Syosset Beverage

A complete redesign with a long term goal: gain SEO dominance.

Syosset Beverage is exactly what it sounds like: a beverage store in Syosset. They have, though, an amazing selection of beer, and are among the nicest and most knowledgeable purveyors of fine brews that you'll ever meet.

The owner of Syosset Beverage is very smart and always willing to listen to advice, but more importantly, she is very creative and always has good ideas. This is another company we've been working with for years, so this case study will focus mainly on our original plan, which Syosset Beverage has been following for years. If it ain't broke, and it's actually working really well, leave it alone and let it make you money.

What Syosset Beverage wanted was nothing less than search engine dominance... along with more customers and sales. The market for beer tends to be local — people don't drive 20 miles for beer (well, some do, actually), so we decided to rank as high as possible for certain search terms within certain locations, and we also focussed on specific products. We also decided to think very long term - like years. SEO is a very good long term investment, because it doesn't cost much to optimize a page, and it only has to work a few times to pay for itself, and after that it's all gravy.

The Plan

Devise a list of critical keywords and key phrases targeted for high ranking search results.
Construct a 100% custom website, built on a proprietary CMS.
Structure data and pages to be highly search engine friendly.
Have simple data entry and maintenance features such that the average person behind the counter can easily update specials, sales items, coupons, etc., and more importantly, continually add to the beer database.

We've expanded the site as new things, like Growlers, have become part of Syosset Beverage's' business. We build a lot of robustness into the site so a minimally trained staff can copy and paste in text and images, and the site handles it all without breaking or causing really ugly moments in the design. Size wise, the site is like a spider web — stretching out all over the place and getting bigger and bigger, pulling in clients to the little beer store on Jericho Turnpike.

The Results

For business critical key phrases — approximately 35 different phrases — Syosset Beverage is on Google 1st page, and in most case ranked #1. Unfortunately, we cannot go into anymore detail on this because the SEO work on Syosset Beverages' website is essential to its business and growth, and it is information that isn't for their competitors.

Focus on SEO - Think specific!

You're almost always better off going after a small niche within a larger market. You'll attract visitors more likely to purchase your products or services because your search terms are more specific. And in fact, if you do really well in Google on your niche terms, the rankings of everything on the entire site tend to rise.

Beer Long Island is an example of a very competitive search term because the words "Beer" and "Long Island" appear on so many websites. There are beer distributors, brew pubs, brewers, beer hobbyist groups, companies that sell brewing equipment, trade groups and trade magazines — hundreds of organizations. So we aimed for more specific terms and gained dominance for them. And as of this writing Syosset Beverage is ranked #4 for Beer Long Island, something we didn't intend but it is nice anyway.