PuppyInTraining.com Teardown: 5 Easy Wins, Highlights, Takeaways

We analyzed a 16-year-old dog training website, PuppyInTraining.com. The site receives an impressive 299,000+ pageviews per month (Ahrefs estimate).

This is a good example of a niche site excelling in a crowded niche by doing a lot of things well. It is similar to MyFirstShiba.com which we covered in a previous teardown.

The owner picked a great domain that is both brandable and descriptive. They have also done a great job identifying good keywords and publishing useful content that ranks for over 200,000 keywords (from 1,000 articles).

They use multiple monetization methods, but we think there is a lot of opportunity to increase revenue per visitor by implementing the easy wins described below.

This is what we cover in this report:

Website overview
Major highlights
Competitor overview
Easy wins to increase revenue and/or traffic
Actionable takeaways you can apply

Let’s get into it!

Disclaimer: Only public tools such as Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and my experiences are used in these teardowns. I do not know the owners nor have access to Google Analytics and earnings.

✅ Website Overview & Highlights

The website has been active since 2007 but traffic really picked up in the past couple of years with traffic increasing from 30k to 300k since 2021.

Ahrefs shows a steady upward climb in traffic with a strong link profile of over 5,000 referring domains.

The website’s domain has been active since 2007, and the owner has published about 1,000 expert-written content pieces. Traffic is diversified across many pages with 87 pages getting over 1,000 traffic per month (Ahrefs).

The owner has another dog site at LabradorTrainingHQ.com. Interestingly, there are some 301 redirects to PuppyInTraining.com from specific pages of his other site. There are also 301 redirects from other dog sites that are still active.

Monetization is well diversified with Mediavine, Chewy, Amazon, and their own courses to be launched soon.

While the website design is fast loading, clean, and easy to read, we explain below how site design improvements could help the site reach its full potential.

Highlights

Strong upward trend in organic traffic over the past 2 years
Averages about 300 traffic per published article
92k Facebook followers and 2k subscribers on a dormant YouTube channel
Links from Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and many more

Why is this site winning?

Strong EEAT with articles written by experts with many years of hands-on experience with training service dogs
Good keyword research was used to find popular topics to cover
Buying guides have custom photos and the content shows first-hand experience with the products
Strong link profile with over 5,000 referring domains earned over 16 years

Top 3 Competitors

Here are similar competitors targeting many of the same keywords:

LoveYourDog.com – A well-designed site that covers a lot of general informational topics about dogs with a small section on dog training.
DogAcademy.org – A relatively new and fast-growing site that earns from lead generation for local dog trainers.
YorkiePassion.com – A site focusing on Yorkie care and training with steady traffic despite appearing to publish too many off-topic guest posts.

Let’s get into the easy wins to grow this specific website.

🔥 5 Easy Wins To Grow This Website

There are opportunities to significantly grow this brand. I break down the following easy wins:

Add comparison tables to buying guides and product boxes where a product is mentioned
Increase the ratio of affiliate to informational articles
Invest in improving the site design to look more like a media company
Repurpose popular articles for the YouTube channel
Incorporate HARO into the SEO strategy

Let’s get into it!

➡️ Win #1: Add Comparison Tables

Add comparison tables to the top of buying guides and add product boxes when a product is mentioned.

These are proven tactics to boost CTR to Amazon and other affiliate programs.

Using a tool like AAWP, you can add product boxes with photos that encourage more clicks than text links.

Currently, many articles have a list of text links which could be improved with product boxes.

Takeaway: One of the fastest ways to increase the revenue of a site is to implement CRO best practices on affiliate articles with the highest traffic.

➡️ Win #2: More Affiliate Content vs Informational

Add more buying guides and product reviews to increase revenue per visitor.

A small percentage of articles cover commercial intent keywords like “Best X for Y”. However, affiliate content tends to earn much more per visitor than informational articles with display ads only.

The current buying guides are very well done with original photos and useful commentary based on real experience with the products.

New buying guides should rank well due to the strong link profile and topical authority of the site.

Takeaway: When there is a low ratio of affiliate articles on a high-traffic site, it is often a good idea to add more buying guides to increase the revenue per article.

➡️ Win #3: Improve Site Design

Invest in improving the site design to make it look more like a high authority publisher than a personal blog.

While PuppyInTraining.com looks like a personal blog, its competitor LoveYourDog.com looks more like a large media company.

A polished site that looks like other popular media sites will increase trust and credibility for readers. It will also increase the number of passive links from writers and journalists who want to link to a reputable source.

We also think that the logo looks outdated and could use a redesign.

An improved site design would help this site reach its full potential.

Takeaway: If a site looks similar to high-authority media sites like The Spruce Pets, it will be easier to earn passive links from writers looking to cite a reputable source.

➡️ Win #4: Repurpose Content for YouTube

The YouTube channel is eligible for monetization with over 2,000 subscribers but no videos have been added in 4 years.

Repurpose popular written content into videos for the YouTube channel. A writer could be hired to rewrite articles into YouTube scripts. Some publishers have even used ChatGPT to help write scripts based on existing articles.

There are affordable video editors that can add stock videos and other effects to make the videos more engaging and increase watch time.

Takeaway: Repurpose existing content to reach a larger audience and increase ad revenue with YouTube.

➡️ Win #5: Incorporate HARO For Links

With the author’s strong expertise and experience in the field of dog training, there is a great opportunity to earn high authority links by answering HARO requests.

Links and brand mentions from HARO can boost the authority of the site and generate links that are very hard for competitors to replicate.

Participating in Help A Reporter Out can be time consuming so we recommend hiring a VA to review HARO requests and only forward the ones that closely match the topic of dogs and dog training.

Takeaway: When the authors of a site have extensive expertise and impressive credentials, it is usually recommended to incorporate HARO into the SEO strategy.

👉 Actionable Takeaways

Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:

CRO improvements are often overlooked but often provide the easiest opportunities to increase revenue in a short time period.
Having many informational articles that rank high in Google means there is a good opportunity to publish affiliate content that will likely rank high as well.
Sites using an outdated site template can lose trust and credibility which can lead to missed opportunities for links from large publishers.
With uncertainty about the future of Google Search, it may be a good strategy to repurpose popular text content into video content for YouTube.
When a site’s authors have impressive credentials, it is often a good idea to leverage this expert knowledge with a HARO campaign.