As you might know, I work in the wine industry and spend a lot of my time educating clients about various online marketing strategies. When you operate a bricks and mortar business, one of your main goals is to get customers through the door. For a winery with a tasting room, this is especially important. With the rise of mobile devices, and location-based social tools like Foursquare, we’re seeing a huge rise in local-oriented searches.
Think about the last time you were out shopping, and wanted to find a place to buy something, let’s say a pair of sunglasses. You probably opened up Google Maps or your mobile browser, and typed “sunglasses” into the the search form. Search engines like Google have tailored the way they deliver results, and in particular, they focus on providing highly relevant local businesses that match whatever you’re searching for.
In the presentation below, I focus on the Oregon wine region, but the same principles apply for any area.
In this presentation, I explore some of the ways you can gain more exposure from these types of local searchers. As someone who has frequently driven up Route 29 to go wine tasting, I can attest to the number of times I’ve searched on Google Maps for “winery” or “wine tasting” while looking for the next spot to visit. Local search marketing and the wine industry make for a perfect pairing; with its huge base of tourists, there’s a constant deluge of people actively looking to find this type of business. But can they?
Resources:
- Top local citation sources by city
- Frommer’s CA travel forum
- TripAdvisor’s CA travel forum
- 16 ways to create unique local content for your city/region
- Schema.org generator for local businesses
- Adwords Express
Services:
- BrightLocal – BrightLocal provides one of the best local search optimization platforms that I’ve come across. They have an excellent set of tools, and focus only on local SEO, unlike some other services that bundle a local package into a larger suite of tools.
- UpCity – UpCity was formerly known as DIYSEO and they have a really nice suite that you can use to power your local search marketing campaigns, in a “do it yourself” style. While I have not personally used them, they have gained a strong following and have very approachable prices.
