Case studies › Filkins Vineyards
Growing Filkins Vineyards' online wine sales +212% in organic revenue
Family-owned Michigan vineyard, selling wine online · DTC Wine · Coloma, MI
Results at a glance
- Monthly organic revenue: Baseline → +212% in-person + online
- Organic traffic (YoY): Baseline → +811% clicks
- Page 1 keyword rankings: 0 → 224 keywords
Background
Filkins Vineyards is a Michigan vineyard owned by Zach Filkins, lead guitarist of OneRepublic. It's a beautiful estate that draws wine-lovers from across Michigan, Illinois, and the wider Midwest.
The challenge
Filkins drives revenue on two fronts: in-person and online. Because Michigan's cold winters force the vineyard to close for a good part of the year, online sales are a vital part of the business.
Wine is also one of the hardest categories to stand out in online, since the sheer number of competitors makes visibility tough. Filkins needed a reason for wine-lovers to choose them over everyone else, and, more importantly, they needed to drive sign-ups for their wine club: the predictable, recurring revenue that carries the business through the off-season.
What we did
Three moves drove the turnaround.
First, we leveraged Zach Filkins' celebrity to earn media mentions, local press, and backlinks from Michigan outlets and wine-focused publications alike.
Second, we launched a blog campaign that positioned Filkins as not just a top summer destination in Michigan, but the top Michigan winery. It brought over 10,000 clicks to the site, concentrated in the holiday and winter months that had always been the revenue gap.
Third, we optimized their product pages and set up Google Merchant Center to drive organic traffic straight to their bottles for 'Michigan wine' and related buyer searches.
+212% organic revenue, and online sales that finally carry the winter.
Filkins generated over 10,000 clicks to the website from more than 200 page-one keyword rankings, lifting organic revenue +212% across in-person and online sales combined.
Most importantly, the seasonality problem eased. Filkins no longer has to lean entirely on in-person traffic. Online wine sales now carry the business through Michigan's long winters.
- +212% — Monthly organic revenue
- +811% — Organic traffic increase
- 224 — Page 1 keyword rankings
- 10,000+ — Clicks generated to the site
Want results like this?
Tradewinds Media builds organic revenue for DTC e-commerce brands across Google and AI search. See our SEO agency for ecommerce and AEO & GEO agency for ecommerce services, or book a call. Client outcomes are not a promise of future results.