SEO Strategies Bader Beer and Wine Supply

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1 Daniel Spung DTC 356 March 20, 2013 SEO Strategies Bader Beer and Wine Supply For this project, I ve chosen to analyze the web site of my favorite local home brewing supply shop, baderbrewing.com. The physical store is located in Vancouver, Washington, and is to my knowledge currently the only location in the United States. Bader s is very much a small, local business, but they do ship products from their online store. For this reason, it was difficult to determine exactly how I should go about wording my search terms in order to get a representative and useful sample of the results for my analysis. I suspected that without including some kind of reference to our local area, most search terms would be too generic to return the site as a top result. Since there are many local homebrew shops in states across the country, as well as several that ship relatively larger volumes of product, and therefore have a greater web presence, I felt that putting my searches into a local context was necessary. I did, however, consider that the store most likely appreciates business from other parts of the country as much as it does its local customers. Therefore, I decided to search two ways: once using keyword phrases alone, and once including the term vancouver in each phrase. This way, I hoped to gauge how the site appears to customers specifically searching for a local store, as well as those searching only for a certain product from any store. Based on my analysis of the search results, as well as the Google SEO Starter Guide, I was able to come up with several ideas on how the company might improve its standing on three major search engines. Each of these tools behaves somewhat differently, but the patterns that emerged during this analysis clearly show that the placement of key terms is critical in making the site easily understandable by users and web crawlers alike. Incremental improvements to the site can be applied in its HTML markup, its navigation and directory structure, and the way its content is presented and promoted.

2 Let s first take a brief look at the keywords used to perform the analysis of baderbrewing.com. Some were derived from obvious descriptors present on the site, such as the title and main focus of the store. Some keywords came from suggested and related terms; these typically included some of the top and high impact search queries reported on alexa.com. The remaining terms were brainstormed from simply browsing the site. Many of these were drawn from product categories and subcategories, as well as less central parts of the site like the distilling and cheese making sections. As was expected, Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go each responded differently to these keyword phrases. Some general patterns were apparent, however. First, almost none of the keyword phrases omitting vancouver returned the site within the top 25 results for any of the three search engines. This is not terribly surprising, but it might be more useful to take notice of those few phrases which did produce top 25 hits without localization. For beer and wine supply, the site appeared in the top 25 for all three engines; with vancouver included, it was consistently at or near the #1 result. The same goes for high gravity brewing, though without localization, this appeared at #5 only when using Google. The phrase beer replicator recipes returned the site for Google and Duck Duck Go (Bing was just shy at #27). These results confirm, for one, that the site title is a key term with regards to SEO. If the name of the site were instead Steve s Cotton Candy Consignment, obviously no one would know they actually sell beer and wine supplies, and they d probably never find it in a search. It also seems that the articles section of the site holds some weight in attracting traffic to the site, since beer replicator recipes and high gravity brewing relate to this content, but are not main parts of the store itself, nor products for sale. The exact reason these results are popular is unclear, but perhaps they are highly linked to from other web sites. When vancouver was included, the site s search presence was respectable across the three search engines overall. Only five phrases returned no hits at all, and these were generally references to relatively obscure products (e.g. oak barrels ) or terms unspecific to the focus of this site (e.g. spirits ). In general, the site seemed to perform better on Bing alone when searching for specific product

3 subcategories, such as draft accessories and malt extract. The hits largely increased for Google when searching more general categories relating to the site, like home wine making and beer ingredients. It rarely appeared with Duck Duck Go, except when searching the most general terms (e.g. brewing supplies ), or strangely, very specific ones (e.g. 8 gallon stainless steel pot ). Put together, all of this seems to suggest that an SEO plan targeting Google specifically should focus on the proper placement of terms relating to the overall scope of the site, as well as perhaps drawing more attention to product subcategories in order to create context for web crawlers. Several SEO improvements could be made to the HTML markup of baderbrewing.com. First of all, the meta description and meta keywords tags are nonexistent in the pages I analyzed. At the very least, a meta tag with a short description of the site s focus and what products it offers would create a great deal of useful metadata for indexing bots. If I were to write this, I would suggest something like: Bader Beer and Wine Supply is a home brewing store located in Vancouver, Washington. We offer beer and wine making classes, equipment, ingredients, draft accessories and a wide range of books, articles and recipes. A meta keywords tag could also help to include some of those terms which are not as central to the site, such as distilling and cheese making, or more specific products. Next, some of the page titles could be made more descriptive. For example, in the Cheese section, the title is simply Cheese (all page titles do, however, also include the site name). It relates to the content, and is not vague like Page 1, but Cheese by itself could also be referring to a bad joke, a photographer s catchphrase, or what the moon is made of. Something like Cheese Making Ingredients, Equipment & Finishing might say more about the actual content of these pages. Improving these areas might also help to attract customers who are interested in hobbies related to brewing or wine making. The site s URLs are generally simple, not generic, and relate well to the content of the page (e.g. The root URL is perhaps too generic, as it could be referring to an actual brewery, rather than a supply shop, though the actual title of the site is

