First impressions matter. If your winery wants to attract more website traffic, your homepage is that first impression for many potential customers.

It’s the first page your potential customers see when they visit your website. It introduces them to your brand, experiences, and products, creating the opportunity to become loyal customers.

The homepage should be the landing page to all the important pages on your website, making it easy for visitors to find what they care most about.

Your homepage is also critical for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines read your homepage to understand your business and to determine whether you deserve the top spots in the search engine results pages.

In this blog, we’ll explore why your homepage is a critical piece in the wine SEO puzzle. You’ll learn how to improve your homepage to appeal to your target audience and boost your monthly search volume.

Why the homepage is crucial for winery SEO

Before you can implement solid SEO strategies, it helps to understand why the homepage is considered the cornerstone of your winery website.

It gives potential customers their first impression of your brand

Before your online visitors experience your tasting room, before they taste your wine or tour your vineyard, before they hear your story—they’ll see your homepage.

An increasing number of people search for wineries using Google and other search engines. When they find your winery website, they’ll decide whether they’re interested in your brand in less than a second of viewing the homepage. In that first second, winery websites need to grab their audience’s attention and compel them to stay, read, and explore.

Search engines prioritize the homepage

Search engines give the homepage priority in their algorithms because it typically represents the whole website. It’s considered the standard that all of the other pages will meet. Without a strong homepage, your winery will miss out on a ton of traffic, bookings, and sales.

But, search algorithms weigh all pages on the website. The other pages on your website like your blog, tasting room page, and About Us page also contribute to a higher search ranking.

The homepage leads visitors to other pages on your website

Your homepage is also the jumping-off point for visitors to navigate the rest of your website. From the homepage, they’ll decide whether they’re interested enough in your brand to learn more about your winery or read about your tasting room.

And remember, search algorithms give websites a better ranking when they include clear, easy-to-use navigation. Don’t be fancy here.

What humans want to see on your winery website homepage

When designing and creating homepage content for wineries, the best SEO strategies keep human visitors at the heart of their approach and tactics. Here’s what humans want to find when they visit a winery’s homepage:

A thrilling first impression

When wine lovers want to buy a bottle, tour a vineyard, or book a wine tasting, they’re seeking an exceptional experience—starting with your online presence.

Your homepage is an opportunity to wow potential customers with a brilliant online experience. High-quality images and videos of your vineyards, tasting rooms, and wine products should appear on the homepage to help sell the experience to your customers.

Your messaging should speak to a clearly defined target audience. Start with a tight definition of your ideal customer, then conduct keyword research to find the right keywords to attract them. Include these in prominent places like headlines and calls to action (CTAs).

>> When conducting keyword research, be sure to check out the competition. Find which keywords other websites are using to rank higher and attract more customers, and if they’re relevant to your brand, incorporate them into your content. <<

Trust and credibility

Wine drinkers want to know your winery is a professional vineyard run by true wine experts.

A subpar website won’t convince wine drinkers that you’re legit. Establishing a credible brand on your homepage requires you to lean heavily into your content and messaging. Decide who you are as a winery, and what unique selling proposition (USP) you offer wine enthusiasts.

>> For example, if you’re a family-owned winery that works exclusively with organically-grown grapes, work those attributes into your homepage headers and copy. <<

A clear way to visit, book, and buy

Clear calls-to-action are the most crucial component of your winery homepage. Potential customers researching wineries online want to visit a winery, book a tasting or tour, or buy a wine product. Your homepage should make it easy for them to take one of those actions.

Your homepage navigation should be straightforward, with clear, compelling CTAs, leaving no question about what step to take next.

If your visitors encounter any obstacles (called “conversion barriers“) en route to their goal of booking or buying, they’re likely to abandon your website and head for a competitor’s.

>> From your homepage, be sure to have one-click avenues for visitors to book a tasting or buy a product.<<

How to optimize your homepage

Search engines are designed to help human users find the best website for their search query. Here’s how a search algorithm determines whether your website is a good fit for a particular search term or keyword:

Quality content

When you create content for your homepage, it should speak directly to what your potential customers are searching for. Search engines reward websites that effectively answer searcher intent with higher search engine rankings.

Homepage optimization is all about balancing relevant keywords with well-crafted content. Here are the steps we suggest:

1. Consider your visitors’ intent.
   For example, if they want to book a wine tasting, you should highlight your wine tasting experience on the homepage and create a clear CTA.
2. Find keywords that align with that intent.
   There are free keyword research tools available like SEMrush and ahrefs, but you’ll get more in depth data from paid tools. Choose keywords that align with what your visitors are looking for, and incorporate them naturally into your homepage content.
3. Structure content so it’s easy to navigate to what they want.
   When writing your home page content, structure your content so it’s clear, understandable, and easy to navigate. Avoid using large walls of text; instead, break your text into sections and include clear headings to highlight important information and help potential customers find what they’re looking for.
4. Write good copy.
   High-quality copy will engage your audience, keeping them interested to spend more time exploring your homepage. The longer you keep them engaged with your content, the better your site looks to the search engines.

Reputable backlinks and internal links

Search engines like to see that you provide a deeper level of information for your audience; high-quality backlinks and internal links are an easy and effective way to do that.

Include external links to other websites that you trust and that search engines deem reputable. You can find trustworthy websites by checking their domain authority with tools like this one from Ahrefs.

>> Remember to link to your own website! Use internal links to your product pages, tasting room, or relevant blog post. <<

Speed and mobile-friendliness

Ensuring your homepage and other pages load quickly is critical for human visitors and search engines alike. It should also be mobile-friendly, meaning it’s responsive and smooth when accessed by mobile users.

>> You can test how quickly your website loads with this free tool from PageSpeed Insights. <<

Local SEO techniques

Local SEO is one of your winery’s most important SEO strategies. It helps wine drinkers find your winery for tours and tastings, whether they’re locals or they’re visiting your area on vacation. Check out our blog on local SEO for wineries.

Sample Winery Homepage Layout

Once you’ve gathered all the pieces of your winery homepage, all that’s left is to lay them out in a clear, effective way. We recommend the following:

• Hero Image and Primary CTA: Whether you specialize in wine products, tastings, or other experiences, place your primary offer prominently at the top of the page where potential customers can easily find it.
• Featured Product and Wine Selection: Highlight the wine blends and varieties you’re proudest to offer your customers. They deserve top homepage billing!
• Winery Visits, Tasings, and Experiences: Make it easy for new and existing customers to find and explore ways to visit and experience your gorgeous facility and finely-crafted wines. Showcase them on your winery homepage.
• Unique Selling Propositions (USPs): Your homepage is the perfect place to highlight what differentiates your brand and sets you apart from competitors.
• Wine Club: Feature your wine club on the homepage to give your visitors the opportunity to join the community of wine lovers who enjoy your wines month after month.

