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.