I made a programmatic SEO site for breweries. I’m ranking ahead of Yelp in major cities without even trying!
Hey everyone! I am excited to share my online directory & community side project for craft breweries, breweriesnearby.com. Despite barely touching this project since launching in June 2022, this site has received 1.4 million impressions on Google and 20k organic visitors. The site's ranking on page 1 for “breweries {city}” keywords in cities like Toronto, Seattle, & Vancouver - sometimes even ahead of Yelp & Tripadvisor.
I built this for fun using no-code tools as a way of learning programmatic SEO. In case you don’t know, programmatic SEO is a method of generating 1000s of pages of website content from data in a database or spreadsheet. The oversimplified version of how this was built is the following:
-Scraped a public directory for breweries using Octoparse
-Structured the scraped data in an Airtable base
-Built a CMS site in Webflow with a matching CMS data structure to the Airtable base
-Synced data from Airtable to Webflow’s CMS through Whalesync
Other tools that have greatly helped with the site’s passive growth are Supersparks for enabling a community with UGC (comments and reviews), and Finsweet Attributes for on page filtering of breweries.
Similar to what I did for Breweries Nearby, there is a trend of creators unbundling keyword niches from Yelp or Tripadvisor and then building directory sites with design, features, data, and content that better serves the niche. So if you are looking for a side project idea that can grow passively, there is a great opportunity here :).
I would love to hear any ideas or feedback you might have for improving / growing / monetizing this. Or if anyone wants to collaborate on this, I am all ears! :)
For a more detailed explanation of how this was built, here and here are a few additional resources.
Thanks for reading :D
Pretty cool.
My concern for you would be that you are probably relying purely on search traffic, and probably can't get that much even because most will just use Google Maps.
If you want to turn this into a full fledged business, your best approach should be using these directory pages as a lead source into an actual product. That could be a home brewing course, or drinking club if you want to keep it local. Something that people will visit your site directly for on a regular basis, and open up other channels other than just search.
20k organic visitors
that's not bad.
You could probably turn this B2B and market it to breweries themselves. Allow them to promote their weekly/monthly events, new product releases, etc.
100%. That was the first monetization idea that popped into my head.
Also, the breweries near the top of the city breweries lists are getting significantly more pageviews than others. Similar to what Yelp & Houzz do, this premium B2B membership could also ensure a higher ranking on the breweries list.
Thanks @DCudmore !
I agree that it is tough when you are competing against the owner of a playing field (Google Maps). But I'd say it's getting surprisingly decent organic traffic with engaged users on ~1k indexed pages.
Great ideas for monetization - home brewing is huge right now. Right now it's very much a side project, but would be cool if it turned into a full fledged business haha. The goal is to create a community (reviews & comments on brewery pages) to get users to come back to discuss / engage in discussions about breweries. Easier said than done, but it's a pretty passionate niche. It's also a good way of using my own no-code tool (supersparks.io) for one of the use cases it enables :).
Nice. Would you recommend Octoparse over other solutions for scraping?
Did you use Algolia for the search function or is it a native Webflow function?
Octoparse was the most user friendly but I actually recall it didn't work for triggering the infinite load interaction on the directory I scraped. So the tool I ended up using was Parsehub, despite being way more difficult to use than Octoparse...
I am using Finsweet's filter attribute on a CMS list element for the search functionality:
https://finsweet.com/attributes/cms-filter
This is cool, you might be able to link up with Beer Advocate site or something like that for details on the beers and reviews. Also as others have said, link up with the breweries for promos.
Thats great! How are you handling web scrappers?
Thanks @Collab. I'm not doing anything at this point. I actually scraped a directory to get this data in the first place 😂. But as the crowdsourced data & UGC starts to increase, I will definitely consider that proprietary and start to implement some guardrails.
I'd be really interested in how chatgpt could add to this.
Agreed! I haven't utilized it yet. I've been meaning to use a ChatGPT plugin in Airtable to create brewery descriptions in bulk, and decrease indexing issues from pages being too similar.
Awesome!
Quick heads up, the search bar on this page https://www.breweriesnearby.com/world isn't filtering anything, it just returns a message 'Thank you! Your submission has been received!'
D'oh! Thanks for the heads up :D. I recently added a new filtering tool and definitely missed this page.
Np!
Oh fuck yeah! I'm in the same path and it gives me more clarity on the next steps. Really appreciate!
My pleasure @Germerlo. Out of curiousity, what are you building?
I'm working on 3 micro saas. 1 for profit, 1 for SEO, 1 for environmental commitment. The SEO project is currently in an experimental stage and all you said here will help me a lot.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing
Thanks @Vickylove 🙌
This is an incredibly impressive project! I'm amazed at how much you've been able to achieve with no-code tools
Yes, no code tools are such a lifesaver sometimes
Thanks @MadhavanGI 🙌