From Chateau Montelena to Chateau Ste. Michelle, FINE has designed and developed winery websites for archetypes throughout the industry. When FINE acquired Big Daylight in 2011 and established a search engine marketing division, the immediate opportunity was to move beyond building glamorous online destinations and focus on directing traffic to them. We’ve learned much about how to best approach SEO and online marketing for wineries.

One of the first revelations – many wineries simply do not own results around their OWN BRAND online. This goes above and beyond the name of your winery, and extends to every type of wine and release date featured on your website. It’s not that you don’t want wine.com or snooth.com to mention your product, it’s that ranking more highly allows you to tell your story first, especially if you also sell your wines online. With that in mind, here’s a taste of some frequently asked wine and search questions:

What should I do about age verification?

When it comes to SEO, the home page is all-important. So what happens when you are required to slap an age-verification on your homepage? We certainly don’t want Google to think your site is about “You must be 21 years of age or older to enter. Please select your date of birth below.” Your homepage also must resolve at http://www.yourdomain.com, and not redirect to http://www.yourdomain.com/ageverification.

FINE has handled this by creating a clever pop-up screen that allows the user to enter their age, while still providing plenty of search-engine friendly content directly on the homepage. You can see this in action on several FINE websites, including this Napa Valley winery.

Do I need to create a unique page for every type of wine?

YES. Don’t make the mistake of listing various types of wine on one page, instead of creating a page for each type. It may be hard for your 2007 Chardonnay to position if you haven’t really devoted a page to it. Other online retailers selling your own wine (along with tons of others) could beat you!

But I put all my tasting notes in PDFs! It’s so much easier to link to all of these from one page!

You’re right. That is easier. But sometimes building a SEO-friendly site takes some time and elbow grease. We guarantee it will be worth your while to take that fabulous PDF content, put it in a real HTML page instead, and then also continue to offer PDFs for download and printing. Some SEOs might advise you to use robots.txt or other methods to block the PDFs from being indexed since they would be duplicate content to the main pages, but honestly, Google is smart enough to figure this out on their own.

I want to position on Napa Valley Winery. And also Napa Valley Wines. How do I do that? Give me the secret…
Honestly, that is going to be very hard. This is what we call a “Vanity Term”. It’s an instance where you are not only competing against other wineries, but information sites, tour sites, and even hotels.  It looks so attractive and shiny, but remember that every rose has its thorn. If you want to position on that term and currently are nowhere even in the top 30, be prepared envision someone working on this 8 hours a day for an indefinite amount of time, building content and links. Probably 2 people.

Instead of focusing on on vanity terms, we suggest you focus on keywords specific to YOU. You will find these terms in the long tail, and the long tail can bring you more traffic than any vanity term ever would. This superb chart and SEO article from SEOMoz (we encourage you to subscribe to this site) illustrates this in more depth:

I want more people to come for wine tastings, and perform better in local search.
Local search is one of the best places a winery can work to optimize your brand and website. See this separate article we wrote, all about Local SEO. Also, don’t forget the huge power of Online Reviews. Also consider linking to your Google Places page from the footer of your website.

Any other tips I should know about?
Be sure to give every page on your website a unique Title Tag and Meta Description Tag that contains important keywords while also sounding great for users. Ideally you will write these by hand yourself, but if not, then create intelligent rules that auto-populate tags to make them as descriptive as possible. Back to that 2007 Chardonnay – if you created a page for it, but didn’t optimize the title tag or description (which instead only say the name of your winery), you’ve really reduced overall relevance for that page.

Also, if you sell your wine online, be sure you have registered and submitted a Google Merchant Feed.

Of course, from URL structure to website navigation, there are a variety of other factors that encompass creating a search-friendly website. But for those who run winery websites, these considerations may help guide you toward the traffic you so richly deserve.

They started in San Francisco 115 years ago. Since then, they’ve inspired what is now known as the craft brewing industry. Those who know them may know only of their signature brand, Anchor Steam. But Anchor Brewing is a brewcraft icon and innovator on many fronts, with legions of loyal fans. And their web and digital environment goes a long way to showing it as never before.

The Anchor Brewing Website
Like their beer, this site combines rich history and traditional process with some state of the art touches. Dramatic imagery from Anchor’s archives is used throughout. A drop-down “beer shelf” helps you navigate between beers using the bottles, a “Beer is Social” tab integrates to/from social media channels to make the brewery website a hub of activity. It’s all constructed using the latest technology brewcraft, some fancy javascript, which allows you to do things like navigate between images by pushing buttons or just scrolling.  A new blog is set to roll out in coming weeks, to house more history and brewcraft content than ever. Behind it all, a content management system helps keep the words and pictures fresh across the site and social media channels.

Social Media Management (Facebook, Twitter)
Anchor’s social media strategy has already tapped into significant latent demand. It turns out Anchor already has thousands of fans on Facebook that have been waiting patiently (on sites setup independently to celebrate Anchor Steam and Anchor Brewing) for Anchor to jump in. Anchor’s Facebook and Twitter presence inspired thousands of new followers in the first 2 weeks after their first ever post (“Anchor Brewing started in San Francisco 115 years ago. Then we started in social media 107 characters ago.”) Now, Anchor’s set to socialize with Anchor fans everywhere through both channels, and sharing a steady stream of FINE-generated Anchor updates and content including a calendar of new content and promotions. A new Facebook tab will be launching within a couple weeks.

