If you want to be successful in the equine industry, it goes without saying that you have to be passionate about horses. We tend to find that most horse people are brilliant communicators, passionate about sharing their equine knowledge.
However, we often find that there’s a huge disconnect within the equestrian industry when it comes to crafting an effective online equestrian marketing strategy to leverage business.
 
We’ll explain why SEO is a crucial building block, in your online equestrian marketing strategy and how it can help you to improve your equine business’ ranking in search engines leading to increased traffic, brand awareness and last but not least increased sales.

What is SEO?

You’ve probably heard or read the term for search Engine Optimisation before. However, we know it can be a real task to keep up with digital marketing terms  - which is why we’ve outlined a simple description here.
 
Why is SEO important for your equine business?
 
SEO can help your business to gain more online traction by ensuring brand visibility, driving more traffic (visitors) to your website, increase lead generation and help you drive more sales online.
 
Brand new to SEO? 
 
Not to worry, here are three easy initial steps that will help you to get started on SEO to ensure your equestrian services and products are discoverable online.
 
 

Define your audience and their needs

Knowing your target audience is an essential part of your online equestrian marketing strategy. If you don’t know the main needs and interests of who your equine business aims to attract to your website your online presence becomes obsolete.
 
Take a minute to sit down and outline an overview of your ideal customer. 
What do they want? Where are their reservations or self-made convictions about their certain needs?, What are their interests? And finally, how can your equine business be the answer to their needs?
 
Once you have an insight on who your targeted audience is it will be much easier to proceed with the next step, which involves discovering the relevant keywords to implement on your website.

Targeted Keywords

Discovering specific keywords which are relevant to search queries revolving around your business offerings and your target audience is the next step in your online equestrian marketing strategy.
 
Conducting a keyword research can take time, but it is well worth it.
For instance, if I am a breeder and trainer of dressage horses I would want to discover the specific words and phrases which are typed in search engines to implement on my website.

Once you’ve determined which keywords are relevant for your equestrian business, you’re ready for the next step.

 
Craft relevant content

Now that you know who your ideal customer is and which keywords they are typing into the search engine you are ready to start optimizing the content of your website.
 
Search engines frequently visit sites to index content that is relevant enough to supply users with the right search results that match their query. 
 
In order to be ranked in the search engine’s index your content should be useful, compelling and of relevancy to your target audience and you should include the specific keywords you picked out in your research.
 
Search engines love fresh content.  The more content you can produce by for instance implementing a blog on your website, the more you ‘train’ search engines to visit and index your site for certain search queries that could lead more potential customers to your business online.

Key takeaway

This was a simplified explanation of why SEO is an important part of your online equestrian marketing efforts.  
There is a more technical part of SEO, but we’ll leave that for another future blog post.
 
What we do want you to remember from this post is:

• SEO is the practice of ensuring your website is ranked in search engine results.

• Understanding your customer is key to conduct an insightful keyword research.

• Creating relevant and quality content on a regular basis will help you ensure your ranking in search engine results.