A Local SEO Case Study For A Specialty Wine & Liquor Store.
A year ago we were contacted by a local boutique wine and liquor store. They felt like they weren’t getting much out of their existing SEO campaign and wanted to explore what we might do differently.
I was extremely confident that we could not only reduce their SEO spend but also dramatically improve results.
The existing company was publishing low quality blog posts and was paying little attention to their Google Business Page.
That all changed when we took the campaign over. In this case study, we take a look at how we made it happen.
The Starting Point
Our client is a specialty wine and liquor store in a downtown metro in Canada. Their owner is a wine expert and their staff really knows their stuff. Recommending a great wine is what they do best.
They came to us at the start of a Shopify redesign wanting to explore alternatives to their existing SEO provider.
The Goal
Their primary goal was simple. Increase foot traffic. They are conveniently located downtown, however they are in a major office tower and they don’t have a street facing storefront.
Our customer wanted to make sure when office workers were searching for a wine store or a liquor store they would come up.
Their existing SEO provider was doing very little to support their Google Business Page, so we had to change that.
Despite carrying a truely great selection of wine and spirits and being far more knowledgeable than your average liquor store they weren’t being found.
In April 2025, we started a campaign. Our first order of business was to optimize their Google Business Page and start generating reviews.
The SEO Strategy
Google Business Page Optimization
For any local retailer, whether it be a specialty wine store or a clothing store, the Google Business Page is THE most important asset they own. This is particularly true in the liquor store industry because search volume is incredibly robust.
The first thing we did was optimize the Google Business Page. The only category they were listed under was "wine store". And after some careful consideration we actually flipped it to a liquor store and added wine store and beer store as secondary categories. We also built the rest of the profile ensuring it was complete and optimized.
Reviews
Once the Google Business Page was optimized it was time to start driving reviews.
When your business exists because you provide a better experience (curated selection, personalized recommendations from wine experts) and your customer service is excellent (helpful employees, who can actually help customers choose a great bottle) this becomes very easy.
We added a QR code at the front and made reviews a priority. This is as simple as asking at the checkout and offering freebies (custom wine opener)
On-Page, Link Building & Citation Building
A few years ago, the Google Business Page was intended to support the website. For local businesses, in 2026, a website should support their Google Business Page. We conducted an on-page campaign to ensure the website did exactly this, support our clients Google Business Page.
Once that was done we set out to improve the sites authority and relevance via link building and citations. Although far from a perfect metric we've done just that increasing DA to 21 (up from 6) and ensuring our NAP consistency.
SEO Content Strategy
Fewer, Higher Quality Posts
Content isn’t a primary focus for this campaign and instead of blasting out 5 low quality articles per month we’re focusing on just a few each month. These pages are intended to support our overall goal of ranking higher for high intent keywords. Instead of writing boring, generic articles (5 wines for Christmas dinner) we’ve sought the clients expertise and avoided surface level content. For example:
X Options To Try If You Love Y Type Of Wine
X Wines from Y Region That You’ll Love
X Red Wines Under Y Price
Somewhat surprisingly a lot of these articles have taken off and we’ve been able to generate clicks to these pages despite informational queries falling off a cliff. This has been an added bonus because the real aim was to help establish the store as an authority in the space.
Results
Over the last 10 months of the SEO campaign, we have
Increased monthly organic traffic from 400 to 800 (+100%).
Increased Google Business Page interactions by 40% (~500/month)
Increased Google Business Page views by 50% (~5k/month)
Improved rankings for high intent keywords (ie: downtown wine store).
Are consistently showing up in the LLMs for those same searches.
