If a user searches for "cat food habits", or “aquarium tank designs” they are just
seeking information and don’t intend to buy anything anytime soon.
However, they may buy in the future as they are mostly pet owners, and hence
relevant audience.
Such users should be focused through blog articles, videos, and other types of
content that provide them requisite information.
They are usually high in numbers but only a small percentage of such users convert
into customers.

57. ANNEXURE-2: UNDERSTAND USER’S SEARCH INTENT
2. BUYING RESEARCH INTENT
Search keywords like "best dog food" or "royal canin vs pedigree" indicate that they
have decided to buy dog food, but are unsure of which one to purchase. Other
indicators of buying research intent are suffixes/prefixes like “popular”, “vs”, “or”,
“cost”, “price” etc.
The right kind of communication on dedicated landing pages can convert them into
buying customers.

58. ANNEXURE-2: UNDERSTAND USER’S SEARCH INTENT
3. CLEAR BUYING INTENT
Users searching for "fish tank online" or “royal canin maxi junior 15kg” have made up
their mind for the purchase and just need the right deal for buying. These users have
clear buying intent and should be targeted actively for converting into customers.
Ads should always be targeted on these keywords only.
Buying Research intent and Clear Buying intent can be grouped together as Buying
intent keywords.

59. ANNEXURE-2: UNDERSTAND USER’S SEARCH INTENT
4. NAVIGATIONAL INTENT
Users don’t always remember the actual address of the website. So they just type in
the name of the website on Google and get the website as the first result.
These keywords are the name of brand stores like Your website, Pets World India, Tail
Lovers Company etc. and are a good measure of how popular a particular store is.