To better understand the competitiveness of the online marketing strategies, I always perform a multi-step audit of a clients' site, their market as if I were a customer trying to find their site (or one that offers a similar product/service), and their competitors who are performing better than they are in the online marketing arena.

The first step of this process is understanding the important keywords that your customers will search and will ultimately determine whether they find you or your competitor.

Search Engine Optimization

For this purpose, I chose 4 primary keyword searches to see where your site placed, and the results were as follows:

Since you were on page 3 or lower on each of these searches, I audited your site and compared them to the top competitors who appears higher up than you did. This means that I performed 20 audits directly comparing you versus your top five competitors in each of the result sets from the 4 chosen keyword searches. All of these competitors placed in the top 10 positions, meaning they were on the first page of the Google Results. You can see the comparison between your site and your competitors sites by clicking on any of the keywords below and then selecting a competitor:

Competitors:

While you provided me with some local competitors that you would need to target with local ads and some basic location marketing, I found that your most direct search competitors would be as follows:

• Archetype Brewing
• Foggy Mountain AVL
• Wicked Weed Brewing
• Bhramari Brewing
• Asheville Brewing
• Wedge Brewing
• Green Man Brewering
• Twin Leaf Brewery

SEO Conclusion:

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that your site is not optimized for search engines very well at all. The good news is that most of your competitors aren't a ton better off than you are. There are a few things that I recommend to assist in SEO:

• The site is dramatically lacking in content. I've read MANY of the articles that John has written for other sites and sources- and this type of material will help you immensely in the search engines. Right now you just have a few sentences on your home page. You need a lot more content.
• The site isn't properly using Header Tags in the content, which hurts your SEO as well.
• The site isn't using alternate tags on images which would greatly aid you in SEO

Other Site Recommendations:

• The Map is broken, generating a JavaScript error
• Needs a LOT more images and needs those images to utilize the alternate tags to assist in SEO
• Current Mobile Layout is very poor, which is a HUGE detractor in mobile search placement.
  • Google won't send a mobile user to your site if the mobile friendliness is poor. Upwards of 60% or more of your traffic will be from mobile users.
• Add the Phone Number on the Contact Page, Location Page, and Home Page
  • Having it in the menu isn't enough, especially for mobile users

Online Marketing Recommendations:

• Many of the top search results are review websites where people visit breweries and brew pubs and then write about their experience. These sites are outranking you and many of your competitors. I believe it's very important to get in touch with the ones that are ranking the highest and invite them in to come and write a review about your business.
  • Prior to doing this, research the writer who will be visiting. Find out what kind of beer, food, etc. they generally give high reviews so that your team knows what to recommend to them when they are in your brew pub.
• You've integrated InstaGram into your site, which is great- but you need to be more active with it.
• Reviews- you need to increase the number of reviews that your business gets online. Recommend considering a service similar to Podium to assist in good reviews.
• Recommend utilizing an API service to connect online videos. In short, you upload a video and description (and more importantly, a link back to your site) in one location, and it distributes it to more than a dozen video feeds. That's more than a dozen links back to your site every time you upload a video.
• Recommend considering a Progressive Web App. Almost identical to a dedicated app but more affordable. Offers loyalty program, turn-by-turn directions, etc. similar to a dedicated mobile app but less expensive to develop and implement
  • Recommend utilizing the PWA to assist in scheduling of FB and Twitter posts
• Recommend putting events in Facebook so they can be shared with friends
• Need more of a prominent Social Media presence and following. Twitter, Facebook, More IG, YouTube, Google+ - content is crucial to doing this.

 Pay Per Click Advertising Recommendations:

After researching your local market and the competitiveness of various keywords for advertising, I strongly recommend that you consider an online marketing campaign with multiple search networks. I will continue my research to figure out the right PPC campaign to recommend and present my findings to you when they are complete.