In all, the Anchor digital presence is a significant step toward bringing this venerable brand to life online in multiple ways (with their distilling and corporate sites to follow). Put simply, it sets the standard for Anchor’s industry, just as they’ve always done with their products.

By now you’ve probably had a chance to check out the latest round of changes to Facebook’s user interface – and likely read/heard plenty of opinions about the new look. Facebook’s quest to display content relevant to users’ interests and usage patterns has resulted in yet another update to the News Feed. The resulting design is a bit more, shall we say, busy, for a service that’s never been too strong on design.

But for a moment, let’s put aside purely aesthetic considerations – things have gotten much more cluttered on Facebook. And let’s go with the question we’d ask as digital marketers: “How does this effect brands and their ability to engage?”

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{Each week, our own resident technologist “Dr. Brisko” scours the Interwebs to find examples of the arcane and interesting. They are first shared privately in the inner FINE sanctum, where we retain some as pure trade secrets. But we switch a short list public to give you just a taste, from technology deep dives to design to the, well, unclassifiable info that just may be the cure for what ails you.}

I, Interface
Applying Asimov’s three laws of robotics to UX.

The Ruins of Dead Social Networks
A requiem for BBSes, the forerunner to today’s social networks.

Samuel L. Ipsum
[BEEEP!]ING PLACEHOLDER TEXT! In keeping with the expletive theme, for those who want to generate some saucier placeholder content.

SEO for Non-[BEEP!]s
With this great quote “Good SEO is a by-product of not being a [Beep!]” We’ve edited this NSFW title, but if you’ll click through you’ll read about practices worthy of an expletive.

List of Changes in the Star Wars Re-releases
Han shot first!

The Great Lie – Lorem Ipsum
Content shot first!

Portland ranks 11th in list of world major bike-friendly cities
… “The smallest city to make the Top 20 list is Portland. We are aware that it doesn’t technically fit into the major cities category, but we were curious to see how the USA’s top cycling city would fare… Besides, we’ll never hear the end of it from Portlanders if we leave them out…”

PointPoint
A Plugin For Pointing To Things

Not sharing is caring
Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web.

Unfolding the IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Things We Build
The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item.

Radiolab:
An appreciation by Ira Glass

For most people, airline travel (particularly leisure travel) involves some research. Whether it’s a travel site like Expedia.com or directly on an airline website, over 93 million U.S. adults used the Internet for travel research in 2010, according to the U.S. Travel Association. In an online environment this competitive, converting users to customers is critical. And timing is everything. The Internet enables a cycle of simple touchpoints that can be used to nudge customers towards action.

A real world example. While researching flights to LAX for a trip to Los Angeles recently, I visited Delta.com and searched several itineraries but did not end up booking a flight. I also researched fares on one or two major travel industry sites. I decided to hold off on booking the flight and resume my research in a day or two. Which could easily have turned into 3. Or 4. Or possibly never.

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We’ve seen a number of references lately to the abysmal state of restaurant websites:

McSweeney’s Channels a Single Restaurant Site

Slate Lambasts The Entire Industry

It seems clear that the restaurant industry is not embracing the digital revolution. It’s as though the industry has surrendered to the mercies of Yelp. It’s true, many sole proprietor restaurants do not have the resources to deploy a state of the art online destination. But with as much attention as is paid to their entrees, a better result is within grasp of most.

With experience designing and building sites for high end and large scale restaurants and hospitality, we’ve learned a few simple things that help whether you’re a world-class destination or a mom and pop shop. So if you’re considering building a website for your restaurant (good idea – the web is probably THE single best place for a diner to find you), we share them here in an effort to clean up the whole Internet neighborhood.

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Continuing the multi-year rollout of Ste Michelle Wine Estates tools and touch points, you can now dial up the Chateau Ste Michelle website from your smart phone at http://www.ste-michelle.com/mobile/. The content and design is pared down and tailored to the medium, allowing for a simplified map, events, tours and other information you might need if you were literally on your way for a visit (hands on the wheel there, buddy). It facilitates channel partners who might be looking for tasting notes, and sharing of event and product info in social media, not to mention clicking on over to Ticketmaster for tickets to the concert series. Look for some added features, like the ability to run QR code-based promotions, in the near future.

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This Monday an intriguing email landed in my inbox from a friend, exclaiming about an interview she heard on NPR by Eli Pariser, author of the book The Filter Bubble. Destiny (Social Media? Facebook Filters?) continued to push the book towards me, as I later saw a Facebook post linking to Mr. Pariser’s TEDx presentation:

What’s a filter? Well, this refers to how search engines and websites tailor results for you. At face value, this seems like an great idea. Your Facebook feed depends on what things you tend to click on and interact with. If you start to ignore posts from one particular person or subject, then they’ll get filtered out. Similarly, your Google results depend on anything from your physical location to whether or not you are logged into a Google Account such as gMail, Google Analytics, or AdWords. You can read Google’s official explanation of Personalized Search for more details.

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