Three ways independent wine shops can win the new battle to be found online
If you own an independent wine shop, the wines you find hardest to explain may actually be some of your most valuable assets online. Everyone knows what Sauvignon Blanc is. Far fewer people know about grapes like Rebula, Rubin or Teran. On the shop floor, that unfamiliarity can be a hurdle. On Google or on AI platforms, it can be an opportunity.
Before starting Intrepid Wines, I ran a marketing agency working with food producers and hospitality businesses. We did a lot of SEO work and, particularly during COVID, helped businesses adapt to a world in which being easy to find online suddenly mattered enormously. One of the most useful lessons from that period was that you don’t necessarily win by competing for the biggest search terms. Often, there is far more opportunity in owning hundreds of smaller ones.
Today, I think that opportunity is getting bigger. Search itself is changing. Google is still enormously important, but people are also discovering businesses and products through maps, AI tools and increasingly conversational searches. For an independent wine shop, there are three areas I would concentrate on.
Own the Long Tail
Chris Anderson popularised the idea of the Long Tail around two decades ago. The principle is simple. At one end of a market there are a relatively small number of things that everybody wants. Behind them sits a much longer tail of increasingly niche products, each attracting relatively little demand.
In wine terms, the head might contain things like Sauvignon Blanc, Rioja and Prosecco. Huge numbers of people search for them, but competition for those searches is correspondingly fierce. You are competing with supermarkets, national merchants, producers, magazines and some extremely large websites.
As you move along the tail, you find increasingly obscure wines, grapes, producers and questions. Perhaps somebody wants to know what Rebula tastes like. Someone else wants a food pairing for Teran. Another person has encountered Rubin on a wine list and wants to know why the grape is described as a cross between Syrah and Nebbiolo. Far fewer people will search for any one of those things, but far fewer websites are competing to answer them too.
This is where independent wine shops have an interesting advantage. Your shelves are probably full of the Long Tail. A supermarket might have the resources to dominate a search for “Sauvignon Blanc”, but it probably isn’t going to create the best page on the internet explaining what Vrachanski Misket tastes like, what to eat with Teran, or why somebody who likes Ribolla Gialla might want to try Slovenian Rebula. You can.
This requires a slight change in thinking. Don’t just look at your shelves as products. Look at them as questions people might ask. Take one of the most unusual wines in the shop and imagine picking it up as a customer who knows nothing about it. What is this grape? How do you pronounce it? Where does it come from? What does it taste like? What should I eat with it? Is it similar to anything I already know? Why does it cost £25? What makes this producer interesting?
Each of those questions is potentially something somebody else is typing into Google.
At Intrepid Wines, we’ve been experimenting with exactly this through our Grape Guides. We import wines made from relatively unfamiliar native grapes, which means we have an obvious problem: people frequently don’t know what we’re selling. So we create useful pages explaining them.
A guide to Rebula helps somebody understand Rebula. A guide to Rubin explains the strange story of this Bulgarian crossing of Syrah and Nebbiolo. Another page might explain Teran or Zelen. That content helps us sell unfamiliar wines, but it has a second job. It gives search engines a reason to associate Intrepid Wines with those subjects.
One page isn’t really the strategy, though. Fifty genuinely useful pages about fifty unusually specific things is the strategy. Individually, the traffic to each might be relatively modest. Collectively, all those little searches can start to add up.
One of the most useful tools for understanding this is also free. Google Search Console shows you which Google searches are causing your website to appear, how often you’re being shown, your average position and which searches actually result in clicks.
Once you’ve accumulated some data, look at the Queries report and don’t just concentrate on the obvious searches. Look for the strange ones. You might discover that a producer profile is appearing for searches you hadn’t considered, or that a grape guide is being shown for lots of variations of the same question. You might find pages receiving hundreds of impressions but very few clicks. Those are clues.
If Google is already starting to associate your website with a subject, ask yourself what else you could create around it. Don’t start by asking, “What should we write a blog about this week?” Start with, “What are people already looking for that we know something about?” That is a much better content strategy.
Own your patch
The Long Tail helps you compete with bigger websites by becoming very specific about what you know. Local SEO lets you do the same thing with where you are.
If you have a physical wine shop, somebody 200 miles away reading your article about Barolo may be useful. Somebody two miles away searching for “wine shop near me” at four o’clock on a Saturday may be considerably more useful. Searches such as “independent wine shop Exeter”, “wine tasting Bristol”, “natural wine shop near me” or “wine events Bath” have an entirely different kind of intent. The person isn’t simply researching wine. They are looking for somewhere to go or something to buy.
Google says its local results are principally based on three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. You can’t do much about distance. Your shop is where your shop is. But you can do quite a lot about the other two.
Start with the boring stuff. Make sure your Google Business Profile has the correct address, current opening hours, telephone number and website. Check that you’ve selected an appropriate business category and upload good, recent photographs that actually show what the shop is like. It sounds basic, but this information helps Google understand what your business is and when it might be relevant to a local search.
Then think about what makes your business relevant to particular searches. If you run wine tastings, don’t hide that fact in an Instagram post that disappears down your feed. Have an events section on your website. If natural wine is a significant part of your range, make that clear. Or perhaps you specialise in Burgundy, Portuguese wine or grower Champagne; give those subjects proper space on the site. If you offer local delivery, explain where you deliver.
The objective isn’t to shoehorn the name of your town into every other sentence. It’s to make it extremely easy for both a person and a search engine to understand what you do, where you do it and why someone might choose you.
Reviews matter too. Don’t buy them, manufacture them or offer somebody a free bottle in return for five stars. Just make it easy for happy customers to leave a genuine review. Google says review count and positive ratings can contribute to the prominence of a local business in search results.
