RedHeads Wine
SEO Case Study

The SEO challenge

RedHeads was an established brand with a functioning online website and store. However, it was struggling to attract organic traffic and drive sales to cellar door tours and online sales for wine, both individual bottles and cases.

The aim of our work was to drive more organic traffic to RedHeads’ website, potentially generating more leads and sales for their online store, specifically in Australia. They also wanted to see the difference between branded and non-branded traffic. Non-branded traffic was desirable because of its wider potential, but branded traffic would show an increase in brand awareness and visibility.

Our approach

We took a two-pronged approach to this SEO project – content and technical SEO.

We created SEO-optimised website content, including blogs and landing pages, to capture branded and non-branded traffic and drive visibility. We started with a content audit and looked at competitors to see if there were any gaps we could fill with SEO-optimised content to capture missed traffic.

The blog content covered a number of topics, including general wine knowledge, food and wine pairings and wine varieties and styles. Each blog post was ideated through keyword research targeted at Australia (the brand’s home country) and carefully structured for maximum SEO impact.

The content was then scheduled ahead of time in three-month increments to give us a better idea of the flow of content and to target any timely pieces around major consumer calendar events.

The landing pages covered wine styles, the South Australian wine regions relevant to RedHeads, and wine grape varieties – from Chardonnay to Riesling and everything in between. After conducting keyword research, we created landing pages for each grape grower RedHeads collaborates with, producing high-quality content designed to attract organic backlinks.

The technical side of this approach was more extensive. We began with an in-depth SEO audit of the RedHeads website, including internal links, keyword positions, traffic origins, domain performance, site structure, organic performance and backlinks. We were then able to build a comprehensive, bespoke SEO strategy for RedHeads to increase visibility and SEO performance.

Digital performance tools gave us customisable and comparable data sets that we were able to track throughout the project and share with RedHeads as part of their monthly performance reports.

Troubleshooting across this website to improve its SEO performance included adding alt tags to all embedded images, disavowing toxic backlinks, improving internal link structures across the new content and resolving header tag issues. We also updated broken internal and external links, enhanced meta descriptions and titles and developed SEO-friendly page templates for new SEO-optimised content.

The result

By the end of our 18-month project, Submerge successfully grew RedHeads’ SEO performance through a combination of technical and content strategies, resulting in the desired increased traffic and more leads to their online store.

With the keyword-optimised, fresh content, we increased the website’s organic keyword rankings from 171 to 296 – a 73% initial increase. As a direct result of our content strategy and technical efforts, the number of organic keyword rankings increased further to 705 by July 2024.

RedHeads’ organic traffic followed the same trend. At the beginning of the project, the website received an average of 490 views per month, which increased to over 630 by June 2023. In the twelve months following the end of the project, our work directly caused organic traffic numbers to rise to an average of 1393 visitors per month.

Through targeted keyword use, we also doubled the website’s SERP feature instances within the first two months after this Google feature first appeared.

By the end of the project, the branded vs. non-branded content split was 66% to 33%, compared to 75% to 25% at the beginning. Although the branded traffic dipped slightly, it remained high thanks to the increase in non-branded traffic, which brought in visitors who were looking to be educated through high-quality content packed with informational keywords.