4 fairly well represented on every page. The internal links throughout the site are formatted well for the user, and the anchor text is on the whole short, descriptive and appropriate. The site uses a great deal of image links referring to products, but each of these fortunately also includes a text link, which is helpful for indexing. However, few if any of these images have any accompanying text in the alt attribute (they are all formatted as alt= ). Adding some description in this attribute would help the indexers understand what is being linked to, though this context can probably be pulled from the text links mentioned above. Some external links to related sites have also been given a nofollow value, though it is unclear why they should not gain from the site s reputation. These include a local homebrew club and a bottle shop located downtown. Removing this might give these sites incentive to link back to baderbrewing.com, and both sites could then gain from mutual linking. Finally, the hierarchy of the heading structure used throughout the site seems to be a bit confusing. Overall, the headers are used appropriately to guide the user through parts of the site, but they could be changed to present better structure for web crawlers. The main logo header image persistent across all pages is placed within an h1 tag, but so are the headings for each main section. The Shop Our Store, Store Hours and other subsections are within h2 tags, as are the sections in the footer area (which is actually part of the HTML body). There are also a lot of invisible elements within h2 tags, which are most likely used for styling, but don t provide any semantic meaning. In some places, the text of an h1 tag appears elsewhere on the page as a subcategory link under an h2, such as in the beer making ingredients section. In the articles, the article type heading and the article titles nested beneath it are all in h1 tags. However, if one navigates to these same pages through the site s internal search bar, article titles are instead in h3 tags. Maintaining some uniformity in heading structure across pages and ensuring that the hierarchy reflects the importance of the content would improve the site for both users and bots. The navigation and directory structure of this site is generally well constructed, but some improvements could also be made in these areas. For the most part, the navigation is simple and

5 makes sense to the user; the site is divided into a few main categories, with subcategories and individual products nested inside. A breadcrumb type navigation system might be helpful for some users, but the navigation is not so complex that it becomes unwieldy. At most, the hierarchy is about four levels deep, and the main navigation is persistent. Therefore, it is not easy to get lost, nor does it take twenty clicks to get from point A to point B. Deeper investigation reveals that the structure changes somewhat confusingly in the deeper levels, however. For example, products in the directory root/products/wine/wine-yeast link to root/products/wine-yeast/productname. This behavior is not consistent across all product categories, either. In another example, natural fruit flavorings is nested inside the wine directory, while wine kits has its own directory, even though both are at the same level in the navigation under wine making ingredients. This might have been done to avoid more complex nesting, but it just appears somewhat redundant and confounds the overall directory structure. To create a naturally flowing hierarchy, all product subcategories at the same navigation level should be kept within the same directory level as well. The underlying directory structure should also correspond to the way the site is arranged for the user; many items under wine making ingredients are actually in the wine directory, which leads to a page not found message. Though it is embedded within the site, the page isn t customized, and it is not particularly helpful to the user in any way. Tightening up the directory structure would help to ensure that users trying to navigate the site in different ways, i.e. by deleting part of the URL, would not end up staring at a 404 error. Lastly, the site could be improved by making some adjustments to the arrangement of its content, especially in the non-product related sections. For example, in the articles and how-to section, the full text of the articles is linked from titles presented as a list of headings. These headings are sometimes accompanied by snippets often the first paragraph of the article, and sometimes are not. Some of these samples seem to cut off at an arbitrary point, such as in the middle of a recipe. In some cases, the heading link is simply repeated below as plain text at the same size and style, which becomes

6 confusing. Furthermore, there is no real organization here, as the articles are all just listed blog-style across seven pages with no dates or visible sense of order. The full articles themselves are formatted well, and very easy to read, but navigating through the links is somewhat difficult. Once you land on the article page, there is a link at the bottom pointing to groupings by article type, from which one can browse other related articles. However, the user has no way to know what types of articles even exist until they read them all. Linking to the articles through this type of organized structure would make it much easier to find useful information quickly. Furthermore, promoting these articles in an actual blog with announcements relating to new content (e.g. upcoming classes or new recipes) could increase attention and attract traffic to the site. There is an especially great deal of interesting and unique content present here, and the site could easily take advantage of the local community by simply promoting it a bit more. On that note, a Facebook page couldn t hurt either. In general, SEO can be improved greatly with meaningful HTML markup, clean and simple navigation, and treatment of content that focuses on the user first. As web indexing techniques are constantly changing, there are no hard and fast rules or magic tricks that can be exploited to increase a page s search rankings. However, SEO guides provided by the developers of the search engines themselves give a great idea of the best practices one can follow to improve their site. Moreover, these methods can be applied to sites of practically any scale, be they giant corporations or local businesses. By making small changes to many different parts of their web site, the folks in charge of baderbrewing.com could substantially increase the site s exposure on the web and likely expand their customer base.