Winery SEO: Everything You Need To Know
Search engine optimization is an opportunity to increase the number of leads you generate to your website and revenues for your business. But this is only true if following the proper SEO steps and set the correct expectations for your SEO campaign. Creating a winning winery SEO strategy requires time and money, but that investment can pay off significantly.
Here are three reasons SEO is an effective form of marketing for your wine business.
- Less Competitive: Marketing a wine business is a tough business. While most wine brands focus on social media, print ads, and referrals (all good things), there is one area they miss. Rarely do they bring an SEO expert in to help build brand visibility through organic search marketing.
- People are Looking: The search term “wineries in Paso Robles” receives 4,300 monthly searches. The number one position is receiving 1000+ monthly clicks on their website. Could even a fraction of this number help your business?
- SEO Equals Industry Expertise: Today’s search engine optimization strategy looks different from years before. Now, content is king. Through creating and distributing helpful blog posts, your content marketing strategy builds brand equity, increases social shares, and improves your business.
Hopefully, you are more sold on SEO than before you performed an initial Google search. Now, let’s dig into SEO for wineries and wine brands.
Digital Marketing For Wine Companies
Over recent years, increased goods costs and competition have challenged wine marketing. The customer acquisition costs have increased, and ROI has taken a hit. But that doesn’t mean you cannot win with digital marketing.
There’s no better time to invest in digital marketing for your winery. The new tools and strategies make syncing your marketing campaign easier, and they become greater than the sum of their parts. The trick to carrying more weight is having search engine optimization be the lead horse.
Search engine optimization efforts will be the foundation from which you build your digital marketing empire. Using your content for email campaigns, social media marketing, and as an insight into Google Ads is how you win with online marketing.
A good SEO will not understand this, but the best SEO agencies understand that search optimization is how we begin, not end.
What is Wine SEO?
Wine SEO is slightly different from most SEO campaigns, as we can segment it into different business categories. There will be a crossover between them, but there are also specific strategies for each.
This article helps Wine brands with Ecommerce, B2B, and a Brick n Mortar strategy. All wine companies will understand how to leverage search engine-based online marketing to grow their brand. Going further, we will discuss how wine SEO affects revenues for visitors traveling to their destination.
At the end of this article, you will understand what is required to create a winning SEO strategy for any wine business.
SEO For Wine Brands
You can optimize your online presence with or without a winery for increased traffic and revenues. Through effective keyword research, your search engine optimization strategy can help sell more bottles of wine through your wine club subscription, case pricing, or single-bottle sales.
SEO Keyword optimization means identifying the terms your potential consumers are searching for. We then segment these terms based on what is required to compete for a first-page search ranking position.
For example, The term “winery in Paso Robles” has more difficulty than “Winery in Templeton” or “Organic wineries in Paso Robles.” While there are fewer searches, you may see faster first-page rankings for these terms.
Ecommerce
A search engine-focused Ecommerce strategy includes showing up in organic searches, Google images, and Google shopping. Here is the truth: with Google shopping, they prioritize wine brands, dedicating at least some portion of their budget to paid search. Don’t worry; we can help you with that as well.
A less guarded entrance to page one of Google is through traditional search results and images. When wine-searchers type in “low acid wines,” you can appear on the first page more than once. You can accomplish this by creating a transactional and informational page since this topic has a “fractured search intent.”
A recommended Ecommerce search engine strategy for online wine retailers looking for alternative doors to enter. Unless you want to invest heavily in a direct search term such as “chardonnay wine,” we suggest a more specific approach. Look for longer-term keywords and specializations about your particular product.
SEO For Wine Estates
The trend of experienced-based wineries continues to grow at an exponential rate. Now, winos expect more than just wine sampling when they visit. Nothing is off the table for enhancing the visitor experience.
Several months ago, my wife and I sought a winery to visit. Our search became more difficult once because 5 kids joined the fun. So our online search narrowed to “family-friendly wineries.”
There were zero results in an organic search for wine websites with information specifically stating that they are family-friendly. Thankfully, bloggers and Google reviews helped us by using keywords such as “kid friendly” in their posts or reviews.
A key benefit of search engine optimization is gaining control of the conversation. While being mentioned by bloggers and reviewers is nice, these should rank slightly lower than our website’s explanation of our services.
Keyword research helps to explore and identify these opportunities. With the right strategy, your search engine ranking position will make you a top consideration for the wine consumer.
Local SEO For Wineries
Wineries first need to understand that Google’s algorithm for local businesses differs from that of national searches. We must optimize winery SEO for both.
Our agency performs local SEO services well beyond simply ranking in organic search. Our local SEO framework includes strategies for the Google Map Pack, online directories, and maps services. Each has its own search engine.
Since we understand that most people have flexibility with their travel itinerary, we expect them to search for terms such as local wineries near me. Google prioritizes the Map Pack for these types of searches.
Google Local Listing SEO: Your business description should include visuals, customer reviews, Google Posts, Images, and Videos
Travel SEO For Wineries
A local search is not the only way a potential customer finds your business. Those who “plan” their trip use search engines as their primary research means. Through an organic search, they find businesses that offer what they desire. Whether it is information or product specific, lean on organic search to find the answer.
Your Google listing SEO strategy is even more important when someone searches from outside your area. In this situation, geo-targeting is less of a concern.