>> Don’t forget to add clear site navigation and contact details in the header and footer of your homepage! <<

Examples of great winery homepages

Looking for some inspiration? It’s helpful to explore other winery websites to see what’s working well, and how you might approach your own homepage. Here are a few winery homepages we really admire:

Avaline Wine

Avaline highlights their best-selling premium products, their professional standards, and their customizable wine box and wine club opportunities.

Jordan Winery

Jordan Winery shares their brand story, estate, and experiences on their homepage, supported by high-quality visuals and well-crafted copy.

Bricoleur Vineyards

Bricoleur Vineyards highlights their family legacy and invites their customers to become part of it, featuring vineyard events, experiences, their wine club, and exceptional products on the homepage.

When it comes to winery SEO, the entire site matters

The wine industry is competitive, and more wine brands are improving their websites to attract local drinkers and establish a national following. Solid SEO strategies can help your wine brand appear in the top 10 search results and top the list for local searches, too.

Whether you’re writing a blog post or describing your winery tours, every page and piece of content on your website should work hard to increase your monthly search volume and improve your overall conversions and sales.

We work with wineries from the west coast to the east coast and everywhere in between to help them sell more wine. Book a call with the team to discover how our evergreen wine SEO strategies will help you build a thriving winery.

You might not realize it, but your winery’s tasting room bookings could be directly related to your search engine ranking.

Keep reading to learn how search engine optimization (SEO) affects your website’s ranking in search engine results. Plus, learn how you can tailor your website content so users who want to visit wineries in their area find your website when they search online.

Why wine SEO is important for wineries

SEO has taken many in the wine industry by surprise. Drinking habits and drinker profiles are changing; Despite what you might think, Americans are drinking more, and more of them are choosing wine. So far, so good for wineries!

However, competition is growing, too. Wine drinkers are adventurous and enjoy exploring new wines from across the United States, which can be easily found, researched, and ordered online.

Online wine retailers must ensure their website contains the quality content and the technical SEO features that will help them outrank the competition in search engine results. Search engine optimization is the answer.

SEO ensures that every word, image, and button works in your favor. It’s a rigorous exercise in fine-tuning, and it can be time-consuming, but it’s essential for helping your customers find your website easily online.

How wine SEO affects your tasting room bookings

Whether they live nearby or they’re just passing through, local wine drinkers will use search engines to find wineries in the area.

If you want to book more wine lovers into your wine tasting room, you’ll need to make it easy for them to find you online. Search engines will rank your website higher in search results when users search for keywords like “wine tasting rooms near me” or “tasting rooms in Sacramento”.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means for your winery:

What is local SEO

Local SEO is website optimization that focuses on attracting wine drinkers in your local area. They may live nearby, or they may be planning an event in your area, like a wedding or fundraiser. They may even be vacationing nearby and want to sample regional wines. Whatever the case, local SEO helps them find you.

Here’s how it works: Search engine algorithms award higher search engine rankings to the websites that best answer a user’s search query.

So if a user’s search query is “local wineries near Atascadero” or “Southern California winery”, they’re searching for a local winery they can visit. If search engines read your website as the best one to satisfy the user’s search query, it’ll be listed first in the search engine results.

Steps to improving your winery’s local SEO strategy

Wine lovers can’t book your tasting rooms if they can’t find you. So let’s look at a few tactics that will boost your local wine SEO strategy and make it simpler for local wine drinkers to see and book your winery.

Assess your website content

Hopefully, you’ve already optimized your website to meet SEO best practices. But now, the challenge is encouraging your target audience to visit your physical premises using local SEO tactics. To do that, you may have to make some content changes.

Start by determining which keywords local drinkers use to find winery tasting rooms. A typical structure customers use is “wine tasting rooms in X” or “wine tasting rooms near X” (X being the name of your local area). Add those phrases to your website wherever appropriate.

If you don’t have a web page dedicated to your wine tasting room, create one and work relevant keywords naturally into the content. But don’t overuse keywords; “keyword stuffing” will result in a lower ranking on search engine results pages.

Winery websites should also have regularly updated blogs. A blog post is a great place to connect with your audience and to share the stories of your winery and your wines, all the while including relevant keywords.

Test your tasting room booking process

Make sure that it’s easy to book a tasting online. Any hiccup in the booking process can turn visitors off your website. An exhaustive booking form or a submission button that takes too long to complete the booking could drive customers away. Go through the process yourself to ensure the booking form is the correct length, and the process is streamlined.

Include clear and accurate contact information

If you include straightforward contact information, customers are more likely to book a tasting experience. Clear and accurate information shows users that you’re a professional winery. It reassures them that they’ll enjoy a thoughtful, well-orchestrated tasting experience at the hands of wine experts.

A wine tasting is exciting and special for your customers. Assure them they’re in good hands by making it easy to contact and chat with your team.

Beef up your Google Business profile

According to our keyword research, users in the US searched for “tasting room near me” 2,900 times last month and “wine tasting rooms near me” 1,300 times. “Wine tasting room near me” had a monthly search volume (MSV) of 760. (Note that those figures don’t count the keyword searches for local wineries that include the names of cities, states, and neighborhoods.)

Most of those searches happen via Google. If you activate your Google Business profile and fill it with correct and detailed information, Google’s search algorithms will reward you with a higher ranking for those keyword searches.

Plus, many customers see an active Google Business profile as proof that you’re a winery worth noting. Inaccurate information might give them the impression that you’ve gone out of business or are not accepting bookings.

Ask for online reviews

If your recent tasting room visitors have had a fabulous time, ask them to say so online! Most people are happy to help small wineries get a leg up, and even a quick star ranking can make your website more attractive to search engines.

Detailed comments are the gold standard for online reviews, so ask your visitors to write what they liked about the experience and which wine they’d recommend to others.

Don’t forget about technical SEO

“Technical SEO” describes the practice of optimizing the technical or “back end” aspects of your website to make it attractive to search engines.

Mobile-friendly websites rank better in local SEO searches, because those searches are usually conducted on a mobile device. Specific schema markups like “LocalBusiness” and “OpeningHoursSpecification” tell search engines to display helpful information in local searches.

Technical SEO can be overwhelming. If you need help determining whether your website is optimized for technical SEO, book a call, and we’ll discuss it with you.

Winery SEO services from Kru Marketing

You can boost your winery’s online visibility, and you don’t have to do it alone. At Kru Marketing, we specialize in helping wineries get more tasting room reservations and sell more wine online.

We can help you optimize for local search and build a long term search marketing strategy to help your winery sell more wine. to get started.

An often-overlooked facet of your winery’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are the product page descriptions.

It may sound surprising, but how you describe your wine products on your website is crucial to your search engine optimization. Those product descriptions can be your secret SEO weapons that help you attract more ideal customers and climb the ranks of Google’s search engine results.

We’ll help you make your product descriptions work toward your winery SEO goals. Plus, we’ll share tips on how to write product descriptions that help you rank higher and catch the attention of your ideal wine customers.

