SEO basics for your winery or cellar door website
- Feb 3
- 7 min read
When you're planning a weekend away to one of Australia’s many excellent wine regions, it requires some serious research. With so many great wineries and only so many hours in a day, how do you decide on the perfect winery itinerary.
If you own a winery or cellar door, you want to make sure that you are showing up in these types of searches so that you don’t lose out to the winery down the road – whose Chardonnay maybe isn’t as great as yours!
Read this quick guide on the SEO basics for your winery website to make sure that you are prominent in search and not getting missed by potential visitors.
Utilise local SEO with Google Business Profile (and more)
As a physical business which wants visitors, the first thing you want to do is claim your business on Google Maps. Make sure you have added all your information accurately, your business name, address, phone number and contact information.
It can also be helpful to include some keywords in your description e.g "independent winery and cellar door in the Barossa" and also add some good quality images and photos. Take a clear image of the entrance to your property and the front of the building as well as any good pictures of the ambience or vibe of your winery.
Don’t forget about Bing and Apple maps
It might feel like Google is the only platform around, but remember that many people use Apple Maps to navigate and use Bing, owned by Microsoft, for searching.
Make sure your website is fast loading and mobile friendly
Some people are pre-planners (like me!), and already have a ready wish list of places to visit — but not everyone is as organised. You want to make sure you’re showing up for the spontaneous visitors, looking for a winery near them on the go on their phone.
Make sure you website looks great and is easy to use on a mobile, and it loads nice and fast, especially if you’re based in a rural area and the phone signal isn’t as great.
Test your website on your phone
When you’re building or updating your website, make sure you’ve looked at on a few mobile phones first. What looks great on a desktop, might not work on a smaller screen, and with the average Australia website having ~60% mobile traffic you want to be catering for the bigger audience.
Keep your images small and don’t load big PDF documents
To make sure your website loads fast on mobile, make sure your images aren’t too big. I generally keep full width images under 1MB (700-800KB is fine) and smaller images to around 500KB, logos and icons can be even smaller. You can either save them smaller or use an image compression tool to reduce the file size – I like using Kraken for free image optimisation.
Also, if you are uploading PDF menus or tasting notes, make sure that the file size isn’t too big either. Under 1MB is a good rule to follow, but the smaller the better. If you don’t need to change it too often, it’s also better to have the content on your website, as well as providing a downloadable version.
Write quality content with local relevance in a natural tone
That means you can’t paste it straight off of Chat GPT (sorry!), but if you do need help from AI to write the content, remember to give it a clear prompt to use the local language i.e “write this in Australian English” and give it a good edit. Read it in your voice and see if it sounds natural, consider if you’d ever use a sentence like "heralding from the viridescent landscapes we call home”?
Make sure your content is relevant
Although you are creating content to rank, you’re still writing it for your human customers. So write about what they want to hear. You know your business and the type of day-to-day questions and conversations you have with your visitors, so use your real-life experience to inspire your next piece of content.
Frequently asked questions are a great way to add helpful and relevant content to your website, as well as potentially reducing the amount of time you spend answering customer queries over the phone on via email.
Use structured data for rich snippets
This sounds complicated, but with the right tools it can be a very simple strategy to stand out from your competitors.
Rich snippets (also called “rich results”) are search results that include content like images and reviews inside the result.
For example, when you search for a recipe on Google and the top results have an image, cooking time and user reviews included.
These are created by adding some extra data called ‘schema markup’ into your website so that search engines can understand it.
For your winery or cellar door, here are some good options to try and use on your website, with links to the official Google documentation to apply it:
Local business (LocalBusiness) →
This can be added to help display a prominent Google knowledge panel about your business in search results, especially for searches including ‘near me’.
Adding this to your homepage can help display business information in search results such as services, contact and reviews.
Event (Event) structured data →
If your business holds special events, like tastings, live music or festivals you can add this information so that your events show up in search results.
FAQ (FAQPage, Question, Answer) →
I love this markup, and with the increase in AI search and LLMs it’s become ever more useful. This can be used with your frequently asked questions content to supplement the context and help it appear on search results.
