Suntory case study: SEO drives 80%+ traffic

ClientSuntory

IndustryFood & Beverage

ServicesSEO & AI Search

The Cocktail Project's Story

The Cocktail Project, a digital platform from Beam Suntory, offers a carefully curated collection of cocktail recipes that helps cocktail lovers discover and learn how to make them. Beam Suntory is part of Suntory Group, one of the world's leading consumer packaged goods companies, with annual revenue above 20 billion USD.

Suntory developed TheCocktailProject.com to capture cocktail searches, the largest consumer search behavior for spirits, and use them to promote its brands.

Technical Issues, Thin Content and Weak Rankings

Despite large market potential, the site's performance was held back by several technical issues that needed fixing. TheCocktailProject was not adding new content, and its number of indexed pages lagged far behind giant competitors in the same space.

Rankings were weak. Most potential keyword sets were outside the top 100, very few keywords ranked in the top 10 and only a handful ranked in the top 20. The site also had many tracking and URL structure problems that made measurement and analysis difficult.

A Full Audit and SEO Rebuild

CB/I Digital audited the entire TheCocktailProject site to find its strengths and weak spots and define improvements.

Classified 40,000 keywords to optimize content and meta content
Changed to an SEO-friendly URL structure for fast, accurate tracking and measurement
Ran in-depth on-page and off-page SEO, adding potential keyword sets to key page groups and to hundreds of existing detailed recipe pages
Optimized page load speed on mobile and desktop, added suitable rich snippet types for each page group and planned 301 redirects

SEO Became the Main Traffic Source

The optimizations put The Cocktail Project in a leading position in its field.

80%+Of site traffic from SEO

Rich cardsRecipe rich results for top categories

#1 channelSEO became the main traffic source

SEO became the main traffic source, bringing in more than 80% of total site traffic

A focus on recipe rich cards and structured data greatly increased visibility

The site drew most of its organic traffic from premium rich results, outperforming traditional top 10 rankings, and strengthened its place in Recipe Rich Cards for top search categories

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