The Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US by SEO

The top 5 by SEO factors only.

Not by any usability tests, sales, content, wine range or other consumer factors – just industry SEO analysis  .

It is based on the SEO factors in the legend which is discussed below. But first I suggest you check out the graph.

Wine.com is miles ahead of anyone else

In fact they do so well that it’s easier to talk about what they struggle with – which is Google News. Winebuys.com gets 193 mentions vs wine.com’s 9 mentions. The only other factor that stands out is wine.com having a lower rank in their top 10 pages than wineweb.com. But now I’m getting finicky.

Winebuys is behind the rest of the pack

Behind by quite a bit (but remember they’re still number 5 for a key query!). The home page is not bad and it has excellent Google News coverage – but every other factor is poor. Afraid these guys probably need to get focused around getting quality external links to their site.

It’s the middle of the pack that are in a serious battle for spots 2 and 3

And there is a big difference between these rankings. It’s been estimated that position 2 (“P2″) in the search results gets 3.5x less then position 1, P3 get 4.9x less than P1, P4 gets 6.9x less, P5 get 8.5x less.

Wines.com is doing well out of dmoz, has a good home page Page Rank, and does generally well in all the factors with the exception of Yahoo Site Explorer (back)links. I can see why they are a “nose” ahead with a good all round performance.

Winezap is doing exceptionally well with Google blogsearch links and Yahoo Site Explorer (back)links but needs to work on all the other factors about equally if it wants to come second.

Wineweb has an excellent average page rank of the top 10, good Google News strategy but needs a little more work with the bloggers and Yahoo Site Explorer (back)links.

What’s at stack is a 100%+ increase (or decrease) in traffic. It’s a battle I’ll watch with interest.

Who else is doing well with the search engines?