But first, we’ll start with a solid understanding of how product descriptions can make a difference in your winery SEO efforts.

Importance of product descriptions

A product description is the text that accompanies your wine products on their product pages. At a bare minimum, you’ll have your wine’s name, grape, and region.

However, for a product description to sell wine, it needs to go beyond the tasting notes. Wine buyers do not search for wine based on tasting notes. In the sections below, we’ll explore the other types of information to include in your product descriptions so that they strike a chord with wine buyers and do a better job of selling your wine.

Customers need product descriptions to make a purchase

But the more information you can include in your product description, the better. Studies show that when it comes to online purchases, product descriptions really matter to customers.

The stats about product descriptions are compelling. According to SEMRush, 82% of online buyers read the product description before purchasing. Google’s research has shown that for 85% of shoppers, the product description is the single most crucial factor in their buying decision.

Search engines love product descriptions

Search engines like Google base their ranking results on the amount of relevant keywords and data on a website. So, if your winery website includes keywords that are relevant to customer searches, you’ll have a better chance of ranking higher.

But search engines are sophisticated enough to spot “keyword stuffing”, so you can’t cram your website with unnaturally-placed keywords and watch your search engine rankings climb. In fact, you’ll be penalized with a lower ranking for keyword stuffing.

Product descriptions are the perfect place to add plenty of relevant keywords in a natural way. You can include descriptions of the wine’s taste and provenance, outline the history of your growers, and suggest food pairings. It’s real estate that demands to be developed, because search engines love to see informative product descriptions, and wine buyers do, too.

Target the right customers with solid keyword research

If you conduct thorough keyword research before you write your product descriptions, you’ll have a list of keywords that attract your target audience.

Not all wine drinkers are your ideal audience. Your marketing efforts – including product descriptions – should be focused on targeting the right wine drinkers and excluding the rest.

If your product descriptions include the right keywords and are written in a voice and tone that resonates with the audience you want to attract, you’ll pinpoint the ideal buyers.

SEO tactics to improve your wine product descriptions

With these 6 steps, you can write product descriptions that resonate with your target audience. You’ll also provide the data they need to make a wine purchase or book a wine tasting.

1. Research keywords and include them naturally

Keyword research is always the first step in effective SEO strategies. Don’t rush through your keyword research or assume you know how wine lovers find your products. The phrases they use to search for wine online may surprise you.

Wine buyers often start their search with terms like “buy wine online,” a phrase which has a monthly search volume (MSV) of 2.9K. They also include terms like “best” into their search, for keywords like “best cabernet wine” (9.9K MSV). “Fine wine” was another popular choice, with 14.8K MSV. “Organic vineyard” only yielded a MSV of 10 searches, while “organic wine” had a MSV of 8.1K!

Keep your target audience in mind as you conduct your research. The wine industry is changing, and younger drinkers are finding new ways to describe the wines they love. To attract a younger audience to book wine tastings or purchase wine online, you’ll need to research the keywords and wine information they look for on a product page.

Young wine buyers often prioritize brands that align with their personal values, so they’ll search for wines that use keywords like “organic” or “black-owned winery.” Include nutritional information and don’t be snobby with your language. Young wine drinkers are increasingly turned off by esoteric wine terms.

When choosing keywords, remember that search volume isn’t the only metric to analyze. Keywords with a higher search volume are usually expensive and competitive to rank for. Instead, look for less competitive keywords with a lower search volume.

2. Look to your online reviews for inspiration

Your online customer reviews can be a great source of inspiration for finding keywords that resonate with your audience. Current customers will describe your wine products in surprising ways, so check your reviews for clever, descriptive phrasing that might strike a chord with potential wine buyers.

Your product pages should include as many reviews as possible, as shoppers rely heavily on product reviews to make a decision. Encourage existing customers to write reviews after they’ve received their product or attended a wine tasting.

3. Provide accurate and specific information

Wine drinkers are sophisticated shoppers who expect a certain level of reliable information about the wine they’re buying. For starters, they’ll want to know the wine’s specs:

• Country of origin
• Region
• Grape or grape blend, with percentages
• Alcohol content
• Vintage
• Color
• Style

Serving recommendations, including the temperature at which to serve the wine, how long to aerate it, etc, should also be included in this section. Buying wine online takes imagination, and wine buyers need to envision themselves enjoying this wine. The more information you can give them about the wine and how, when, and where to enjoy it, the easier it is for them to imagine themselves drinking it. And the easier it is for them to click “Add to cart.”

Your customers should be able to rely on the accuracy of your product data. Trustworthy product descriptions establish trust and promote loyalty among your customers and create an aura of thought leadership around your brand.

4. Add food pairing recommendations and similar wine suggestions

Food and wine pairing suggestions are a great way to show your wine expertise and improve your search rankings at the same time.

Pairing suggestions make it easy for shoppers to buy your product. They can envision how and when they’ll drink your wine, making it an almost effortless decision to purchase it. Describe the wine’s flavor profile and then suggest foods which would complement those tastes. For example:

“This red Bordeaux features a bold black currant aroma with subtler notes of plum and pear. Its rich earthiness is best complemented by a grass-fed beef roast, heavily marbled, or a beet and goats cheese salad.”

If you’re trying to book more wine tastings, food and wine pairing suggestions show your audience the type of expertise they’ll enjoy when they sit at your tasting table.

5. Tell a story that resonates with your buyers’ values

With all this talk of keywords and SEO strategies, it’s important to remember that buyers respond best to compelling stories. Your product page is the place to spin a compelling narrative about your grapes, your growers, and the exciting process of producing exceptional wine.

To stand out from other, similar wineries, you need a unique brand and a tightly-defined target audience. Think about what’s unique about your winery – your history, your values, your grape blends – and then decide what specific wine buyers would be most interested in your unique brand. When you write copy or identify keywords, always keep that ideal audience in mind.

Pepper your wine’s story with the keywords you identified in your research. But keep it human, and write it for the real people who will enjoy its flavor and history – not the search bots.

6. Include a simple “call to action” (CTA)

A CTA describes the next step you want your website visitors to take. “Book a tasting”, “Purchase this wine”, or “Buy a box” are all good examples of clear, effective CTAs. When you make it simple for shoppers to take the next steps, they’re more likely to do it.

Product DescriptionExamples

Let’s take a look at some brilliant product descriptions to understand what information to include, how to format your product information, and what voice is right for your brand.

Bricoleur Vineyards is a great example of addressing the core aspects of what a customer is looking for in a product description. Going beyond the basic tasting notes is crucial for proving the details a buyer needs to make a purchase.

Avaline Wine does something here that is so simple, that it’s easy to miss. They tell the buyer what environment this wine pairs with.

“Pairs well with: A cozy evening with friends around the table”

Take it a step further, give your customers some ideas who how they can best enjoy your wine.

