Improving SEO For Your Brewery
Organic website traffic is hands down one of the most profitable digital channels for your business. Ranking well on various search engines will ultimately earn you more organic traffic too. The million-dollar question is “how can you improve your rankings?”
Well, SEO is kinda complicated. There are many things you can do to improve SEO, some straightforward, some highly technical. There is also a ton of commentary out there on the topic.
What we want to do is point you in the right direction on a few things we’ve found to be impactful. This isn’t a full dissertation on the topic but taking action on this stuff will definitely give you a lift.
Update Your GMB
Your GMB is highly relevant to searchers looking for information on your brewery and others like/near you. Brewery Hours, location, and phone number are obviously important so keep them updated (especially with special hours for holidays/events). However, there are several other spots to add more information that will get you involved in other searches and help you stand out.
Add photos to show off how cool your taproom is and how yummy your beer and food look. Include services to give more details about your business and appeal to more searchers. Publish regular updates to keep your GMB fresh - if GMB isn’t part of your content distribution strategy then it should be. I really can’t emphasize enough how valuable your GMB is.
Use Google Search Console
An important and yet often overlooked SEO tool is Google Search Console. Using it allows you to track how well your website is ranking for various search terms and the impressions/traffic you’re getting from search queries. In fact, GSC has evolved quite a bit just this year, now offering visibility on mobile website performance.
Make sure that your website sitemap is added to your GSC profile too. Doing so will give Google all the resources it needs to crawl your site more effectively and get you ranking faster.
Get Better Map Pack Visibility With Structured Data
Put your tech-nerd glasses on for a second… “Structured Data” refers to a snippet of code that lives in the header of your website and tells a search engine what your business is (business name, type of business, phone number, hours, location, etc) - which has a lot to do with how your business shows up on maps.
You can test your structure data with these free tools.
Website builders like Wix and Squarespace already have structured data built-in, so you don’t need to worry about messing with code there (whew!). You just need to make sure your “business info” is accurate within settings.
If you built your site on WordPress, then I would recommend installing a plugin called Yoast SEO and using their built-in Schema tools.
If you have a custom site, then you may need to manually install or update the code. Here’s a Schema generator tool that will help you build the code that you can later copy/paste. To install it, you’ll need to paste the code into the header of your site’s code. Important: if not done correctly, this can potentially break your website. If you’re comfortable doing yourself, great. If you are lost, hit up the developer that built your site or reach out to me and I can help connect you with someone to help.
Build Your Target Keywords/Phrases Into Your Meta Titles
Meta titles are the headings and subheadings of your website content (often referred to as H1’s, H2’s, H3’s, etc.) and they send signals about your website to search engines. Making sure that your target keywords exist in these places helps send the right signals.
There is a volume of information out there about meta title structure and how to squeeze the absolute most SEO juice from them. Seriously, you could go down some intense rabbit holes with this stuff. Here’s a shorthand way of approaching it… If your current meta titles contain almost zero target keywords then just adding them will make a huge improvement - so just worry about that. If your meta titles already have decent keyword placement, then you’re probably good.
Add Keywords to Your Image Alt Tags
This one is a surprisingly simple yet effective tool for gaming the search engine a little bit. Image Alt Tags are just a place to add a description to your images online. They are hidden to the public site and are usually overlooked. Here’s the thing, they are used by search engines to learn more about your site AND rank your pictures in image searches.
The potentially challenging part about updating your alt tags is that you might have a ton of images, which means you have a ton of alt tags to update. It usually isn’t hard to do this, but will take some time. BTW, you can literally paste the exact same alt tag into every one of your images and be A-OK - in fact, I totally recommend doing that.
Here are some how-to guides for updating image alt tags within various website platforms: