Hello, it’s Dr. Meg here to sort the bad from the good dog breeding websites options out there. I really want to help breeders get their breeder website right! I mentor breeders on how to get to the top of the puppy market. But today I’m going to be talking about breeder website options and how to choose a dog breeding website that works. So we’re going to investigate current breeding websites for dogs and test their performance. This will help you figure out the best dog breeding websites for you.
There’s so many confusing options for breeders on which kind of website to create:
- Should I do it myself on Weebly or Wix or GoDaddy website builder?
- Should I get someone else to build it for me?
- Should I join one of those breeder website platforms?
So I’ve done an audit of all of them.
And I’m going to show you exactly how I tested them, so you’ll be able to see which ones actually do work and which do not.
I have seen so many breeders waste years and thousands of dollars taking the wrong road and the wrong option here.
So we’ll also be covering some of the worst breeder website pitfalls that I have seen and common traps and mistakes for breeders trying to choose good dog breeding websites.
Most of us are not tech-savvy so it’s very easy to get sucked into the wrong thing. So let me show you how to choose a breeding website for dogs that actually works to bring enough of the right customers to you!
For the best dog breeder website built for you by Dr Meg visit EliteBreederWebsites.com
The Typical Dog Breeding Website Journey
Now, often what I see is people start with cheap or free dog breeding websites. They’ll persist with that for a while. When it’s clear it’s not working, they’ll either move to a breeder website platform, or they’ll engage a website designer to create their dog breeding website for them [and often spend thousands of dollars]. Unfortunately, a lot of the time this doesn’t get them any better result than the cheap do-it-yourself option did in the first place.
So let’s figure out how to do this right. I’m going to explain how to actually check and see what the performance is of the option you are thinking of!
What Makes Good Dog Breeding Websites?
Good dog breeding websites have one thing in common:
They get you to the top of the Google search engine results when folks are looking for puppies like yours.
The point is, if you want a website to sell puppies on, and prefer those puppies to go to top-end buyers, you have to get in front of their face early.
Top end buyers typically start their journey to their ideal puppy by Googling for information about your breed. So we have to be there on Google at the top of the search engine results so they notice us. And if we are not ranking at the top of Google, then we’re not going to be seen by that particular high-end buyer. That’s why it matters.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to stand out from the crowd on puppy marketplaces. If you are a mediocre breeder of medium to low standard then puppy marketplaces might be the best website to sell puppies on.
But if you are an exceptional breeder and doing a lot more than others do, you really have your heart in it, and you’re dedicated, then puppy marketplaces are a very difficult place for the right kind of buyer to find you and identify you in all that noise.
What About Social Media for Selling Puppies?
Unfortunately, you can be at the top of social media, but it only attracts tire kickers. Some people are teaching breeders, that all they have to do is do lots of videos on YouTube or have lots of social media posts, but unfortunately that is not going to attract the right kind of people.
Think about it: most people go on social media to be entertained and not specifically to buy a puppy. When they come across your post or video they might think, “That’s a really cute puppy.” But only then does the idea occur to them to buy and they get curious about the price.
So you might get a “how-much-are-they” kind of query from social media but not serious qualified buyers.
In fact, one of the breeders who joined my program about six months ago, has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and yet she still needs a good website because that wasn’t doing it for her. Her followers were all over the world and they weren’t typical buyers for her puppies.
And top-end buyers actually do their research on Google. So you’ve got to rank on Google for them to find you.
The Best Dog Breeding Websites Top Google Search
So here’s a bit of information for you. If you appear in top one or two positions on Google search, position one and two each get clicked about 32% of the time. For example, if I Google “Schnauzer Puppies WA” my Facebook page and my website each take position one and two in the search results [see image above].
When you compare that to the bottom four positions on the first page of Google, they only get clicked 3% of the time. So there’s a 10 X difference!
If you’re at the top of Google, you’re likely to get 10 times the number of inquiries as someone at the bottom of page 1.
If you are a one of the best dog breeding websites and rank at the top of Google you push the marketplace websites to sell puppies on down at the bottom. Not only are they now getting clicked just 3% of the time, but once they are clicked, you’re one of maybe 10 to 20 [or even more] breeders, diluting buyer attention even more.
Most Dog Breeding Websites Are TERRIBLE
Even a bad breeding website can rank [at least until a breeder who knows what they’re doing comes along!]. It may simply be the best of a bad lot. The fact is most breeder websites are terrible.
I’ve seen thousands of them. Usually they’re just pretty pictures of puppies and pretty pictures of parent dogs and not much content.
Google is a content engine, so a bad website that’s not set up properly but has some content on it, that’s actually applicable to the breed that they’re selling, can rank. But that will only work for those breeders until good dog breeding websites come along to compete with them and knock them off their perch.
Cheap or Free Dog Breeding Websites
So here we go to the first option, the cheap do-it-yourself option, and there are some pitfalls in this. There are easy DIY drag and drop platforms out there.
Most of the mistakes that come from do-it-yourself dog breeding website platforms is from lack of guidance.