Adding some basic graphics is something that Usual Wines does for all their products. Speaking to the points your customers care about, wether its sustainability, sulfates, or ingratiates makes it easy for people to find your products. Nothing helps make the point clearer than an icon, making it quick and easy to read.

Jordan Winery goes above and beyond in its product page design and descriptions. Not only do they include beautifully easy-to-read tasting notes, they also provide serving instructions, a Youtube video on the wine, and paring suggestions.

Notice Jordan includes recipe recommendations, cheese-paring suggestions, and ingredients that pair well with the wine. This level of detail not only provides value to customers, it provides SEO ranking opportunities.

Get your products ranking

We’re the experts on writing product descriptions that help convert website visitors into wine purchasers. You can rely on us for advice and revenue-growing SEO tactics to improve your on-page SEO, technical SEO, and more.

We specialize in improving search results for winery websites through targeted SEO for wineries. Book a call today to start strategizing an SEO campaign that will increase your website traffic and boost your position on search engine results pages.

It can be hard to see the connection between a few keywords on your winery website and a booked-out tasting room. But amazingly, search engine optimization (SEO) can put your winery on the map for customers who might not have found your business without it.

Wine lovers in your area want to visit your winery. But without relevant keywords, it’s hard for them to discover you.

With targeted keyword research and a thoughtful SEO campaign, your website, blog posts, and social media campaigns can find the right audience and draw them to your website. 

In this blog, we’ll tell you why wine SEO works, and how you can use it to fill your tasting room, improve your eCommerce sales, and grow your email list.

Benefits of winery SEO

SEO is the practice of finding the words or phrases customers use to search for your products, and then adding them to your website, blog, and social media text. That way, search engines associate your web content with those keywords, and you’re more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages.

A well-considered SEO strategy helps you find the right consumers: your target audience. Not every wine drinker will love your wine or respond to your winery’s brand story. With winery SEO, you can use the keywords that resonate with your target audience so you know you’re connecting with the consumers who are most likely to visit, purchase, and visit again.

Here’s how a better search engine ranking delivers powerful advantages for your winery.

Increased tasting room reservations

When consumers want to book a wine tasting, they’ll most likely start their search on Google. Having the right keywords on your website, blog posts, and social media posts makes it easier for search engines to find you and rank your winery higher.

Wine consumers also use Google Maps to find tasting rooms in their area. If your Google business profile is up to date and includes the right keywords, you’ll rank higher when a consumer searches for local wineries on Google Maps.

Both of these tactics make you visible to consumers. They want to find you, but they can’t book a tasting if they don’t know you exist. SEO helps you jump to the top of the search engine results and get discovered by the consumers who want to visit your tasting room.

Grow your eCommerce sales

Younger wine drinkers tend to buy wine online, which could be a brilliant opportunity for your winery. And SEO helps eCommerce wine consumers find your brand online.

Remember, winery SEO drives more website traffic, and it attracts consumers to your website that want to be there. When you have the attention of the right consumers, they’re more likely to stay on your website longer and make a purchase. 

Get more wine club subscriptions

Your website is the perfect vehicle for increasing wine club subscriptions and once again, SEO helps would-be subscribers find you.

With the right SEO strategy, your wine club can grow to include wine enthusiasts from across the country. You’ll be able to sell more, more regularly, and build relationships and customer loyalty with wine drinkers who care about your wines.

Grow your email list

Subscribing to an email list may seem small, but it’s a strong step towards building a relationship with a new customer.

Using SEO, you can get more visitors to your winery website. And because your SEO strategy has helped you find the right consumers, they’re more likely to sign up for your email list when they visit your website.

7 tips to create a winery SEO strategy

Identify key phrases

Keyword research identifies the right words and phrases to include in your online text. There are free tools that can help you find a few keywords (like these from Ahrefs), and subscription-based tools that will take that initial research even further (like SE Ranking).

You’ll probably start by researching the phrases that you regularly use to describe your products. But don’t forget to consult the true experts on your products: your loyal customers. The phrases they use to describe your wine might be the language that resonates more with potential customers.

Consult online reviews or ask for feedback or testimonials from your customers to find keywords you might not have considered.

Research and measure those phrases

With some keywords in hand, research how often consumers are searching for them (called the “monthly search volume” or MSV) and how competitive they are.

Other wineries may already be using some of the keywords you’ve found in your research. These keywords are considered “competitive” and will probably be difficult to rank for in search results.

A better plan is to find keywords with a moderately high monthly search volume and a lower rate of competition.

Write your copy for those phrases

Once you’ve identified your keywords, they should appear on every page in your website. You’ll use overarching keywords that work at a high level to help customers find your brand.

Plus, you’ll identify other keywords that are specific to an individual blog post or product page. Don’t write anything –- not even a popup box or Contact page –- without consulting your keyword research.

Find the right balance of keyword density

Whether you’re composing a new blog post or writing your homepage copy, including keywords in your text is essential.

But, you don’t want to include too many. That’s called “keyword stuffing”, and search engines hate it. In fact, your website will be demoted in search engine rankings if you’re stuffing keywords on your website.

It’s best to include your keywords in a natural way, without forcing them into the conversation.

Continue the cycle for every new piece of copy

If you want your website to climb Google’s search results, you need to regularly create content for it. Blogs are a clever way to add fresh, SEO-friendly content, and for best results, you should commit to publishing a new blog post at least once per week if you can.

But keep in mind, every new page on your website should have a carefully-constructed SEO strategy, complete with targeted keywords. That way, you can scale the search rankings and help wine lovers find your winery.

Write from the heart

With all this talk about SEO strategies and search queries, it can be easy to forget that it’s the humans behind the website traffic that you want to connect with.

Incorporate your keywords in the appropriate density, weaving them into your brand story in a way that feels natural and honest. Customers buy from brands that spark interest and resonate with their values.

So include your keywords, but don’t forget to let your passion for wine shine in every word on your website.

Partner with a winery SEO expert

The wine industry is changing, and your marketing tactics need to follow suit. SEO for wineries is essential for encouraging website traffic and sparking meaningful connections with your customers.

At Kru Marketing, we’re dedicated to helping winemakers connect with the right consumers through SEO and online marketing. We create data-driven SEO strategies that deliver unmistakable results. Talk to our team to get started.

Unveil SEO secrets for winery blogs and boost your online presence. Sip on practical tips for engaging content that ranks and resonates.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? It’s making your online platforms and content as relevant, authoritative, and credible as possible in the eyes of search engines.

Why should wineries and wine businesses do SEO? Good SEO results in more visits and more sales for your business.

Around 50% of businesses don’t use SEO at all in their online content. Using SEO immediately gives you an advantage over half of the field of competitors.

You can check out our in-depth explanation of SEO for wineries here, if you’re looking for a deeper dive into why SEO is part of a winning winery marketing strategy. 

If you want a “quickstart guide” to practically implement SEO now, with real results – you’re in the right place.

