So, Corona took my small tour operator startup out of business. No wine tours in Germany now, and possibly not for the rest of the season either.
I stopped moaning though. And I decided to do some of the work I procrastinate independently of whether season is on or off: updating my website, basically to ensure search results will position my site for you to find, my dear reader.
I don’t want to discuss the specifics of search optimizing… but there are a couple of rather fun outcomes of in the process, which I thought I’d share for your distraction, since you are probably not on a wine tour either.
One part of the process of optimizing one’s website is to understand for which keywords and in which rank the website shows on a search results page. Google Console is a tool to use (and free, by the way).
So… BottleStops gets found for …
“wine tours in Germany”
– Ranks on the first page. And gets me click-thru’s. Good on me, I deserved it… had stuffed the site ad nauseam with that term… Don’t need to worry about that one.
“just ok guides”
– WUT??? You are f*cking kiddin’ me? Google listen up: I TA ranks BottleStops #nr 1 for food and wine tours in the region! At least ‘just ok guides’ ranks our site on position 98… Position 1000 would have barely been justified! And still apparently we got 5 views for that keyword-combo from hell. Note-to-self: remove all ‘justs’ and ‘oks’ from the site.
“Jerome wine tours”
– Gets me flattered. My name is Jerome. I am the main tour guide. Keyword ranks well, gets me a lot of views and clicks… But… uh, what’s the keywords “Jerome wineries” and “Jerome cellars” doing there? Now I gotta search myself…. Apparently, I am a stupid town in Arizona. With wineries.
Note-to-self: ask the town to change its name.
“Gluvein” “Gluwien” “Glugwine” „Glue Wine“
– Fascinating, the sheer amount of declinations the spelling of “Glühwein” (the German term for mulled wine) is entailing. Though a bad Glühwein comes probably pretty close to Glue Wine. Haha. … We are ranking well for all this crap and get plenty of clicks, due to actually ONE blogpost on ‘Glühwein’. Not sure what this may be good for, but for now that’s a keeper.
These have been just a couple of examples and insights we pulled. From pretty helpful to sheer bonkers, there seems to be still some SEO gold to mine.
A quest to be continued.