If you don’t have the right guidance, your website can turn out really pretty, but might not work for you if you don’t know what you’re doing. And it’s not that cheap compared to the best dog breeding websites out there. However, it’s better than nothing.
If you don’t have one yet, at least get a website started. Why? Because the website that’s been around for a while is much quicker to turn around and get ranking than one that’s starting from scratch. We’re talking weeks compared to months, and time’s important.
GoDaddy Dog Breeding Website
With GoDaddy, you’d need the Search Engine Optimization option. So you’re looking at about $18 a month and then you’d need Professional email as well, if you want to stand out as a professional person. So that adds $4.50 a month. So what are we looking at, about 22, $23 a month? That’s pretty expensive, but at least it’s easy to set up and you can get started pretty quickly on that.
Wix Breeding Website for Dogs
With the Wix “light” option, they give you a domain that’s free for a year. No branding, $16 a month, pretty cheap.
Weebly Free Dog Breeding Websites
While on Weebly you can create free dog breeding websites, you absolutely need the SSL Security. The Professional level here is the best. Plus it also gets rid of ads, ’cause you don’t really want ads on your website. That’s about $15 AUD or $12 US dollars. And unfortunately, Weebly doesn’t always have proper mobile friendly qualities [sometimes doesn’t look very good on mobile devices].
Common Dog Breeding Website Mistakes
So the sort of mistakes I see over and over again, for people who haven’t got good guidance when they’re doing it themselves, are:
- They don’t have a privacy policy. Google wants to send people to websites that they consider to be a safe place, and if you don’t openly respect people’s privacy by having a privacy policy that Google can crawl on your website, then that’s going to be a negative for you.
- And most websites have way too many photos and that tends to slow the website down. That’s another thing Google looks for. How fast is the website to load? Google knows that people have got pretty short little attention spans, and if a website takes more than a second or two to load, they’re probably going to just bounce out of it. So it does look for fast websites that don’t have loads of photos on there.
- Insufficient content. You absolutely need content. You need information about your breed because Google is an information engine.
- No SEO. Most of the time I see zero use of popular search phrases, which I’ll go into a bit more in a second just to show you and demonstrate what I mean.
- No SSL. And I also see websites all the time that are not secure.
Dog Breeding Website Platforms
So let’s look at some of the breeder website platforms. And I’m not going to identify particular platforms here. I don’t want to point at particular platform providers, but they are real platforms that I’ve only just looked at this week, so you can figure it out for yourself.
What are dog breeding website platforms? They have an easy to use interface and are already set up for dog breeders. All you have to do is just plug your information and images in. As a breeding website for dogs it’s DIY, relatively cheap and the usual mistakes are from lack of guidance.
Dog Breeding Websites Platform 1
So one that I looked at was $19.95 a month US. Drag-and-drop, simple building of the pages. Their sites were secure, which was great, but they got the rest wrong. That’s not really their fault, but because people were left to their own devices and of course they didn’t know what they were doing, so they did the mistakes.
Here’s a typical example:
This was their “showcase site” example. For it’s puppies for sale page the URL was domain.com/nursery. So basically, if someone is looking for puppies and they type the word nursery into Google, well, there’s a chance that this page will rank, but who does that? If someone’s looking for Golden Retriever puppies for example, they’re going to type “Golden Retriever puppies” into Google, aren’t they? They’re not going to type “nursery” in there.
This is a mistake I see over and over. It’s the first thing I check when I go to a website to see if they know what they’re doing. Is their puppy for sale page properly optimized? Here there is no optimization.
And their showcase breeder website example also had way too many photos.
It had no content.
And when I checked its ranking on Google, it was not ranking at all.
So that one didn’t work.
Dog Breeding Websites Platform 2
The next one I looked at was $10 to $20 US a month. Again, you build it.
Their sites were secure, so that was good. But again, the same examples, the same problems. “Our puppies”, instead of “[whatever the breed was] puppies for sale”, the same mistakes over again, and not ranking.
Dog Breeding Website Designers
Typically breeders first try drag-and-drop DIY, then when that fails, going on platforms, but neither work.
So they next decide to “bite the bullet” and pay a website designer sometimes thousands of dollars to create a beautiful website hoping it will work. If you spend all that money, you should end up with a good dog breeding website, yes?
I tested some of the big ones out there, but what I found was, you get a pretty website but you don’t get much actual performance of that website for your dollars. They’re just not optimized enough and they are easy to beat.
How to check website designers to see how good they actually are!
Website designers always leave their name at the bottom of a website, built by great website designs or whatever.
- First look at their website to see if they have testimonials that you can follow in Google to check them out. Or see if they have what they call their showcase customers. So check for that first.
- Now if they’re not there, then Google the name of the website developer in inverted commas on Google and the word puppies. So for example, if the name of the website designer is Great Websites, then you would Google ‘”Great Websites” puppies’ to find the websites where those developers had done their work.
- Then, once you know which websites they are, discard any that are built in the last 6 months because they haven’t had time to work yet, it’s too soon. Brand new websites need at least six months to start working.