There are natural moments to ask. Someone sends you a lovely email after an order. Ask if they’d mind putting it on Google. You’ve just finished a brilliant tasting, and everyone is enthusing about it. Put a QR code somewhere discreetly near the till. A customer tells you they’ve been coming to the shop for ten years. Ask them. For a small independent business, a steady stream of genuine reviews is an asset that compounds over time.
I’d also think about the relationship between the physical shop and its website. There can be a strange disconnect between the two. The shop itself is alive with tastings, conversations, new arrivals, producer visits, staff recommendations and collaborations with other local businesses, while the website contains an address and 700 product pages.
Bring the two together. If you run events, publish them. Maybe a winemaker visits; write about it. If you’re collaborating with the cheesemonger down the road, put it online. If you’ve created a guide to hosting a wine tasting, publish that too. This is useful material for customers, but it also creates a much richer picture of what your business actually is.
The website shouldn’t just be an online stockroom. It should be the digital version of everything interesting happening inside the shop.
Start thinking beyond Google.
This is where things become particularly interesting. For years, SEO has largely revolved around search terms. Someone types “Rebula wine”, and a search engine produces a page of results.
Increasingly, people don’t search like that. They ask questions. Someone might ask, “I normally drink Chablis, but I’d like to try something less obvious. What should I buy?” Or, “What’s an interesting white wine around £20 that would work with grilled fish?” Or, “I’m organising a Slovenian dinner. Which wines should I serve?”
Those questions might still be asked on Google, but they might also be asked of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or whatever comes next. This has spawned a whole new marketing vocabulary around things such as AEO, GEO and optimisation for AI. I wouldn’t get too distracted by the acronyms.
The more useful question for an independent wine merchant is much simpler: is your website a genuinely useful source of information about the things you sell?
Imagine you have a page for a bottle of Slovenian Rebula. The page has a photograph, vintage, price and two sentences of tasting notes supplied by the importer. There may be nothing wrong with it. But compare that with a useful guide explaining what Rebula is, where it grows, how to pronounce it, what it tastes like, why Slovenian examples differ from Italian Ribolla Gialla, what foods work with it and which bottles someone should try.
Which page would you rather find if you’d never heard of Rebula?
That’s the standard I’d work towards. Don’t create content because somebody told you that publishing four blog posts a month is good for SEO. Create the best answer you can to a question a real customer might actually ask you.
If customers regularly ask whether they should chill Beaujolais, answer it. If they don’t understand orange wine, explain it. Maybe they want to know the difference between Crémant and Champagne; write the explanation you’d give them across the counter. Perhaps everyone wants to know what to drink with Christmas dinner; answer that. If you’ve discovered an extraordinary producer in a region nobody has heard of, tell the story properly.
Over time, you’re building a library of expertise. That library is useful regardless of whether somebody discovers it through Google, an AI assistant, your email newsletter, LinkedIn or a QR code beside a bottle.
This is particularly important in a world of AI-generated content because it has never been easier to produce 100 mediocre articles about wine. Merely having content is therefore becoming less interesting.
The advantage an independent merchant has is access to things that aren’t generic. You taste hundreds of wines, talk to winemakers, see what customers actually buy. Also, you know which bottle everybody loves at tastings. You know which food pairing sounded ridiculous but worked. You know what customers misunderstand and which questions people repeatedly ask at the till.
Use that.
Instead of writing another generic article called “Ten Best Red Wines for Winter”, perhaps you write about the five wines that unexpectedly sold out at your Christmas tasting and what customers said about them. That’s information only you have.
The internet doesn’t particularly need another summary of information that already exists elsewhere. It does need your experience.
One technical thing worth doing
There is another side to SEO which is considerably less romantic than discovering obscure grapes. Your website needs to work properly.
Fortunately, you don’t need to become a web developer to identify some of the obvious problems. Put your website into Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It will analyse the page on mobile and desktop and highlight performance and user-experience issues.
Don’t become obsessed with achieving a perfect score. You’re running a wine shop, not trying to qualify for the World Championships of Website Loading. Look for the obvious problems instead. Perhaps your beautiful homepage photograph is enormous and takes forever to load. Maybe the mobile site is painfully slow. Perhaps elements move around as the page loads, or your shop is frustrating to navigate on a phone.
If you have a developer or agency, send them the report and ask which of the biggest problems they can reasonably fix. Then get back to selling wine.
What I’d do first
If all of this sounds like another enormous marketing job, don’t treat it as one. You could make a useful start in an afternoon.
Open Google Search Console and see what searches your website is already appearing for. You may find opportunities you didn’t know existed. Then search Google for the things somebody might type when looking for a business like yours locally. Don’t just search your shop’s name. Search “wine shop near me”, “wine tasting [your town]” and the particular categories in which you think you should be visible. Look at what appears.
Then look at your shelves and find the five bottles that require the most explanation. Look for the weird grape, the tiny appellation, the producer nobody has heard of, the wine made in some improbable corner of Europe or the bottle with a brilliant story behind it.
Pick one and write the page you wish existed when somebody picks that bottle up and asks, “What’s this?” Make it genuinely useful. Then do another, and another.
Because the irony is that some of the wines that look hardest to sell online may ultimately be the ones that make your shop easiest to find.
Looking for wines worth talking about?
At Intrepid Wines, we specialise in native grapes, overlooked regions and wines with stories worth discovering. We also create Grape Guides, Field Guides and other materials to help our trade customers explain and showcase the unfamiliar wines they put on their shelves.
If you’re looking for wines that could give both your shelves and your website something different to talk about, get in touch by emailing henry@intrepidwines.com.