Best strategies for alcoholic beverages online store

[teconsite]

Hi,

we are now creating an strategy for an online store that sells alcoholic beverages and also drinks to mix with them (for example for creating cocktails).

The company is located in Spain and wants to begin selling in France. We are thinking of optimizing SEO of the online store, but it is a little difficult cause the description of drinks are really similar, and the inner text too. (Gin is Gin, and you can't describe many things about it. The brand changes, and also the bottle, but it is very difficult to describe a product like that)

So we are thinking of creating a content marketing strategy and alsoa social community using facebook and twitter, and so on.

As allways we are thinking of a blog and placing the contents there and then distribute then in social networks.... As the the products are alcoholic drinks, we thought that we could give people ideas and recipes of cocktails, and also to create videos about how to prepare those cocktails.But I am not sure about this strategy, specially about the video generation, cause as the products are alcoholic beverages, I am not sure about the policies of Youtube about that kind of issues. I tried to search on the Web and find nothing.

This kind of content is for adults only? If so, should we create it anyway? Is it worth it?

What kind of strategies will you apply to gain visibility for an store like this?

I will apreciatte your comments and advices.

Thank you!

[Johnny4B]

Content is always an issue when you come to online stores in particular ... We have not worked with Alcohol related stores, but on numerous occasions with Jewellery stores ... and have had the same issues with content being firstly:

Minimal, descriptions of products contain little or no information.

Repetitive - One product can be pretty much the same as the other product.

The way we have tried to address this and been relatively successful, is by not actually trying to rank each and every product, but rather the product category,our client did not necessarily want to rank for a specific piece, rather though the term "wedding Jewellery", or "Pearl Pendant" ...

We then obviously created a section in each website, with proper structure and informal information about each product category, and from there linked to the product page or indeed each product.

I assume you could take the same approach .... by creating product informal pages ,talking about how the gin was distilled etc etc, I am a great believer it doesn't matter how you rank the clients term, its getting the person looking for the product to the clients website, and from there having a well structured navigation path for them to easily and accessibly get to the product to purchase them.

So yes, I would use blogs, I would use any tool available to you to enhance e-Commerce stores cause they are notoriously lacking good content for you to work with.

I would also suggest you use rich snippets ....

I assume you are going to translate the website (as French folk speak French ,not Spanish  ,is it a new website you are doing for the French market ,is your current website set up to target Google locally ...

We are currently working with a client who has two stores, almost identical in content, that targets specifically the Irish and UK markets .. This was a huge problem initially for us, but we got around it by structuring the pages differently ,trying to make unique content for each almost identical page. I got advise of someone on here to make sure the URL for each page was different, which is helping a lot, using rel can ....

Kind of easier to offer specific advise if we know if you plan to use the same website to target France, or is it a new website

Oh, as for using social., Every other drink manufacturer in the world use all social engines, there may be guidelines you have to adhere to ....But you can use it ... mind ya, I am a rugby fan ,and I know from rugby France is very strict on alcohol advertising, marketing

Hope that helps a little and good luck

Regards

John

[teconsite]

Hi John

Thanks so much for your advices, that for sure I will follow

We have two options with the store, move the French site to a domainstore.fr or keep it in the main domain  domainstore.com/fr. Of course we will work in french. I think the best strategy is working on the .fr site, but it means higher costs. Any idea about how the .com/fr would work? Are you using local domains or international ones?

Thanks again!!

[Johnny4B]

The store we are currently working on are actually two seperate sites ... .co.uk and .ie , actually they aren't even on the same server , I am of the believe if you are trying to rank in the .co.uk, use a server based in the UK and vice verse (I must add this is more opinion that substantiated evidence )

Lots of stores do though use subdomains, actually I would suggest that this is more  common than the approach we are talking about, for client reasons we actually created two separate domains.

We have though found it a lot easier targeting two local search results using two separate domains than we have in the past using subdomains ...

If you do go down the root of using www.domain.com/fr, you will in theory, have one website trying to target two different languages, and to be honest, I have never ever worked in that situation ,so hopefully someone with experience there can offer you some advise, thankfully we have only ever worked with English.

3 months ago I would have probably thought going with the subdomin would be the best fit, but from our recent experiences of creating two separate domains of late, I might think that would be a better fit (but once again ,its merely an opinion, there may not be no right of wrong answer here)

Hopefully someone who has worked with two international languages might advise, I mean without stating the obvious, anyone worth their salt in coding can create a  script that will translate your current website into a number of languages, Google has one built in as you probably know.

But the problem there might be if you have optimised your website already to rank within google.es, and then have to adjust your website to target google.fr

I appreciate a lot of the advise here is subjective, buit its hard to offer definitive advice when I have not actually been in your position, or not sue how you are set up at the moment, but at worse it will get your brain working

Regards

John

[teconsite]

Thanks again John!