Google PPC Keyword Secrets For Selling Wine Online

What keywords do the top online wine sellers target?

How many clicks do they get from them?

Should smaller wineries use or avoid these keywords?

To get some understanding about the answers to these questions we have done some analysis that will be in two parts:

What keywords do the top 10 wine sellers target? (top 10 by Google search ranking)

What keywords do the top 10 wineries target? (top 10 wineries by volume that have a webstore)

This post is about the first question.

In late May we looked at what wine sellers are listed in Google’s top 10 when you do a search simply for “wine”.  Most of these companies are not wineries, but rather distributors of wine who sell a wide range of products, unlike wineries, which are typically limited to their own brand.  It is natural to assume there are differences in how the two categories of businesses do their marketing and advertising.

The top 10 wine sellers we looked at are:

Again, these were the top sites returned by Google from doing a search on “wine” on a particular day in late May, and selecting only the results that were actual sellers of wine.  Google results are constantly shifting so the results today will certainly be different.

At any rate, we took these wine sellers and then looked at all the Google ads they have run in the last six months and which keywords they targeted for those ads.

There are a number of ways to slice up this data.

For example, here are the most popular keywords targeted by all online wine sellers and how many different sellers targeted them in the last six months:

Another question: which keywords generated the most clicks per day in the last six months?

A simplistic view of this data might lead you to think you should target the keywords getting the most clicks.  But there are two primary considerations against doing this:

1. Those are often the most competitive and most expensive keywords – if you’re a little winery, with small volume, you can’t possibly cost justify purchasing those keywords to the same extent as the big guys.
2. Clicks on general keywords, like “wine”, do not deliver nearly as focused and motivated buyers as do more specific keywords like “Napa Valley chardonnay”.

And what were the most expensive keywords targeted by these top 10 wine sellers?

Those are some very expensive clicks – they sure better convert them to sales!

You may wonder who was spending so much money on these ads.  In this high-priced, highly-clicked group it was cawineclub.com, brix26.com and klwines.com that invested the most money.

There is a whole other aspect to this analysis we have not yet touched on and that is doing the proper keyword research to see what people are actually searching for.  You might presume that companies that would spend so much on advertising would do thorough research, but I can tell you from past experience that it definitely is not always the case.

In a future post I will review what I call “keyword arbitrage”, which is looking for opportunities in the spaces between what is searched, what is clicked, what is targeted and what is bid.

How You Can Use this Information

If you are a winery selling your own brand online this should primarily be an article about what you should not do.  You should not try to compete directly with these companies.

What you should do is focus your efforts on smaller niches which you target consistently in all your marketing.  But before you start targeting you should begin by doing your research and understanding what people are actually looking for.

For the full report of nearly 6,000 keyword usages by these top 10 wine sellers, contact us here.