Winery owners looking to increase tourist traffic to their tasting rooms should consider expanding their website with web pages optimized for each town name in their primary market area.

Tourism Search Traffic

Google and Yahoo seem to reward well organized websites. They also seem to reward well written content placed on meticulously named pages. Since the California Wine Country is a tourist destination, consumers planning a trip to the wine country will often use town names to narrow down their trip itinerary. Towns like Oakville, Calistoga and Yountville have grown in popularity for tourists and these town names are often included in search phrases to track down hotels and restaurants.

Winery owners should capitalize on tourism search traffic by creating informative pages for each town in their primary market area (PMA). For some wineries, this would include every town in Napa and Sonoma counties. Winery owners know the best restaurants, hotels and tourists attractions in each town but they have not been told how to convert this information into more website visitor traffic and wine sales.

I have tested this SEO architecture on numerous client websites and the results have been outstanding. The caveat is that the content on the pages needs to be original and informative. You cannot copy information from other website directories. If wineries task this job to someone in their organization that can write, or to an outside writer who knows the area, this project can be completed in just a few weeks. This translates into creating permanent “fly-paper” to attract tourists for years to come. An increase in tourist traffic will yield more wine sales and grow your email marketing list.

An Example

I will take a fictitious winery called dunewines.com. If this winery was located in Yountville I would want to capture tourist traffic from all Sonoma and Napa County town names. So I would create a website sub-directory structure for every town in each county. Some examples are listed below:

- dunewines.com/ca/napa-valley/yountville-wine-tours.html
- dunewines.com/ca/napa-valley/oakville-wine-tours.html
- dunewines.com/ca/napa-valley/stags-leap-wine-tours.html

Each page would contain specific information about the town and some hot spots for tourists to visit. This could include restaurants, hotels, clubs, boutiques, coffee shops, etc. The page would of course have your winery information, tasting hours, maps, and directions. This information could always be on a side bar on all these targeted pages. The goal of this page is to be formatted meticulously so that Google and Yahoo respect the information contained on the page.

If done properly, the page will show up when people type in searches like:

- Yountville Wine Tours
- Oakville Wine Tours
- Stags Leap Wine Tours

The skill is how to format these pages using the latest search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This includes how to use HTML Titles, META tags, Internal Links and External Links to the pages to make them powerful. Once done, these pages will eventually become well ranked for popular search phrases used by the demographic you want to attract. This yields more hits to your website and the rest you can surmise.

Testing The Strategy

An example of this strategy can be found in another industry, but the concept is exactly the same. Go to Google and type these three phrases:

- Red Bank Infiniti car dealer
- Edison Infiniti car dealer
- Eatontown Infiniti car dealer

If you look carefully who is showing up on Google Page one, you will see company that follows the strategy I have outlined. See listing like:

- www.newcars.com/infiniti/car-dealers/new-jersey/red-bank/index.html
- www.newcars.com/infiniti/car-dealers/new-jersey/edison/index.html
- www.newcars.com/infiniti/car-dealers/new-jersey/eatontown/index.html

The three searches in this example are town names in New Jersey. In your mind replace this with towns in your PMA. The website www.newcars.com has made a page for every town in the USA and for every car model in the USA. This of course is done to a much larger scale but understand that this one website is gaining national page one prominence. The fact that their page names and directory names include the search phrases we entered IS NO COINCIDENCE.

More Traffic - Online and Offline

If you want to grow traffic to your tasting room and to your website, this strategy will yield greater visibility for your website on Google and Yahoo. Once this is done, you can expand this concept to include the creation of a page for each “A-List” attraction in the area. You would be surprised how easily it can be to get on page one with local points of interest that draw tourists.

Cheers,

Brian Pasch, CEO - Pasch Consulting Group

About the Author: Brian Pasch is the CEO of Pasch Consulting Group, a firm specializing in Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. The PCG website is located at www.seonj.com and Brian Pasch can be reached via email at brian@seonj.com. Brian is also an avid wine collector and wine advocate. His wine blog can be found at www.brianpasch.com.

This entry was posted by admin on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Clients, Direct Sales, Keywords, Marketing, On-Site SEO, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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