If your horse business has an equine website that you are interested in optimizing in 2021 then the following basic insights of your site’s performance are a great place to start.

It’s always easier to improve your SEO score if you are aware of which parameters you should prioritize.  In this blog, I will address two free tools that you can easily apply to perform an analysis of your site. If you’re brand new to SEO I do suggest that you start reading here before going any further with this particular post.

Google strives to always present its users with the best search results. If your equestrian website takes a day or 3 to load, Google will rank your horse business’ website at the very end of the search query results. However, do not fret as Google has its very own tool that can help you gain insight into where your website is ranked – what’s even better is that they offer this tool for free.

What is this wonder of technical magic you might ask?

It’s called PageSpeed Insights.

For the sake of learning by doing let’s do a quick test of a website for a prominent equestrian apparel brand:

 As you can see in the above result, Google has estimated that the front-page scores 13 out of 100 possible points, hence this score is not that great. This result will in turn also affect the page’s SEO score. So, if Google products that are related to this particular equestrian brand, there is a chance that the loading time will ruin the search query ranking results for this particular equestrian brand.

In other words, this horse business has a disadvantage, and competitors with better scores will likely be placed higher in the search results.

However, Google does not merely “point fingers”, they are quite helpful and include an explanation of where the challenges of this equestrian website are placed.

This equestrian website applies a lot of scripts that take time to load and that is quite understandable really. After all, as a visitor to this site, I have to be able to choose a particular category within the broad variety of equestrian apparel and view details as the priority.

But according to Google, it takes a full 13, 1 second before the website is fully loaded and gone to ´idle status´.

I had to double-check and analyze again just to see if this was correct, but I got a 12,3-second score from my 2nd try.

I ask you to try to put yourself in the position of the visitor to this particular site – I am sure you’’ agree that this is way too long a time. The graphics on the page and the basic functions are loaded continuously so although it’s a “heavy” page, it can be used. But a score that is in the range of 13 seconds is far too low for this caliber of a website.

This equestrian business could better their performance by looking into which particular scripts need adjusting.

 Improve your Horse business’ page speed

Few horse businesses own a complicated website similar to this equestrian apparel site. If you attempt this test with a simpler equestrian website, you will usually find that it is the size of the images that are the main reason for slowing down the page.

 However, this is an easy fix. You can easily compress images and thumbnails and ensure that the image dimensions are the same size as they should be displayed on your horse business’ website. If you do not seek to amend these flaws you set yourself up for spending space and loading time on data that is redundant in every way – needless to say that this will also harm your overall customer experience.

 If your horse business’s website is operating on a WordPress site or other similar one-click solutions you can apply several plugins like WP Rocket, which will help your content to be loaded in an appropriate order and that will cut some of the waiting time off your score.

Measure the popularity of your horse business

 Just how popular is your horse business?

One of the parameters of SEO is how often other equestrian websites refer to your page with links, and how heavily the referrer is weighted by Google. This means that when Google crawls the internet and discovers that there are links to your website on other websites – such as a blog, you receive some points.

Links like these are called inbound links, which refer to external links pointing to the web page of your horse business.

Just how high these are weighed by Googled depends on the domain authority of the sender.

As an example - The United States Equestrian Federation has many visitors every single day, which gives them authority as a domain. If pages like theirs link to your website, there are more points to pick up than if the local pony club refers to your page in a news article.

To gain an insight into this part of your horse business’ digital presence I recommend the tool Moz Link Explorer.

You can ask Moz to analyze a domain or a simple page and get their assessment of how it scores. Now, the readers that are quick here will already have learned that when I choose to link to Moz in this post it counts as an inbound link in their SEO score.

Let’s try it shall we?

I’ll ask Moz to look at the same equestrian brand that I used in the above example for PageSpeed:

In the above example, Moz estimates that the equestrian apparel company has a domain authority of 55. The page that I inserted is again just the front page, which has a page authority of 50 – i,e 5 points lower than the domain: www.equestrianapparelbrand.com.

Now, this, in turn, could indicate that when other websites of a certain horse business link to the equestrian apparel company, it also happens through links pointing elsewhere than to the front page:

This you can conclude by looking at where the links come from. Reddit and in particular usef.org have high domain authorities. 

When usef.org lists their sponsors or has an article it makes sense that they have linked to the specific page on the equestrian apparel brand in question. Therefore, the front page is sometimes skipped and does not receive points in the analysis, while the points count towards the account of the domain, which in turn covers the entire website structure behind www.equestrianapparelbrand.com.

Moz is a free tool but it does require you to create an account. This will allow you to analyze up to 10 domains or pages per month as a free user.

So, to wrap this blog up - If you’re looking to create more inbound links in 2021 to up the SEO score of your horse business it’s time to get cracking!

A great tip to doing this is to ask other equestrian websites, which your horse business may do business with to insert a link to your equestrian website if they mention you online – the mention alone is not enough, you need that link!

Questions?

Feel free to comment below send me an email, I’d love to hear from you!