How to Drive Traffic to Your Winery's Website with Content (Video)

In this video, Ben Salisbury walks winery and distillery owners and executives through the process of how to drive traffic to your winery or distillery website using CONTENT. If you want to rank higher in Google search and get more visitors to your website, having a solid content marketing strategy is a low-cost way to do it. They key is well-researched keywords and related keyword phrases combined with well-structured content. Ben methodically (but briefly) walks viewers through the basics. Content marketing is best tackled in a crawl, walk, run approach and this video will help you get started on the right foot. Whether you are brand new to the world of content marketing or already have some experience, this video will be very helpful to you. And, as always, we would love to hear back from you if you have any questions after viewing it! Enjoy the lesson.

Timestamps

To access the free training that Ben mentions in the video, please click here: The Definitive Guide for Selling More Wine and Spirits

Video Transcript:

One of my favorite ways to drive traffic to winery websites, especially well-qualified traffic, is by using content marketing. My favorite way to do that is writing a blog post. I try to pick a topic that's just a little bit provocative, maybe a little bit irreverent. I try to express myself and my beliefs very strongly. I think there's something very powerful that happens when you raise a flag and take a stand. It is attractive to people, and they remember it. So pick a topic that you want to write about that you think you could solve or could help with. Then do a little bit of keyword research. I recommend Keywords Everywhere. It's a Google Chrome extension, and it's free. You just type in a phrase like sell more wine, and it'll show you all the related keywords. Pick out a few of those keywords and key phrases and try to use them at least five times in your blog post. And if you can put it in the title of your blog post, especially at the beginning of the title.

SEO Tips for Winery Websites

So, we're talking about here is search engine optimization, some of the most basic forms of it. But if you start out writing your blog post this way, you'll get a lot more traffic to the website because of Google's search capability. So doing that keyword research, write a blog post of at least 1500 words. Google really favors blog posts that are written with a lot of words, that have a lot of writing to them, and it really works. So if you are not a good writer, you may have to get someone to write for you, but try to go at least 1,500 words, and really, if you could go over 2,000, that would be even better. Then you take this blog post that you've written. I just write mine in Microsoft Word or a Google Sheet, or whatever. Then you publish it on your website. Then you optimize it for search, and then you promote it on social media.

The 5-step Process for SEO

1. Do some keyword research.
2. Write the blog post.
3. Publish it on your website.
4. Optimize it for search.
5. Promote it on social media.

If you could do that every other week, that would be great. If all you can do is once a month, it's still going to be way better at driving qualified traffic to your website. Now, I want to talk just briefly about search engine optimization, because in number four here, I say optimize it for search. I think it needs a little bit more explaining. So one, two, three, four. There's four things here that you could do to do some basic SEO. Once you've got your blog post published on your website, and it's really easy to add a blog section to your website. You want to do these four things:

Break Up Texts with Headings and Images

You want to break up the texts as much as you can with headings and images. Google search algorithm doesn't like long paragraphs or long sentences, so break up your paragraphs, add some headings in. I like to think you just can't put in too many headings and then find some pictures. You can use copyright-free pictures on Canva. I like to use Shutterstock because I'm looking for just the perfect photo. Make sure that whatever photos you use, whatever images you use are copyright-free. So do a little search on Google about how to get your hands on copyright-free images that you can use in blog posts. Break up your text with headings and images. That is key.

Harnessing the Power of Keywords Strategic Placement and Frequency

Next, you want to use your key words that I talked about earlier, at least five times, and try to use them in the subject line or the heading of your blog post, the title, title of your blog post. And then you want to put captions on the images. This is fairly easy to do with most modern website software, so if you're not sure how to do it, you could probably search through the help section of your website and find out how. But it really does make a big difference in the searchability of your blog posts.

Linking for Impact and Authority: Internal and External Linking Strategies

And the last thing, which is very easy to do, anyone can do it. You want to use a lot of internal links and external links in the post. So as you're writing along somewhere in your writing, in your blog post, you may want to reference something you've written previously. Now, if you're just starting out, you won't have as many internal links, but if you do have articles that you've written previously, this is a good time to link to them, mention them, and people, you see this all the time. There's just a link. It's clearly a link, and you click on it, and it takes you to the other post. These are called internal links. Now, I've written over 50 articles, so I have tons of older articles that I can link to, and I use them liberally. You should also have some external links. It could be as simple as referencing an article you've read, pointing to an expert, pointing to somebody else's website, but the Google search algorithm likes to see those internal links and external links. So those four things could go a long way.

So just a quick recap. Do some keyword research, write a blog post of at least 1500 words, publish it on your website, optimize it for search, and promote it on social media. So let's talk about that last. I take the link that's from my website, taking you to the blog post, and I cut and paste that link into the post of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, is my favorite place to do it.

Driving Traffic with Social Media: Importance of Sharing and Engagement

Because I have a lot of industry connections on LinkedIn and just write a little intro. And you want them to read the blog post. So you might just say, "Click here to read the full article," or "Click here to read more." That means they're going to have to go visit your website to finish reading this article. Now, one final thought. If you're not comfortable writing 1,500 words, then do 500. Do 300. It's so important that you write. Take a position on something, write about it, publish it to your website, and use that link to it on social media to drive traffic. So keep playing around with this. There's so much information about how to use content marketing to drive traffic to your website, but this will be, hopefully, a great bit of help for those of you just starting out. Maybe you're starting your own business, maybe you're starting a consulting practice. This would be just a great way for you to get in the game and start driving traffic to your new winery website.

Free Training Video for Small Wine Brands Success and Selling Techniques

I hope you enjoyed this short video about how to drive traffic to your website using content. This is just the tip of the iceberg for a small brand to get a lot more traffic to their website. There's a lot of other things you can do. If you're looking to go further, you're looking for more training on how to drive traffic to your website, convert those visitors to subscribers, convert subscribers to paying customers. I want to invite you to watch a training video. It's about one hour, including the Q&A session, but in this video, I talk about the things that small brands need to do to box above their weight in their category.

Whatever category you're in, making vodka or wine, or something ready to drink in a can. Small brands need this kind of training, so I want to offer it to you for free. Check out the link in the description below. Enjoy the training, and if you have any questions, we're standing by to help. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up, and we hope that you'll subscribe. Thank you.