Transforming content into a scalable health platform
PetCoach
PetCoach was built around a simple premise: pets deserve a higher quality of care, and pet parents deserve an easier way to provide it.
The website and app had pioneered digital veterinary care through its Ask a Vet service, allowing pet parents to connect with veterinary professionals in real time. After Petco acquired PetCoach in 2017, we saw an opportunity to evolve the product from a primarily telemedicine experience into a broader destination for pet health and wellness.
General Manager: Alvaro Jimenez
Content Strategy & Product Development: Jessica Remitz
Digital Product Designer: Álvar Arranz Chicote
Development: Oowlish Technology
My Role
I led content strategy and product development across the transformation, working across content, design, SEO, and engineering.
My responsibilities included:
Defining and implementing a new information architecture and website taxonomy
Leading the product and UX work supporting the site's rearchitecture
Overseeing the integration of PetCoach into Petco's digital brand ecosystem
Developing and optimizing content across articles, video, and sponsored experiences
Building and managing a network of veterinary reviewers and freelance editors
Partnering with engineering and design to translate the new architecture into the product experience
The Problem
What if PetCoach could help pet parents find the information they need before they ever need to ask a vet?
PetCoach had a wealth of content and a compelling core product, but the experience wasn't designed to help users discover and navigate it.
The original product had thousands of Ask a Vet questions, but much of the content was thin and hadn't been optimized for search or broader pet health and wellness discovery.
At the same time, a content consolidation effort brought more than 1,000 additional articles onto the platform. None had yet been reviewed by veterinarians, optimized for SEO, or incorporated into a cohesive taxonomy.
The product also hadn't evolved visually alongside its new parent company. Despite being part of Petco, PetCoach had a separate brand and digital experience.
The Goal
We set out to transform PetCoach into a comprehensive pet health and wellness destination while preserving the value of its original telehealth experience.
That meant bringing together:
Ask a Vet — real-time access to veterinary professionals
An education center — thousands of vet-reviewed resources covering health conditions, medications, nutrition, and breed-specific care
Pet health tools — including the Healthy Weight Calculator and other resources
A more intuitive discovery experience — helping users find relevant information without needing to know exactly what they were looking for
We also needed to bring the website and app into Petco's broader digital ecosystem through a refreshed brand identity.
The Work
Turning content into a product experience
Over 18 months, we built a content quality and optimization program to transform the site's existing information into a trustworthy, useful health resource.
We assembled a network of freelance veterinarians to review content for accuracy and expand thin or incomplete answers. Once the veterinary team signed off, editors refined the content and developed new articles and video experiences.
But improving the content wasn't enough. We also needed to make it discoverable.
Rebuilding the information architecture
We created a new taxonomy that reflected the way pet parents actually think about their pets' health—not simply how the existing content happened to be organized.
That taxonomy became the foundation for a redesigned navigation and a set of dynamically generated experiences around medications, breeds, and health conditions.
The result was a product architecture that could scale as the content library grew
Connecting the product to Petco
We also refreshed PetCoach's logo, colors, and visual identity to align with Petco's broader digital ecosystem.
Together, the new brand, architecture, content strategy, and product experience repositioned PetCoach from a collection of telehealth content into a more comprehensive health and wellness destination.
The transformation significantly expanded PetCoach's ability to attract and serve pet parents through organic discovery. Within a year of the content and product optimization work:
1.25M+
monthly visitors
90%
of traffic from organic search
10K+
questions asked per month