Keep reading this SEO quickstart guide for wineries to learn:

1. Why keywords are the surest way to level up your SEO game
2. How to make your paid ad spend really count with SEO
3. What makes SEO content so important for actually selling your brand
4. Why link building is the quickest, easiest winery SEO secret
5. How to make your wine descriptions generate more sales with SEO

1. Add Keywords to Your Website

Keywords are at the heart of good SEO. They are the specific terms that your potential customers will search for, like “winery near me” or “Pinot Grigio.”

When you include these terms in the text of your website, Google latches onto these, and brings you up in search results for that keyword.

Keywords can be one word, like “wine,” or a group of words, like “the best Spanish wine.”

It’s both unrealistic, and not very useful, to rank for common, one-word keywords like “wine.” These are too general with almost infinite competition in search results. Your website would be buried in the thousands of pages that Google could pull up in search results.

Strategic long-tail keywords (keywords with two words or more) are more useful for SEO.

Long-tail keywords provide more for Google to reference when pulling search results, and can have lower, but more targeted, search volumes. This makes you more likely to be found online.

How do you find keywords? 

Simply type something your customer would search for into Google. The suggestions that pop up below the search bar and at the end of the page are other keywords:

Google is getting smarter all the time, and the best SEO focuses not just on one keyword per page, but a strategic network of many keywords.

Google’s algorithms also recognize “keyword stuffing,” dumping a large amount of keywords at random into an article, or tagging them all on at the end.

Instead of becoming an authority, Google will list you lower in search results, since you don’t provide genuine value and are just looking to rank higher in results.

So, how can you use SEO with keywords today? Start with your “About” page, whether you have one or need to write one. This is beneficial because:

• On one hand, having a webpage with keywords, especially your front page, will rank you higher in Google searches. 
• On the other hand, SEO works best when it’s rooted in a strong brand. Strong brands have a genuine story and clear values that people can relate to. You build your brand through quality content, and that content is made more virtually accessible with SEO.

2. SEO Maximizes Your Google and Facebook Ad Spend

There’s nothing wrong with “paying for clicks” with online ads –  it can be a key part of a winning marketing strategy.

However, this doesn’t replace organic growth through SEO. Contrary to common misconceptions, SEO doesn’t have to take years to work, if done well.

At the same time, if you are spending money, you want to make sure that you get the most out of it. 

You can combine the two – you can use SEO in your already-existing ads to get more targeted leads.

Google Ads obviously work within Google’s algorithms and platform, which rely heavily on SEO. Using keywords strategically makes these ads even more likely to appear to searchers.  

However, Facebook Ads also benefit from SEO. Facebook (Meta) looks at search keywords and other data from many third-party resources, including Google.

While Meta can’t directly see you’re Googling, it can see what websites you arrive at or come from.

This data on website visits is stored on Facebook as an interest. So, when you log into Facebook, the site tracks your interests and matches you to ads with similar keywords.

You can access Facebook interests and some of its high-volume keywords to use in your ads – schedule a call with us for more details on this type of strategy, as it can get a bit technical.

Regardless, it’s helpful to include keywords both in copy for Facebook ads and any other online outreach. Websites and social media are constantly evolving in their communication with each other, but always keep search data at the heart of their advertising.

3. Create SEO Content – Because Personable Personal Brands Sell Best

SEO works best in step with a strong brand – even if you get people to your page, they need to feel and believe in your winery to actually visit, buy, or taste.

And vice versa. You have to get clients to your website over a sea of other wineries competing for their digital attention – and the most consistent way to do this without spending constantly for ads is through SEO content. 

The strongest brands have quality SEO to cut through the noise and help not just users, but actually interested potential clients find them online, which ultimately drives sales.

Otherwise, your site becomes either white noise, or worse – lost in results for unintended keywords, not helping those interested users to find you.

One of the best ways to level up your SEO game is to develop written content on your website or other online platforms, since content:

• Gives you a way to include targeted keyword strategy on your site
• Gives you a space to develop your brand’s unique voice
• Boosts your authority in Google’s eyes, ranking you higher in search results
• Helps you get discovered by interested users more often

One of the best ways to accomplish content-driven SEO results is with a blog.

Not just for the poets and recipe gurus of the world, blogs are a great place to post SEO content to grow your authority on Google.

Posting at least 2-4 times per month makes a significant difference in search engines’ eyes, since you consistently provide users with valuable information on their interests. Good SEO is the “bait,” content and branding the “hook!”

If you’d like help creating content, schedule a call with us to learn how we can help.

4. References for Your Resume, Link Building for Your Website

A good reference can help with a job interview because it instantly boosts your credibility. 

If Google is the interviewer, link building is the good reference for your website.

Link building, made up of backlinks or link placements, happens when others link from their website back to yours, like in an article, post, or webpage:

Try this: ask 3 people in your community – other wineries, local restaurants, retailers – to have a link to your website somewhere on their own (A plus if they’re related somehow to your winery either by location, interest, or production).

The link can be in a Facebook post, recipe post, travel guide newsletter, Google Business profile post, or local travel guide.

Though simple, Google loves these link placements. They make your website instantly more credible in Google’s eyes, since link placements show you are trusted as a resource by other users – and you’ll be ranked higher in search results.

More importantly, you’ll be found by people through other sites that may have a related interest in you, at the click of a mouse.

Leveling up winery SEO through the unique interconnectivity of the wine industry is one of the favorite parts of our SEO strategy. Schedule a free discovery call to see how we can help you build up your link placements for success.

5. Write Product Descriptions Using Keywords

No doubt you know that great wine descriptions can entice potential buyers to finally make a purchase.

Make sure you’re getting the most out of your descriptions by incorporating those long-tail keywords we mentioned earlier! Even if a description is optimal, it won’t speak eloquently to anyone if it can’t be found online.

Your descriptions already live online – make them do more work for you as a digital beacon for potential buyers.

With SEO wine descriptions, it’s good to consider not just what Google recommends in the search bar, but using what customers will actually search for.

For example, if you’re a winery in Texas, use “Texas Aglianico” or “Texas Hill Country Aglianico” instead of just “Aglianico” in your blurb.

SEO for Wineries: Quick Start and Ongoing Strategy

We’ve given you some of our best tips for a tried-and-true SEO jumpstart. But SEO is more than just getting out fast out of the gate.

While you can make strategic changes immediately, results like increased ROI, sales, and conversions come organically and increase over time with consistent strategy work. And with quality SEO, you won’t wait years to see real results.

Whether you’re looking for explosive growth through an ad campaign or a steady DTC sales uptick on your website (or both), a dedicated SEO strategist can be the best option to take the burden of SEO strategy off of your plate – giving you more time to focus on your business.

Check out our more extensive SEO Playbook for Wineries for broader SEO strategy. Or, schedule a free traffic projection with us, where we’ll explore a custom SEO strategy plan to suit your winery’s unique goals.

