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