Google is putting more focus on local businesses and location services. In this post I go through all the things you can do to make sure your local store is at the top of the search rankings. It is an update of the blog post I did back in Feb-11.
Wine SEO
Wine SEO can be split into many sub themes:
Local Search (starting with this post)
Search engine optimisation (start with this post)
The biggest challenge for eCommerce sites and SEO: Content Duplication - 1
Themes - 2
Content - 3
Actually there's much more to SEO so I've split it into many sections and dispersed it into other categories like Selling Wine Online and Comparison Shopping Engines.
What's it is not is "Web Spamming". Unfortunately this is the reputation it's getting so please ignore that. What we're talking about here is ensuring you have great links to your site from authority websites and that Google is clearly able to see you have great things to say about buying wine.
Local Wine Stores on Local Search: the Top 10 Things You Can Do
February 21, 2011 By 1 Comment
A survey is done each year to see what Local SEO experts think the most important factors are. I go through the top 10 here from a local wine store perspective. In 2010 they included: 1. General Importance of Claiming Place Page; 2. Business Address in City of Search; 3. Associating Place Page with Proper Categories
Wine SEO in 3 words – High Quality Links
January 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Wine SEO is about four things: Trust/Authority of the Host Domain (i.e. “www.the-domain.com”) Link Popularity of the Specific Page (i.e. “www.the-domain.com/the-specific-page.html”) Anchor Text of External Links (i.e. this is what anchor text looks like ) On-Page Keyword Usage (e.g. keywords in the title tag – usually seen at the top of your web browser) EDIT [...]
The Internet Emperor says faster, so I turn to the Optimizer
October 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I redesigned MyLocalWineStore to make it faster. I replaced the theme and logo, and made the content easier to find. The key way I improved performance though was through an optimizer, specifically W3 Total Cache, but there are many you can use as well. I cover why I did this and some other reasons why I changed the design.
The Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US
June 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The top 5 by SEO factors only. Not by any usability tests, sales, content, wine range or other consumer factors – just industry SEO analysis for the broad term “buy wine”. Wine.com is miles ahead of anyone else. Winebuys is behind the rest of the pack. It’s the middle of the pack that are in a serious battle for spots 2 and 3.
How a Cheese Store did better than a Wine Store in Google
June 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Showing how to do better on Google by analyzing the search engine results for local wine stores in CA 90210. The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills is ranked in the top two places in local search and organic search. Now perhaps they are famous in Beverly Hills but check out their site. This cheese store has 686 external links from 250 unique websites. This little cheese store for Pete’s sake! Okay – they also sell wine, but not prominently on their website. Photos of the store suggest perhaps one third to one half wine and the rest in cheese? Let’s dig a little further into what’s going on
The SEO Problem with Normal Wine Retail eCommerce site Set Up
June 15, 2010 By 2 Comments
The problem is around categorization and I get a little technical on ya, so please bear with me. I first outline how to categorize your wine eCommerce website for search engine optimization – luckily this is very similar to how you do it normally, but with some exceptions. The second part of this post discusses those exceptions. It is all about theming your website and using links to show search engines your theme.
Are you using Wineries’ Wine Descriptions? If so, you have a Problem.
June 8, 2010 By 1 Comment
Copying wine descriptions isn’t really an issue with wineries given that they are usually very happy with wine retailers using their “poetry” (note there are copyright issues). The issue is really with Google. Google is smart. It is very user focused and knows that searchers do not want the same content for every link in the Google search results page. So Google detects duplication of page content. Google knows if a wine description is a duplication of the winery’s description. It only wants to include the “best page”. Google probably regards the “best page” as the winery’s product page*. Therefore the winery will get the ranking for it’s own page. The rest of the pages will be either discarded (in SEO language made “supplemental”) or given a poor ranking for organic (“left side”) search results.
How to Rank Higher than your Competitors in a Local Search on Google
June 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Local Search is more important for the local wine retailer selling wine online than the normal SEO guidelines you may read about