The engine of any business is marketing and sales. Without it, you would make no money. In the competitive market of wine, your winery needs to lead with marketing. Not prioritizing marketing means other wine brands and other beverage brands will drown you out. A good marketing strategy makes your sales team’s job much easier, allowing them to sell more wine. One of the best marketing strategies for wineries is SEO.

What Is SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO), is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines like Google. By improving your website’s visibility, the aim is to gain more traffic so that you can get more tasting room visits/reservations, sell more wine, and get more wine club subscriptions.

Simply put, SEO is about meeting the user’s search needs by creating valuable, usual content and a high-quality user experience.

Practically, this is what SEO is:

• Technical optimization
• Keyword research
• Content optimization  and creation
• Link building

In this guide, we will discuss each topic in-depth and how to apply it to your winery.

If you are wondering why you should care about SEO for your winery, you should probably read this first, Should Vineyards & Wineries do SEO?

The Starter Guide

At the core of any successful business is a guide for how they plan to be successful. Successful marketing is no different. Luckily, you’ve found The Winery SEO Starter Guide.

In this guide, we will walk through everything Vineyards & Wineries need to know regarding SEO.

By the end, you know how to apply SEO to your Vineyard & Winery website. If you need any help along the way or don’t have the time to take this on, you can schedule a free analysis to see how our team can help out.

Overview of what we’ll cover:

• Technical optimization for a winery website
• Optimizing your winery’s local presence
• Wine Content Creation and optimization
• Link building for the wine industry

Technical SEO

Architecture

URL structure

Your website URL’s structures should be uniform and easy to read for a human because that is how google looks at it. If the URLs are all different, that’s not good. You want your URLs to follow a unified structure across your entire website. Like with many SEO principles, ask yourself, “is the experience good for a human?” Google is smart enough to tell if the UX is bad or URL wouldn’t make sense to a human.

❌         www.yourwinery.com/01-01-2023-Wine-Club-events-all

✅        www.yourwinery.com/events/wine-club

Basic URL Structure Guidelines:

• All lowercase or all uppercase, it doesn’t matter which one. I prefer lowercase because it’s easier to read.
• Easy to read for humans
• As short as possible but still clear.
• Avoid subdomains whenever possible.
• Fewer folders is better

Sitemap & Robots.txt

A sitemap is a file that contains information about your website. With the sitemap, you are telling the search engine which pages are important on your website. The sitemap is a map of your website’s page structure. Usually, this is an XML or HTML file.

The robots.txt file is very similar, but you can think of it more as an instruction manual for the Google crawler bot. “Crawl this page.” “Don’t crawl this page.” The robots.txt file contains instructions for the bot that specify pages that you “allow” the bot to crawl and pages you “disallow” the bot to crawl. This process will either allow a page to be indexed in Google or not. For example, you probably don’t want your checkout page to be indexed in Google and appear in the search results. You would want your wine club page to be indexed and appear in the search results.

If you are using WordPress, WineDirect, or some other CMS, chances are your sitemap and robots.txt files are already in place. It would be a good idea to do a crawl of your website with a tool like Screaming Frog to make sure that all the pages you want to appear and not appear in the SERPs are marked accordingly.

Redirects

301 Redirects

If you are not already using 301 redirects, setting them up can have an almost immediate boost in traffic. A 301 redirect directs traffic from one URL to another, passing link equity to the new URL. It is a good practice to set up 301 redirects to outdated pages or pages that no longer exist (404) so that any authority that the old page had is transferred elsewhere on your website.

Broken Links

Broken links point to a page that no longer exists. Linking to a page on or off your website will negatively affect your ranking. When this happens, Google and the user will see it as a bad user experience. You can find these links by doing a crawl on your website. Once they are found, redirect the link to a new page that fits the intent of the link. If there isn’t another page to replace it with, it’s best to remove the link. If your winery has had a website for at least a few years, there is a good chance you have some broken links.

User Experience

User experience is an all-encompassing set of best practices that is a web design discipline. For SEO, we will stick to the primary areas that impact SEO.

• Page Load Speed
• Menu structure
• Page layout
• Mobile-friendliness

Page Load Speed

Page load speed is simple. The faster your content loads, the more likely the user will enjoy the experience. A good rule of thumb is to look at your competition and make sure your page speed is competitive with theirs. Decreasing load speed from 3 to 2 seconds won’t make a noticeable difference in your traffic if the average winery website is 5+ seconds. Remember to measure and improve mobile performance since the use of mobile devices is becoming increasingly common.

Menu Structure

The menu is the primary way users will interact with your website, so it’s crucial to make sure that it’s easy to use. Only the most important top-level pages should be in the top-level navigation (TLN). Don’t clutter it up. TLN is also important because when Google crawls the website, it will recognize those pages in the TLN as the most important pages of your website. The pages that we have found to be best for wineries are:

• Locations / Visit page
• Wine / Shop page
• Wine Club page
• About / Contact page

Page Layout

Pages that properly use headers perform better. Headers break up the page so that skimmers, most readers, can quickly find what they are looking for. A well-structured page (H1, H2s, H3s, etc.) greatly improves the reading experience. Steer clear of blocks of text. Using plenty of Images and graphics helps break up pages, making them easier to read. When using images, be sure to leverage alt texts to describe what the image is. Alt text is not only required for digital accessibility but also gives Google context for what the image is.

Mobile Friendliness

Similarly to page layout, it is crucial to make sure that you design pages mobile-first rather than desktop. Google has indicated that mobile is the priority going forward. Check Google Analytics, more traffic is coming from mobile, and if not, it’s trending that way.

Now what?

Technical SEO can be complicated and hard to grasp since many aspects can affect website performance. The best place to start is with a website quality audit. A website quality audit will give you a clear picture of the issues hurting performance and the opportunities for improvement.

Local SEO

For many wineries, your tasting rooms are one of the biggest sales drivers. Getting customers into the physical location means more tasting room sales, wine club members, and online sales.

A local visit is the first step to making lifetime wine lovers and, more importantly, lifetime lovers of your wine.

Google has a localized results section in the SERPs that typically appear in conjunction with a map. These localized results show up at the top of the page, the most valuable real estate, one reason why local SEO is so effective.

Search intent is another reason why local results are so valuable. This means if someone is searching “wineries near me” or “napa wineries,” there is a very high likelihood they are going to go to one in the near future.

Google My Business Profile

The first step to local SEO is setting up your Google My Business Profile (GMB), now called Google Business Profile (GBP).

Myself and others may use GMB and BBP interchangeably.

Your GMB is your local listing. It’s usually the easiest way for your customers to find basic information about your business, like address, hours, and phone number. My searchers also use it as a way to find your website.

If you haven’t set up your GMB yet, here is where you can set it up.

