I will be conducting an SEO analysis of a website made for a former employer of mine – Flourtown Beverage. Flourtown Beverage is a beer distributor located in Montgomery County. For reference, here is the link: flourtownbev.com
When we take an initial look at the site using open site explorer, it shows that it isn’t doing well from an SEO perspective yet. The domain and page authority is low, and there aren’t any links pointing to the site.
For this project I’ll be using basic SEO tools such as :
- Moz Open Site Explorer
- Google Adwords Keyword Planner
Keyword Analysis
Flourtown Beverage is a beer distributor located right outside Philadelphia in Montgomery County. The market we want to attract is people from Montgomery County searching for a keyword such as “flourtown beer store” or “montgomery county beer store”.
Recently, beer laws changed in Pennsylvania to allow beer distributors to be able to sell six packs and twelve packs. This presents a new opportunity to also rank for something like “montgomery county bottle shop”. A bottle shop is a place that specializes in having rare beers, a place to drink them on premise, and the ability to buy six packs.
Since Philadelphia is so close, it would be tempting to try and rank for “Philadelphia beer store” but the problem is that you don’t want someone looking for a beer store that is currently in the far northeast or south philly.
Flourtown Pennsylvania is a relatively small town so it would be easy to dominate the results there. As such, it would be good to broaden our scope and reach for all of Montgomery County. Looking at the results for montgomery county bottle shop, the results are dominated by “bottle shops” and since Flourtown Beverage at this point is still a distributor, it would be best to try and rank for “Montgomery County Beer Distributor”.
As we can see, the search results are so low that Google isn’t even picking it up, but the same can be said of flourtown beer distributors, and montgomery county bottle shop. Although the search volume is low, it’s the most targeted keyword available that gives us the largest customer base.
Competitive Analysis
As we can see from doing a google search of our keyword, Flourtown Beverage is already sitting at the top of google places. This is good, but ranking for the organic results as well would be better. By doing a google search we can also get a good idea of who the competition is.
Ambler Beverage Exchange and Narberth Beverage Co round out the top of the google places list, and Madonna’s Beer Distributor and Beer Etc make it to the top 10 of organic results.
In order to get an idea of what we’ll have to do to beat out the competition on organic results, I’ll have to take a look at Beer Etc’s site stats.
beeretc.com has a domain and page authority of 1 with 0 links pointing to it’s site. It would be very easy to defeat this site by adding a few links or looking at some onsite seo issues.
Increasing Authority
If we take a look at the title tag, meta description, and h1 tag for flourtownbev.com, notice that it’s not being optimized as good as it can be for the keyword we’re looking to rank for. First of all, the title tag is “flourtown beverage”. This doesn’t do us any good because we’re already going to be ranking for flourtown beverage as it’s the name of the business and the website.
My suggestion would be to change the title tag to “montgomery county beer distributor”. I would also include an h1 and meta description that includes the keyword. Something like “Montgomery County’s best beer distributor.”
Offsite Link Building
Even though our competitors have very little authority themselves, it would be worth while to take a look at what links they do have and see if we can’t build links there. If we take a look at amblerbeverage.com’s stats, it’s obvious that they have more authority than other competitors.
They also have a couple follow links pointing to their site that reveals a potential source of easy links for our own site. All of Ambler Beverage’s links comes from a business directory for Ambler PA called amblermainstreet.org. They also have a link from a site called amblergives.com which seems to be a charity event site.
We could easily get a link to flourtownbev.com on amblergives.com by sponsoring one of their events and having a link placed on their site like Ambler Beverage did. Ambler is one town over from Flourtown so it would make logistical sense to do this for reasons other than SEO.
Secondly, we could easily find a similar Flourtown business directory and get listed there. Another spot to target would be a local newspaper like Montgomery Newspapers.
Final Thoughts
Making these small onsite changes and reaching out to some high authority flourtown sites would put flourtownbev.com in a much better position. There is more that can be done in the PPC and social media area as well like dipping into the philadelphia market. A small website like this is open to many possibilities in digital marketing to improve it’s conversion rate and bottom line.