How Halleck Vineyard Gets 4896% Increase in Page 1 Keywords with 4 Monthly Articles
The Client
Halleck Vineyard is a family-owned Sonoma winery that makes some of the finest wines globally. They have made their mark on the wine world with their award-winning Pinot Noirs, but offer a range of wines available both online and in their Sonoma tasting room. As a part of their offerings, they also have an exclusive Wine Club and virtual tastings.
Industry: Wine & Beverage
Location: Sonoma County, California
Services Provided: SEO strategy, on-page optimization, monthly content creation
The Client
Halleck Vineyard is a family-owned Sonoma winery that makes some of the finest wines globally. They have made their mark on the wine world with their award-winning Pinot Noirs, but offer a range of wines available both online and in their Sonoma tasting room. As a part of their offerings, they also have an exclusive Wine Club and virtual tastings.
Industry: Wine & Beverage
Location: Sonoma County, California
Services Provided: SEO strategy, on-page optimization, monthly content creation
The Challenge
Lack of online presence with no in-house team to build a strategy for their new website and online sales
The emergence of Covid-19 and the lockdown which followed posed a severe revenue setback for small businesses. Like several brands, Halleck Vineyard wasn’t immunized from taking losses. Pre-pandemic, the 25+ years business depended on foot traffic that either knew them or found them through Google maps while visiting the famed wine region.
While they had a loyal fanbase with their existing Wine Club members, their audience was aging and new restrictions caused in-person tastings to dwindle. Seeing this, the team began thinking long-term about creating a sustainable business that doesn’t just rely on their brick-and-mortar tasting room.
Their resolve? Build a website, improve their online ordering experience, and facilitate virtual events.
They knew they needed to increase their website traffic in order to improve both brand authority and online wine sales. Plus, they wanted their SEO content to find itself at the intersection of casual, inclusive, informative, and effective.
These were brilliant decisions that came with tough but surmountable challenges.
- The wine marketplace is crowded with fierce competition. Many vineyards, wine blogs, and wine retailers had already built SEO and content powerhouses that made it extremely difficult for a new competitor with no domain authority to thrive online.
- The new Halleck Vineyard website had about five pages, which were insufficient to drive meaningful traffic.
- The Halleck Vineyard website pages weren't optimized to rank on search engines.
- Finding a partner that understands SEO and brand style/tone that can take over the brand voice from the Founders wasn’t easy.
Eager to find effective solutions, Eric Schwartzman, who’s Halleck Vineyard’s Marketing Consultant and Author of The Digital Pivot started searching for a marketer that had a process for producing repeatable outcomes.
SEO Content Examples
Our Solution
At OSO Content, we began with competitor research and conducted an SEO audit to find on-page SEO optimization opportunities. Insights from the audit helped us optimize Halleck Vineyard’s virtual tasting, on-location tasting, Wine Club, and wine variety category pages. Afterward, we used the topic cluster strategy to write, publish, and optimize 4 SEO-driven articles per month.
While doing this, we also kept the winery’s brand top-of-mind. We needed to position Halleck Vineyard as a place for non-pretentious wine lovers to come drink world-class wines while feeling like they are at home and amongst friends.
To achieve the client’s goals, we simultaneously optimized on-page content and clustered blog content.
Here’s a breakdown of our process:
- Interviewed the Halleck Vineyard team to learn more about their customers, top-selling wines, and style and tone to ensure brand alignment.
- Completed a deep competitor analysis, uncovering key gaps in the market.
- Implemented a pillar and cluster approach to SEO content creation, focusing on one of their four wine categories each month — Gewurztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc, White Zinfandel, and Pinot Noir.
- Enhanced their on-page SEO content and meta data for the wine category pages and tasting pages.
- Hyper-focused each piece of content (aside from the pillars). Instead of creating content that targeted highly-competitive keywords, we targeted relevant low-competition keywords that immediately started producing results.
This is a snapshot of some initial results:
Overall, our strategy quickly improved organic traffic within 6 months. By February 2021, organic traffic growth became exponential, leading to more users and more revenue.
One reason for this accelerated growth was our low bounce rate. While many factors result in high bounce rates, a prominent one is low-quality or under-optimized content on a website. This is why some businesses get bounce rates as high as 60% with the average bounce rate for all industries at 47% as of 2021.
Halleck Vineyard is off this bracket because our quality content, SEO strategy, and on-page optimization kept the bounce rate to as low as 4.46%.
This is almost 10x less than the average bounce rate. The result? More traffic, happy readers consuming your content, and more revenue.
Competitor Research
Conducting in-depth competitor research helped us discover two key findings. The first is this — publications, wine blogs, and retailers with lots of authority in the eyes of search engines were publishing a ton of wine-related content, but they were promoting online sales as affiliates or as larger retailers with many wines from different vineyards.
The second is that very few wineries were positioning themselves as experts in the industry.
These findings gave us the opportunity to do something remarkably different to favorably compete with these established websites. We were able to go from an unknown domain to one that owns key search engine placements, making us quickly outpace other competitors in both visibility and traffic.
Executing the Pillar and Cluster Strategy
Our content strategy employed the pillar and cluster method. Topic clusters are groups of related content that cover a broad topic. These clusters usually have a pillar page that targets a general, high search volume keyword and smartly interlinked cluster pages which target hyper-specific keywords with lower search volume.
This is a visual representation:
We determined these clusters by the sales and types of wine that Halleck Vineyard sold. We planned for four blog posts a month, with one being the pillar or main guide about a varietal.
We earned immediate ranking within the first month, starting a trend of hocky-puck growth as we built the clusters. Our original topic cluster garnered 300 monthly organic visitors, while our fourth cluster captured 10,081 monthly organic visitors:
An example of a pillar piece is the SEO content piece we wrote is a guide to white zinfandel. Meanwhile, an example of a lower search volume cluster piece piece of content is a question-based SEO blog post about Pinot Noir.
You can see both blogs here:
This post currently ranks for 196 keywords — 14+ of which are on the top of page 1 on Google.
This article ranks 268 keywords in the United States, attracts 2300 organic monthly visits, and saves up to $3,600 that the Halleck Vineyard team would have been spending on Google ads every single month.
Plus, 16 of the 268 keywords that this post is ranking are on page 1, position 1 of the search engines.
Our strategy was to address the questions and concerns that come up when people are optimizing their training routine - specifically those questions about ingredients and supplementation.
One of the simplest pieces of data that point to the relevancy of all these posts is OP2 Labs’ average time on page.
According to Google search results, a good average time on page is a mere 52 seconds across multiple industries.
The Results
Increase in Rankings, Total Site Visits, and New Users
Owner of Halleck Vineyard, Jennifer Halleck, is super-happy that their unique monthly pageviews, keywords ranking on page 1 of search engines, and the total number of organic keywords on the website have seen a massive spike.
Unique monthly pageviews have gone up by 285.68%. Keywords ranking on page 1 of search engines have increased by 4487%. And the total number of organic keywords on the website has jumped by 2248.53%.
But it’s not just about the huge upturn in keywords ranking and unique monthly pageviews.
According to Ahrefs, the estimated Traffic Value of organic keywords ranking on Halleck Vineyard is $7,600.
Traffic Value is the estimated amount a brand has to pay every month if they rely on paid ads. In other words, by creating content and ranking for over 11,000 keywords, Halleck Vineyard saves $7,600 each month.
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