Google My Business (Google Business Profile) Fields:

• Business address
• Business hours
• Business phone number
• Website
• Category
• Description
• Services
• Products
• Photos
• Reviews

It is very important to have all of the information thoroughly filled out. If you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Find out first. Google will look at all of your local listings and verify that all your information is uniform. If it isn’t all the same, your listing will be penalized and therefore be ranked lower.

When filling out your business description, be thorough. This is a chance to use important keywords and phrases that tell Google what your business does so you can rank higher when someone searches “wineries near me.”

Filling out this information will also save your team a lot of time on the phone answering basic questions most people will get answered via your GMB profile.

Local Posts

Similarly, social media posts can be made on the GMB platform. Regularly posting on GMB show give Google another reason to rank your winery higher because it shows them you value keeping your customers and their users updated with valuable information. This is a small thing to do, but it goes a long way to make your winery locally relevant.

Reviews

Getting reviews is a whole service in itself. Good reviews will have a massive impact on your business, especially from an SEO perspective. Since reviews are usually a direct indicator of how users view your business, it’s very important that you, as a winery, value them too.

Some good practices around review management are:

1. Make sure your GMB is set up so you can get reviews
2. Ask your customers to review on Google via email/text.
3. Respond often to reviews, especially negative ones.
4. Listen to the feedback.

Wine Content Optimization and Creation

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is the process of making various changes to a website or web page to make it more appealing to search engines and improve its rankings. This includes things like optimizing titles, headings, meta descriptions, content, images, and internal linking.

This is important because it helps search engines better understand the content of your website and rank it for relevant search queries. By optimizing your web pages, you can make sure that your site is visible to more people, leading to increased traffic and improved visibility.

Here is your On-Page optimization checklist

• Title tags: exist, no duplicates, correct length, optimized
• Meta descriptions: exist, no duplicates, correct length, optimized
• Header tags (H1, H2, H3): well structured content
• Internal and external links: no broken links,
• Images: used whenever possible, alt-descriptions
• Anything on your website should be optimized and used within best practices.

To get a comprehensive Winery SEO Checklist, sign up here, and I’ll send it to you.

Winery Page Types

While every winery sells wine differently, here are 6 of the most common page types that wineries use and how you can optimize them for SEO.

Homepage

Your homepage will be the primary landing page for most searches, so make sure it is the best page on your website. Fill it with engaging content about your wine and tasting rooms. Placing internal links to high-value pages like your most popular wines, wine club, and reservation pages will help increase the ranking of those pages.

Location Page(s)

Whether you are a single-location winery or a winery with over 50 locations, having a landing page for each location is very effective. When users search for wineries, they often search based on their location. Having a local page for all of your locations will ensure you capture as much of that traffic as possible.

Wine Club Page

Your wine club page should be more than just a place for your customers to get information about your wine club. It’s your best marketing asset for the wine club. A common mistake is filling the page with the bare minimum content. Your wine club is probably one of the top profit drivers, so make sure it’s optimized accordingly.

Product Category Page(s)

Most wineries use their category page as a menu page to direct users to red, white, or sparkling wine. This is a massive missed opportunity. This is an opportunity to provide your users with snippets of wine education and increase your rankings.

Product Pages

Your product pages shouldn’t be filled with confusing wine-tasting note jargon. People don’t search like that. Provide tasting notes that are clear and descriptive but not overly verbose. Use localized keywords to describe the wine and the region(s) the grapes were grown.

Blog Pages

Blog content is the best way for wineries to connect with their customers and to add new pages and keywords continuously without bogging down the website. We’ll talk more about this later on.

Content Creation

Wineries that regularly update pages and create new pages get more wine sales than wineries that only update their website a few times a year.

If you have been on the internet in the past 10 years, you have probably seen the phrase “Content is King.” This could not be more true. In a day where it seems like everyone is creating content or starting a podcast, it might seem too late to catch up. Thankfully that’s not the case yet.

Warning, creating low-quality content will hurt you. The statement “Content is King” is not a license to pump useless content to “game” the system.

While you won’t be the first to do it, you will still be one of the early ones. Of every 10 wineries I see, less than 1 has a blog or regularly creates content. Through content creation, you will:

1. Sell more e-commerce wine
2. Get more brand visibility online, selling more wine through distributors
3. Sell more wine to current customers by building loyalty and trust.

Winery Content Topics

These are some of the best topics any winery can use to create content using the pillar and cluster model.

Local

• Best Wineries in Paso Robles
• Best restaurants in Fredericksburg
• Events in Willamette Vally

Winery Information

• What to wear
• Winery vs. Tasting Room vs. Vineyard
• Wine Tasting Experience

Wine Tasting

• Wine varietal comparisons
• Tasting terms
• Serving temperature

Your Story

• How we got started
• Texas wine history
• Our Process

Wine Knowledge

• Types of wine
• Grape growing process
• Wine glass shapes

Parings

• Red meat pairings
• Seafood pairings
• Desert pairings

Regular blogs help you rank for additional keywords and capture traffic by creating useful content based on what users are searching for. Secondly, Google will start to consider your website as an authority on wine topics, which will boost your ranking.

Link Building

The currency of Google rankings is links. The more quality, industry-relevant domains that link to your website, the higher your pages will rank. Links can be built up organically over time by creating quality content other websites want to link to. Link can also be built manually by using outreach.

Over time the most effective and profitable way to build links is organically through content creation. Content creation is scalable, whereas manual outreach is less scalable. When getting started, you will need to build link-building momentum, so it’s best to do manual link-building in the beginning. Without it, you’re facing a catch-22. Your content won’t generate links until it ranks high, but it won’t rank high unless it has links.

A great place to start is to look for domains that link a broken page (404) on your website. You can find these links using a backlink tool, like hrefs. Using a 301 Redirect, point the broken page to a new page related to the topic of the referring page. This doesn’t require any outreach, which makes it a great place to start.

Next, look for websites that reference your wine brand but that don’t link to your website. Reach out to them and give them a link to your website that will add value to their content and help their readers.

Lastly, look at the links your competition has. You can find these links using a backlink tool. Chances are, their links are also relevant to your winery. Focus your outreach efforts on these domains because you have a higher chance of getting a link from their site since they already link to another winery.

How To Do SEO for a Winery

By now, you should have a good idea of all that goes into SEO for a winery, but the most important part is getting it done. Here is the recommended order to start SEO:

1. Technical audit (1 – 2 months)
   1. Website quality audit
   2. Address all technical issues
   3. Analytics audit
2. Local optimization (2 weeks)
   1. Set up GMB
   2. Optimize GMB
3. Content optimization and creation(1 month – ongoing)
   1. Content audit/strategy
   2. Keyword research
   3. Topic ideation
   4. Content brief
   5. Copywriting/editing
4. Link building (1 month – ongoing)
   1. Link strategy
   2. Link target analysis
   3. Link outreach
   4. Link tracking

SEO is highly effective in expanding your reach as a winery, but it is a complicated algorithm constantly changing. Learning effective SEO takes time, effort, and money. This is why we always recommend using an SEO expert so that you can focus on the rest of the business. Even if you have experience with SEO, having someone who is 100% focused on SEO is the most effective.

