Tag Archives: seo

People Think We Are a Brewery

It’s weird, but we get a lot of email from people who think we are a brewery.  It just happened again today:

I recently bought 6 stanley park noble pilsners.
Most of the bottles have whitish debris or flakes in the bottom.  I unfortunately drank most of one before my wife pointed out the yuck in the bottle.
For your info.  I assume i just send them back to the lcb.
Thought you would like to know.

This is most of what we get, complaints about the beer.  We also get a lot of inquires about availability, opening hours, and surprisingly many job applications.  I usually respond informing people that we are just a blog and that they are probably looking for the brewery, then I point them to the brewery website.  Most people, especially the job applicants, are a bit embarrassed, but appreciate the note.

Stanley Park beer is not brewed here, definitely not since 1897

Stanley Park beer is not brewed here, definitely not since 1897

How are these people finding us and not what they’re actually looking for?  It’s the Google.  They are searching for these breweries, usually with an extra adjective or keyword, that we’ve written abut in the past.  For some reason, we’re beating the actual breweries at internet.  We most commonly hear from people looking for Stanley Park and Bowen Island breweries, specifically coming from these posts:

It’s weird, these brands (because they aren’t really breweries) are backed by substantial businesses, and yet their customers are contacting us directly.  Why aren’t people going right to the source?  I have one theory, and it’s that these brands are so inauthentic that it’s nearly impossible for them to build legitimate online communities.

Stanley Park is brewed by Turning Point on Annacis Island (right by the sewage treatment plant) and Bowen Island is brewed by KB Brewing in Kamloops.  Both advertise heritage and try to capitalize on iconic BC locations, but both are relatively new brands in their current form.  While you can trick people into thinking your beer is brewed somewhere it’s not, you can’t trick people into caring enough to talk about it online.

In the interest of both improving beer in BC and in not having to reply to anymore of these misdirected emails, we at this blog would be happy to talk to the marketing people at either of these companies with some internet tips.  Why talk to us?  Because we’re already ranked higher on the internet.

Cheers,

Chris

One Year of Love Good Beer

It’s true, we’ve been around for a year now.  We started this blog because we both love beer, were a bit bored, and wanted to do something fun.  We’ve definitely learned a lot and our blog has led to some interesting opportunities.  Admittedly, we didn’t really know what we were getting into and weren’t very good in the beginning.  I think we’ve improved a lot though and the reports confirm we’ve decreased our coefficient of suck 76%, while effectively doubling awesomeness.  While that may be made up, I can say with certainty that we drank a lot of beer and had some really good times this year.

It turns out the we have made a bit of an impact on the blogosphere.  Google tells us that we’ve had almost 11000 unique visitors and 27000 page views, with daily traffic steadily growing from next to nothing in the beginning to today’s respectable levels.  Who knew anyone would care to read our ramblings?  Most of our traffic comes from organic Google search results.  It turns out that we are pretty good at SEO, enough that Erik and I continually find our own blog in search results (irritatingly so, since we are usually looking for actual information ex. Google ‘caskival’).  We’ve also seen a lot of traffic from referring sites and less and less people accessing us directly.  My interpretation of this shift is that our friends no longer feel obliged to read our blog, but we are getting more traffic from the intertubes at large.  Stupid jerk friends.  Just kidding, I need you people to drink beer with.

We wrote a 191 posts last year, which is more than one every two days.  Some of them were good, some were not very good, some made people angry (sorry), some were fun to write (wooo!), and some got us free beer (double woooo!).  Looking back, it was interesting to see what posts garnered the most attention, where Erik was particularly good at picking hot topics.  Below are our top ten posts from last year, six from Erik and four from me.

Top 10 Posts of 2009

  1. Bud Light Lime is an abomination
  2. Ozarks Famous BBQ
  3. Beer and Meat
  4. The Beer Cellar: how to cellar beer and why
  5. Calorie Content of Beer?
  6. Stanley Park 1897 Amber
  7. Dan’s Homebrewing Supplies
  8. Turning Point Brewery – the inside scoop
  9. Real Trappist Beer
  10. Review: Hells Gate Pale Ale

I hope we have another good year so I can write another post like this next December.  Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Chris