How Farmers Dog Reaches 500,000 People (Each Month) For FREE

In this article, we look at The Farmers Dog.

You'll learn:

How the site advertises to people for free.
a nice way to add internal links that hook people into clicking.
how I find out a websites content frameworks (in minutes)

Let's dive in.

What's The Farmers Dog?

The Farmer's Dog website is an online platform dedicated to providing high-quality and personalized dog food to pet owners. They use human-grade ingredients that are delivered to your door.

The business is estimated to be valued at $ 1 billion and has served over 100,000,000 meals.

What's Their SEO Like?

The site generates 582,000 monthly visitors from 135,000 keywords, and they have a DR of 72 and a UR of 30.

Fuelled by 11,500 backlinks from 3800 referring domains.

OK, so now the basics are out of the way. Let's get to the meat of the case study (sorry...bad joke).

Page Growth and Link Growth = Traffic Growth

When I look at a website and see traffic, links and page growth like this, I know that the site is doing good work.

And for DTC brands, information tends to be the fastest weapon for growth.

With 89% of their website based on information, we can see that they have set on their mission, to provide helpful content to dog owners.

But what does this look like in reality?

The site has over 500 pages of content geared towards dog advice, much of around digestive health for dogs.

Like this post.

The content does exactly what it says on the tin.

It answers the query and certainly appears to be optimised for voice search and featured snippets.

There's a lot to be said for getting to the point with content.

But this site does something quite simple yet clever in their posts.

Internal Linking in Plain Sight

Internal linking isn't anything new, the idea is pretty simple. Adding link in your content to pages of importance in your website can increase traffic to those pages and therefore rankings.

But what if we turned this around and put the user first?

What would internal linking for a site user look like?

I only saw the above on a single page, but loved it straight away.

Imagine the situation. You end up on a page about dog behaviour and inside the content there's a list of other behaviours you might be interested in.

It's easy to see how this could encourage 'stickiness' to the website.

Not sure why they haven't used this more often as I really liked it.

But hey ho, my jobs to spot interesting things and bring them to your attention.

Moving swiftly on.

Why Content Frameworks Matter

When I do SEO strategy for a site, one of the core areas I look into is content frameworks.

I'm looking at the types of frameworks that are used by a website to grow.

As we can see, this site has several.

Care guides (breed related)
Health concerns
Can dogs eat (Q+A).
How to guides

There are probably a few to look at, but how I do this is just looking at the URL report in ahrefs top pages.

URLs give a lot of information away, because they tend to be keyword focused, as such a quick scan tells me what the SEO's/ content heads were trying to achieve.

And as I've said, this website is actually focused on helping dog owners with their issues.

But how does this play out with marketing science and brand growth?

High Information Fitness Matters for DTC Brands

If you're a DTC brand, you need to get in front of your target audience when they're not in the market to buy.

That's how TV advertising works, it reaches a broad audience.

The thing is, it's expensive.

It's why many DTC brands use SEO to place their businesses in front of potential customers who use search engines to solve an informational need.

For example, there you are worried that your dog might be underweight and you come across this article through search.

As you scroll down to read it, you see this advert.

As you read, it scrolls down with you.

This has now turned your own content into a display ad.

You might click on it, you might not.

But either way, you've been exposed to it FOR FREE.

And this is why high information fitness matters for DTC brands.

You are experts in a single area, as such you become the go to resource for information.

The Farmers Dog offers this information to be of value to it's customers, to reach new customers and indeed to advertise to them for free.

And I think people forget this when it comes to SEO.

If you own the information, you can advertise your products at zero cost.

But how does that look?

If we look at the share of search volume, The Farmers Dog is way ahead in the US market when it comes to 'free' traffic.

What is telling is that this growth has come in the last 2 years.

But what about their links?

Fame Grows Links

OK, so it's clear from a slight dip into their link profile that their business generates links via fame.

They get talked about by business websites and linked to.

Having a good product and marketing it well, is actually a great SEO technique in itself.

Which brings me onto my point.

Fame earns links, and it's why publicity matters.

Getting into the media with data, stories and mentions is how you build fame, and this fame turns into organic links.

Yes, tv ads are easily the best way for this, but PR works too.

If you want to learn more about how this works, read my recent article on Link Earning.

OK, so what can you take away from this study?

You Can't Beat Being a Content Machine

The big learning point from this article is that being a valuable source of information matters.

Not only does it mean you'll reach more people for FREE (yes I know SEO is a cost, but you don't pay per click or impressions).

But you can advertise to them for free while they are on your site.

Now I know that SEO's are losing their brains over Google's AI search thingy.

Please, don't.

When it comes to anything, people look for sources of information, so if you'll lose traffic because of this change, those people weren't ever going to buy from you anyway.

People ask Google all sorts of questions that aren't commercial.

If I have a question related to my dog's health, I don't want some regurgitated borrowed knowledge from AI.

I want to read the whole article that gave the answer.

If anything, we'll possibly see an increase in traffic as AI sources content.

So, keep creating content.