Some CMS and website builders will automate the markup or offer a way to add it per page, so have a quick check in your CMS to see if they offer an easy solution. I can also create or audit schema markup for your website, get in touch if you’d like to discuss!
Note! Surfacing answers and information on search result pages can reduce your website traffic as users will find the answer before clicking into your site. Remember to look at your Impressions (how many times you are seen in search) as well as your Traffic metrics to see if it’s making a positive change!
Tools to support you SEO strategies
There are so many tools and programs out there that you can use to help measure, audit and even ideate your website’s organic strategy. Here’s a quick list of some great free and paid for tools to try, as well as some ‘must-haves’ to get started.
Must-have SEO Tools
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a must-have tool. Google wants you to submit your sitemap here to even start to rank. Although the measurement can be very top-line, as only accounts for your appearance in Google Search, it does integrate into many other tools to help you build a bigger picture. It also integrates into Google Analytics and Google Ads and Looker Studio to help with full website reporting in one place.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is just like Google Search Console, but for Bing users. You can actually set it up using your Search Console account, which is very handy. The reason we recommend both is so that you have a clear view across both of Australia's top used search engines. Also certain AI tools also use Bing search instead of Google, so this way you’ve covered!
Free SEO Software and tools
Yoast for Wordpress
If you have a Wordpress website, it’s very likely you already have the Yoast plug-in. Although there is a paid option, the free version is a really good place to start for your SEO hygiene, an it also helps you set up things like submitting your sitemap and robots.txt files. Although I find their traffic light system a bit hit-and-miss, it’s a great tool to have as standard for your Wordpress website.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
I love the full version of Ahrefs, but it can be a lot for a first-timer. I recommend getting their browser plugin for Chrome, Safari or Firefox. Open it in any page and i’ll give you a great snapshot of the pages metadata, headings, schema and indexability. If you have a paid version of Ahrefs it does so much more an can give you a great overview of your page level metrics.
Screaming Frog
An oldie, but still a goodie. You might need a little more technical knowledge for this tool, but if you want a really quick and downloadable view of all of your website's URLs and their SEO hygiene, then this is a great lightweight tool.
The free version lets you upload or crawl up to 500 URLs at a time, which is plenty for a small business. You can export a spreadsheet of all your URLs along with information like the meta data, headings, load speed and word count. However, if you are not a spreadsheet person i'd avoid this one!
Paid and Premium SEO Software tools
SEMRush
SEMRush is my go-to tool. It has a huge amount of tools to help you with keyword strategies, competitive research, paid vs free search reporting, and their Site Health Auditing tool is honestly my favourite. If you want to try the full version, SEMRush offer a free 7 day trial but be prepared, as there is so much in there you can quickly fall down a rabbit hole and your 7 days will have flown by!
Keywords Everywhere
Although there is a limited free version, I’d recommend buying some credits for this nifty little tool. Keywords Everywhere sits in your search results and gives you related keywords (including long-tail ideas) to help you find higher volume keywords and inspiration for more like-minded content. Although you will get ideas in the free version, the paid version will give you accurate monthly search volume, CPC and competition.
Botify
Admittedly, I wouldn’t recommend Botify for a beginner, but I did have to mention it because it is an incredibly powerful tool and it's the dream tool for anyone who’s into technical SEO. Pop this one on the back burner for when you’re ready, and you’ll quickly fall in love!
Get ready to rank
Okay, so that might have been a lot to take in for an 'seo basics' post, but you don't have to do everything all at once. If I had to pick the top 3 things to do first, i'd prioritise:
Claim your business on Google
Submit your sitemaps in Google Search Console and Bing
Check your site is working well on mobile
Once these three key things are done, you can start working on the rest of your SEO strategy, be it creating helpful and relevant content, adding structure data or reviewing your content for keyword opportunities.
If you need a helping hand
Get in touch! I offer help and advice on all things SEO, especially for wineries and the drinks industry, to help people find you and your wine!
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