{"id":316,"date":"2016-07-26T19:07:10","date_gmt":"2016-07-26T19:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress-189143-728126.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=316"},"modified":"2017-12-14T19:06:01","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T19:06:01","slug":"new-brewery-website-get-free-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/headspace.beer\/blog\/new-brewery-website-get-free-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"New Brewery Website? Use These Free Ways to Get Traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, you’ve just launched your shiny new brewery website – Yay! Getting traffic to that new site might take a little bit of creativity, but fear not — I’ve put together a few ideas to get you thinking about how you can get people to stop by your new website for freeeeee!<\/p>\n

Use Social Media and Give People a Tour of\u00a0Your New Brewery Website<\/h3>\n

This is my favorite way to get both new and old followers to check out a new website. People love to be entertained by the brands they follow on social media, so make checking out your new website fun! Don’t you dare post something lame like “We have a new website! Check it out!”. Let your followers have a little fun by diving into your website looking for the answer to a trivia question. For brewery websites, here are a few examples that might get your social mojo going:<\/p>\n

“First 10 people to name a hop not found in any of our beers gets a free t-shirt! Hint:\u00a0Our website lists the hops we use (yourbrewerywebsitehere.com). And, Go!”<\/p>\n

“Contest time! Get a free pint glass if you can find the photo on our website that shows our camera shy head brewer! yourbrewerywebsitehere.com”<\/p>\n

“Tag a friend and go on a virtual scavenger hunt on our website yourbrewerywebsitehere.com. The first team to find all of these items on our website gets 2 free tickets to our annual invitational (worth $300)!”<\/p>\n

This is a fun activity that can actually educate your followers while exposing them to your brand. You can make it super simple, but I recommend asking something more trivia\u00a0related where visitors have to go a few pages into the site to find the answer. The more difficult the question, the better the prize should be! Be sure to give fair warning if the answer is hard to find or you might end up with a bunch of people bitching about not being able to find the answer instead of singing your praises.<\/p>\n

pro-tip: To increase exposure use your brewery’s location name in a hashtag. You can also “boost” these posts on Facebook as well as Instagram and get new followers out of this — all while getting people to check out your new website. Bam!<\/em><\/p>\n

Leverage Search Engines (SEO) to Bring in People Searching in Your Location<\/h3>\n

I can hear you yawning – stop that! I know as soon as I mention SEO most people’s eyes glaze over and I get that look<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"SEO<\/p>\n

Really, though – SEO’ing your brewery website<\/a> doesn’t have to be difficult and honestly, the payoff by way of traffic you don’t have to pay for is well worth the time to learn a few basics. If you’re DIYing it,\u00a0here are things to keep in mind:<\/p>\n

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  1. Make sure your page titles are unique and that they describe what’s on the page.<\/li>\n
  2. Make your “meta descriptions” interesting and related to the content on the page. This is what people\u00a0usually see just under the title in the search results and if left to show just the first bit of text on the page, it could look pretty ugly and at a minimum won’t likely help drive traffic. This is also many times what shows as a description when a link is shared to social media sites like Facebook.<\/li>\n
  3. Do not copy the content from other sites and paste on your site – bad. bad. bad idea. Don’t be lazy or you will be ignored by search engines who would rather show the original\/authority source of content over your reproduction.<\/li>\n
  4. When you put images on the page, make them relevant and give the image an “alt tag” that has some relevance to the content on the page. For example, if you are writing about an event you are holding you could add a photo of last year’s event and title it with the name of the event. When you add it to your website you can then use an alt tag that describes the image and naturally uses keywords that are relevant. This helps Google decipher your page’s content and its relevance to searches being performed. The more “signals” you provide toward a specific set of keywords, the better overall you will perform in search engine results.<\/li>\n
  5. For taprooms and brewpubs with a physical location that people visit, it’s a good idea to place your location and phone number in a prominent place. Personally, I like to publish the name, address and phone number in the footer of every page (if design permits), because it sends a strong signal to Google about your location and also lends some location relevance to content on other pages within your site and might help your site rank for other location based search terms.\n