Geo-targeting is a tool that Google uses as a ranking factor to determine how high to position your business in the business listings.
Your website SEO is critical for this type of search engine marketing. Since these searches are less reactive than those who have reached your area, potential customers are more inclined to review organic search results. This is where content marketing, customer testimonials, and other website marketing come into play.
Local winery SEO is a yin and yang approach catering to in-town, national, and international winery searchers.
Creating Your Winery SEO Strategy
Like winemaking, the best SEO strategy is both an art and a science. While an SEO agency has access to important keywords and competitor data, we must pair it with industry expertise, a detailed customer profile, and an understanding of the local market.
There’s the importance of prioritization. Through keyword research & analysis, your company has more topics than you can cover. So it’s important to look at what has the biggest impact on wine sales and resonates with your brand strategy. In SEO, we use the term low hanging fruit, which aligns nicely with SEO for wineries.
Understanding your existing inbound marketing strategy is also important for SEO success. What levers are already being pulled, and how can we make those more efficient? What levers are not being pulled that keyword research may tell us to start? These are important considerations for your winery online strategy.
But it doesn’t matter if you have the most effective strategy in the world; without planting your vineyard on fertile soil, expect your efforts to wither away. Therefore, your wine SEO action plan begins with website development.
Website Development For Wineries
Sophistication and beautiful imagery are at the forefront of most winery websites. But you need more than a beautiful design for your winery website to perform in organic search. SEO site optimization is the first step to increasing search engine rankings. A website’s speed, stability, navigational structure, URL structure, and meta information are all important factors for SEO web design.
Most designers will not understand the intricate details of technical SEO, which is why you must sync your website designer with a technical SEO specialist.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes information allowing search engines to crawl and understand your website. This includes ranking factors such as page meta description, image meta description, URL title, internal links, external links, and more. It isn’t glamorous work, often requiring tough conversations with clients about what a web designer may have done wrong, but it’s crucial to SEO online marketing.
When hiring a search engine optimization agency, make sure that technical work is the focus of their SEO services.
Content Marketing
If there is one area where wineries shine, it’s storytelling. The problem is most storytelling happens on-site and in person. Sometimes it happens through video, but wineries rarely capture their stories and make them a part of their content creation strategy.
A well-nurtured SEO blog post optimized for the right keywords is a key ranking factor in the eyes of Google.
SEO content marketing is how you show search engines you are the authority in sustainable winemaking. It’s how you build trust in the consistency of your winemaking. It’s how you distinguish the differences between your brand and its competitors.
You know this, right? You might have tried posting blog articles on your website. Most wine companies expect their existing audience to read their articles. Understanding that recent visitors and search engines are the audiences who reads your articles is at the forefront of content marketing basics.
Another way people fail is by not having a consistent content marketing schedule. Like watering your vines, your content marketing efforts must be consistent if you hope to see the benefits of search engine optimization. Your content cadence determines the time to yield fruit. Through competitive analysis, we give specifics about how frequently you should post articles, but a good rule is 1-4 times per month.
Backlinking
Building backlinks is a commonly forgotten rule of SEO optimization. Google sees these as indicators that your website matters to the internet.
Regarding how often to attain backlinks, think of it as adding fertilizer to your plants. Backlinks don’t need to occur daily, but when someone creates a link to your website, expect faster and more fruitful results.
This form of search engine optimization happens organically or through outreach. In your community, partnering with hotels, restaurants, and wine-tasting tour companies can lead to backlinks, but it requires you to follow up. You can take outreach further by being a podcast guest, posting on industry websites, and receiving brand mentions at a wine expo.
These are just a few examples for you to sip on…
Backlinks are another reason we create expert-level blog posts. Once an article ranks, other bloggers create backlinks to your page because your content is helpful to their audience.
At 805 SEO, we make backlink building a priority. Our agency includes your website in existing internet content where your website will be a perfect fit for a backlink.
Content Distribution
You must first drive website traffic before expecting Google to do the same. We mentioned that content should be new traffic and search. However, customers and followers will visit your website when asked. Therefore, include SEO content marketing in your email marketing strategy, social media profiles, and other digital marketing campaigns.
Good SEO does what they need to rank, but great SEO understands how to leverage online and offline marketing strategies to increase your ranking position. You may not assume that ad spend for a wine magazine is helpful, but it is. When working with an SEO agency, ensure they know the details about all marketing efforts.
This is vital and affects your Google search results.
What Not To DO With Your Wineries SEO
Before letting you go, we must address the black hat SEO. There are ways to manipulate search engines through BDN networks, web 2.0 backlinks, and creating fake reviews. These black-hat tactics result in permanent or, at the very least hard to remove penalties.
Also, there are silly, unnecessary SEO strategies that do not work. Strategies such as keyword stuffing are wasteful. Simply put, don’t do business with any SEO specialist making these recommendations.
Your Winery SEO Specialists
Ready to be seated at the top of the search engine results and in the consumer’s mind? Within California’s central coast wine community, 805 SEO understands the wine industry and how to market your grapes.
Fill out the form below for a free website analysis, SEO audit, and SEO strategy session. Our team of search engine optimization specialists helps drive more traffic to your website and wine consumers to your business. Thank you for considering our agency for your business.