Alcohol D2C Retailer’s SEO Journey to 925% Revenue Growth

THE CHALLENGE

Breaking into the bustling online alcohol market, where big brands and aggregator sites rule the search results, was no easy feat for Midleton Distillery Collection. Especially with disjointed branded shop sites, ongoing issues with website migrations and limited online awareness, they needed a strategy that would make a big splash, fast.

OUR STRATEGY

Wolfgang’s proprietary ‘SEO Scorecard’ benchmarked the Midleton Distillery Collection (MDC) against its competitors and revealed the need to focus on the ‘Relevance’ and ‘Experience’ pillars to grow the brand and eat into the traffic share of our closest organic competitors.

Relevance

MDC has seven different brands under it. To maximise ROI, we identified and prioritised the most in-demand brands, starting with Jameson. Being mindful that AI is changing the way search engines read and understand content, we used a special process of semantic HTML optimisation on Jameson product ranges. This proved crucial. We saw an overall 257% increase in organic traffic to the site YOY and 51% of this came via the semantically optimised Jameson products.

Experience

Cannibalisation, where multiple MDC pages were competing for the same keywords was perhaps the most damaging issue on the site that needed to be rectified. We optimised the canonical and noindex tags enabling search engines to better understand and distinguish between pages on the site to improve crawling and indexation.

INNOVATION USED

We took a modern SEO approach that takes advantage of two key things:

1. Making MDC’s website information more meaningful (through ‘semantic HTML optimisations’). We used GSC data and AI-generated keyword suggestions to map out the most relevant semantic queries. We then updated the website’s content and back-end HTML code strategically using these terms.

2. Linking related information together (using ‘connected structured data’). Having run many tests at Wolfgang, we knew that using ‘connected schema’ would be a brilliant way to give search engines a clearer understanding of MDC’s offerings. We created custom connected templates to provide more contextual information about MDC’s product and collection pages. This was key to improving organic visibility on both desktop and mobile by 25%.

BUSINESS GROWTH

Organic Revenue: +925% YoY
Organic Impression Share: +293% YoY
Organic Traffic: +257% YoY

The icing on the cake was the fact that, in key markets like Ireland, MDC increased its organic traffic share from 12% to 37% eating into organic real estate captured by SERP competitors.

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What our clients say

Don’t just take
our word for it

"We launched the Midleton Distillery Collection online shop along with a brand new domain in July ’22 - our challenge for Wolfgang Digital was to help us create a long term and sustainable organic growth strategy. The results have been incredible so far. They’re a great team to work with – forthcoming with new and creative ideas, but always ensure that practical and technical growth solutions are a priority. We look forward to our continued partnership with them.”