Want Some Help?

If you want to focus on making wine and running the winery and want a wine industry SEO expert to help you with your SEO, check out our process below:

Schedule a Discovery Call: A 30-minute call to dive into your winery’s current marketing strategy, competitors, and marketing goals. Get started here.

Receive a Free Analysis & Sales Projection: We’ll create a roadmap for your winery to sell more wine, acquire more wine club subscriptions, and get more reservations. We’ll also provide you with an accurate estimation of what your traffic and sales could look like after doing SEO.

Start Selling More Wine: We’ll begin our Winery Growth Framework, increasing online sales, wine club members, and in-person visits.

Does SEO Really Work For Wineries?

As a vineyard or winery owner, you might wonder if it’s worth investing time and money in search engine optimization (SEO). There are so many marketing channels vying for your attention, and knowing which to prioritize is overwhelming.

SEO is one of the most effective and efficient ways to attract targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is the key to generating massive sales, making it an essential investment. In addition, SEO builds brand awareness and establishes your winery as an authority in the industry or your local area.

SEO is not a one-size-fits-all service, success is in the details. We highly recommend using a professional who deeply understands SEO and all that goes into positioning your website to benefit from it.

Investing in SEO means your winery is doing what is required to become successful online. SEO will take 3 to 6 months to see significant results, but the long-term benefits are well worth the effort. Don’t let SEO fall by the wayside because organic traffic is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy.

What is  SEO?

SEO is a set of techniques to increase your organic (not paid) ranking in search engine results, such as Google and Bing.

Increasing your search engine ranking increases visibility, traffic, and, most importantly, sales.

The most valuable resource in the world today is attention. SEO is an effective marketing strategy because it capitalizes on intent. Intent capitalizes on attention that already exists. When someone is Googling a topic, they have intent. Their attention is already on that topic; otherwise, they wouldn’t be searching it out.

For example:

When someone Googles “wineries near me,” their attention is focused on finding a winery near them. So as wine marketers, we want to capitalize on their intent to find a winery and show them your winery.

Intent-Based Traffic

Let’s compare SEO (organic traffic) to a Facebook Ad (paid traffic) where traffic doesn’t have intent.

Most ad traffic is on platforms with an intent usually unrelated to your winery. If someone is on Facebook or Instagram, they’re there to connect with friends, and unlikely they’re using it to find which winery to go to.

When using paid ads, your ad must be so great that it captures their attention and convinces them to buy your product. Even if the ad grabs their attention, there is a low chance they will convert because there is a never-ending amount of ads also probing for attention.

Searcher intent is incredibly powerful, so you must pay attention to SEO. SEO is essential so that customers find you when they look for you.

Paid ads can be a great supplement to any business’s marketing strategy. However, it is important not to build your business model around it because it will be hard to scale profitably.

Organic = No Ad Spend

Organic traffic is paramount if you want to build a winery that will be successful for years and decades.

With a Paid Ad, the sales stop as soon as the ad ends. Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic does not compound. Paid ads are challenging to manage and are expensive over time without the right strategy.

Compare this to SEO, where organic traffic is free. If you invest $1000 in SEO today, you will continue to get sales as a result of that investment month after month (or years). Continuing to invest in SEO will cause your sales to compound, passively generating sales month after month.

If you want to increase wine sales and profit (most important), an organic marketing strategy, like SEO, is the best way to do both.

What SEO Actually is…

Now that you understand why SEO is great from a marketing perspective, let’s discuss it more practically.

SEO is…

• Fixing technical issues on the website affect SEO
• Creating quality industry-related content
• Optimizing local listing and maps
• Building links from other websites
• Improving website user experience
• Increasing page load speed

Understanding the practicalities of SEO is important, but what’s more important is understanding how it applies to your winery and why you should do it.

Why should my vineyards or winery do SEO?

Expense vs. Investment

The biggest mistake in marketing is viewing marketing as an expense rather than an investment. The goal of marketing is always to make more money and increase profit.

If you view it as an expense, you’ll never see the returns because you’ll constantly be trying to minimize and reduce the “costs,” whereas, in reality, you’re only diminishing the returns.

Wineries should care about SEO because it will make them more money. SEO is an investment.

Getting Found

Every day thousands of people, literally thousands, are searching for wineries to visit or to buy wine online.

Here we can see over 90,000 searches over a month where someone is looking for a winery nearby to visit. Don’t forget all the variations of this search term which include 10s of thousands of searches.

Then don’t forget to add in all location-specific searches such as “napa wineries.”

Then there are hundreds of wine lovers looking for wine clubs to join, “wine clubs,” and all the variations and location-specific keywords searchers use to find wine clubs.

One of the smartest ways to secure more customers is to provide them with amazing content for the questions they’re asking google. When people search for wine-related topics like “red wine serving temperature,” here is another opportunity to show up and provide your customers with helpful knowledge that will earn new business.

Do you want to show up when potential customers are looking for you?

The key to being found online is more than just word of mouth. Your website must be optimized for the search engine so that your website shows up when people search for wine-related topics.

When you invest in SEO, you are investing in your online reputation. Establishing an online authority ranks your website higher in the search results (SERPS) and the local map packs so that more people can find you organically.

Sell More Wine

The best way to sell more wine? Get more customers. Whether your goal is to get more in-person visits, online sales, or grow wine club members, SEO helps you do all that and more. Increasing organic traffic allows the business to grow without the expense of Ads, which is difficult to scale without the right strategy. SEO will enable you to continue to acquire intent-focused traffic month over month, customers looking for and ready to buy wine. There is no need to spend all your profits on Ad Spend.

How to get started with SEO

While SEO is not rocket science, creating an SEO strategy is no small task. So here is some help on how to get started.

The four categories of a good strategy for any winery are:

• Local SEO
• Technical SEO
• Content SEO (On-page)
• Link Building (Off-page)

Since each of these categories requires deep knowledge and understanding of SEO best practices, most wineries choose to hire an agency specializing in SEO rather than doing it themselves.

Want Some Help?

If you want to focus on making wine and running the winery and want a wine industry SEO expert to help you with your SEO, check out our process below:

1. Schedule a Discovery Call: A 30-minute call to dive into your winery’s current marketing strategy, competitors, and marketing goals.
2. Receive a Free Analysis & Sales Projection: We’ll create a roadmap for your winery to sell more wine, acquire more wine club subscriptions, and get more reservations. We’ll also provide you with an accurate estimation of what your traffic and sales could look like after doing SEO.
3. Start Selling More Wine: We’ll begin our Winery Growth Framework, increasing online sales, wine club members, and in-person visits.

Helpful Resources

Not ready for a call? Here is our in-depth guide on SEO for Wineries. In this guide, we will walk you through step-by-step everything you need to know to sell more wine through SEO.