- Find out where the breeder in question is located and their most popular breed and then Google it. [You might have to go to their Facebook page or you might have to go looking through their website to see where is this breeder located? What is their main breed?] Once you know that you can go to Google, and say it’s Cocker Spaniel Puppies, Montana, then you can type “Cocker Spaniel Puppies Montana” into Google and see what position on the search engine results Google gives them.
Are they ranking or not? They should be ranking if it worked. If they’re not on the first page of Google, it hasn’t worked. Because it’s easy to beat breeder websites. Most breeder websites are terrible. If you know what you’re doing, you can beat your competition hands down.
See proof Elite Breeder Formula breeder’s websites get to the top of Google.
Dog Breeding Website Designer 1
So website designer 1 charges $4,000 to create your website, $250 to put a page up, and $575 a year to maintain your website. If you stop paying, you lose your website.
Now when I checked, I found their sites were secure, their sites had privacy policy, which was awesome and better than most I looked at. Their sites, however, got the rest wrong.
And there’s something to be said here too, is that when you create a website, it should be your property rather than a website designer having control over it. If you stop paying them, you lose your website? That’s just not fair, especially when you’ve paid $4,000 to get it set up. It should be yours! Anyway, that’s an aside.
So here’s their first “showcase” breeder site that I checked:
Again the URL ended with “available puppies” instead of mentioning “Cavalier King Charles puppies”. And it’s actually quite an ugly site, just lots of photographs, not enough information. Very, very ugly. And didn’t work. Not in the first three pages of Google search results I checked.
The second one they put as one of their “showcase” breeder sites:
Again, no optimization, it’s just got “available puppies” not anything that matches the words people put into Google when they’re searching for those puppies.
Not on the first page of Google search results either.
Dog Breeding Website Designer 2
So then I looked at a different designer. This one was a lot more reasonable in price. They only charged $70 to create your website and then it costs $35 a month subscription. Again, if you stopped paying, you lost your website.
Their sites were secure, but had no privacy policy plus they got the rest wrong.
This is one of their “showcase” breeder websites:
I think you know by now that the phrase “upcoming litters”. That’s not going to help anyone to find this page, but they did manage to get to the bottom of page two. So that’s about position number 20, which would do very little to help this breeder actually get any customers.
Dog Breeding Website Designer 4
Designer 4, was $99 to $124 a month if you built it. Undisclosed money if they built it.
Their sites were secure, but no privacy policy, no optimization, too many photos, not enough content, and the content was not optimized. So pretty bad.
Poor you guys, I mean, what are you supposed to do when these are the choices that you’ve been given out there? It’s really difficult, isn’t it?
I encourage you to go and check how your own site is going, and also the sites which have been built by providers and developers that you are thinking of using just to make sure they actually do work!
Good Dog Breeding Websites that Actually Work!
- I want to show you results from my Elite Breeder Formula students so you can see what actually works out there.
- I’m going to tell you what they all did differently
- I’m going to invite you to a free online class for more information if you want to learn more.
So these are the Google rankings our Elite Breeders are achieving:
How the BEST Dog Breeding Websites are Made
So this is how you create a website if you’re an elite breeder:
- First, you’ve got to choose the right website host. It will cost you about $7 US a month. Some are cheaper, some are more expensive. [We help you choose the right host and what to look out for].
- Then you choose a theme that you like. That can be free up to about 70 bucks.
- Then you mock it up with a clear job description. You must have crystal clear instructions for your developer because if you do, you can get it built for around $50 US in seven days, which is really cheap [and a lot better than $4,000. Right? And the website is YOURS]
- And then we help you learn how to create the right content and
- Optimize your website.
If you’ve already got a website, you can get started straight on creating the content and optimizing!
How long will it take to be a good dog breeding website you can sell puppies on?
- If you don’t have a website yet and you’re starting from scratch… you’re looking at about six to eight months to start getting to the top of Google.
- If you’ve already got a website that has been around a few years [even if it’s bad] you’ll get a turnaround in six to eight weeks. Definitely reason to get a website started. Though, I should caution you, that choosing the right domain name helps a lot there, and you might need help with that.
To summarize…
- If you want to have a waiting list of the kind of buyers happy to pay to be there so you can breed with confidence, then you absolutely need a great breeding website for your puppies. One that actually works!
You need other things too; good dog breeding website’s not the only ingredient for success:
- You also need to look after your customers. And to communicate well with them and provide good customer service.
- And you’ve got to add the right value to your puppies. Your puppies must be the best that money can buy. There are things breeders can do, which are so easy and cheap [or even free], that can make our puppies worth so much more to the right kind of buyers.
We’ve got to make our puppies blow our competition away, and have a great website that works, look after our customers, and communicate the value of our puppies really well.
Now, if you want to learn how to do that for free, I’ve got a Free Breeder Masterclass that you can take any time. It’s on demand, and only takes one hour to watch. I look forward to seeing some of you there.
And if you would like to learn more and get more help from me, then you can at the end of the Masterclass book some time with me. Those Breeder Strategy calls are where we can look at your website and social media, have a look at your business, and identify the best strategies to help you get the success that you deserve.
To your success
Dr Meg
