Rebuilding Organic Foundations Across the Hill-Smith Family Estates Wine Portfolio

Challenges

Hill-Smith Family Estates came to our Gurus needing to rebuild organic performance across a portfolio of heritage wine brands undermined by technical gaps and thin content depth. Specific hurdles included:

• Historical visibility loss: Both Smith’s Wine Store and Jansz Tasmania had experienced a sharp, sustained drop in overall ranking keywords, pointing to unresolved technical or indexation issues rather than a genuine loss of relevance.
• Content depth gap: Compared with category leaders like Penfolds, which ranks for over 10,000 keywords against the group’s individual brand sites sitting in the low hundreds, existing content lacked the storytelling and educational depth needed to compete for broader, non-branded search terms.
• Traffic concentration: Organic traffic across the portfolio leaned heavily on a small number of homepage and hero-product pages, leaving most of the site underused for search visibility.
• Incomplete technical foundations: Schema markup was inconsistent or missing across product, breadcrumb and organisation data, and XML/HTML sitemaps needed rebuilding on several sites.

Our Approach

Our Gurus built a shared technical and content foundation across the portfolio, then layered brand-specific link building and content plans on top, recognising that each site needed to compete in its own category niche while benefiting from group-wide best practice.

Further activity included:

• Conducted a full technical audit across all four brand sites, resolving indexation blockers and refreshing XML sitemaps.
• Implemented comprehensive schema markup for products, breadcrumbs and organisation details.
• Produced a three-layer content strategy addressing top-of-funnel education, mid-funnel comparison content and bottom-of-funnel conversion pages.
• Developed a dedicated wine-brands hub page connecting every label under one high-authority page to strengthen navigation and brand-level discovery.
• Executed monthly, brand-specific link building programmes targeting each site’s highest-opportunity commercial keywords.
• Enhanced existing category pages across all four sites, turning basic product listings into deeper, more helpful buying guides.

Strategy & Execution

Technical SEO Foundations

XML and HTML sitemap creation, metadata optimisation and schema implementation were rolled out across Smith’s Wine Store, Yalumba, Jansz Tasmania and Dalrymple Vineyards, addressing the indexation and crawlability issues behind each site’s historical visibility loss.

Content and Topical Authority

New category and educational content was mapped against each brand’s specific audience, from Jansz Tasmania’s sparkling wine specialists to Yalumba’s broader Barossa Valley positioning, alongside a new group-wide wine-brands hub to unify navigation across the portfolio.

Authority and Link Building

A monthly link acquisition programme was established for each brand, targeting core commercial terms such as “wine online store” for Smith’s Wine Store and “best tasmanian sparkling wine” for Jansz Tasmania, with domain rating targets set per campaign.

Outcomes

Key SEO Results:

• Increased Smith’s Wine Store’s organic conversions by 39% (from 107 to 149)
• Increased Dalrymple Vineyards’ backlinks by 35% (from approximately 1,100 to 1,490)
• Increased Jansz Tasmania’s first-page keyword rankings by 9.4% (from 117 to 128)
• Increased Smith’s Wine Store’s organic sessions by 34% (from 302 to 405)
• Increased Yalumba’s organic traffic by 61% (from 439 to 707 sessions)
• Increased Dalrymple Vineyards’ organic conversions by 73% (from 86 to 149)

Key Rankings Achieved:

• Dalrymple Vineyards: “pinot tasmania” climbed from position 54 to position 6 (+48 positions)
• Jansz Tasmania: “sparkling rosé wine” moved from position 7 to position 4 (+3 positions)
• Yalumba: “shiraz cabernet sauvignon” advanced from position 63 to position 12 (+51 positions)

Key Results

• 34% increase in Smith’s Wine Store’s organic sessions (302 to 405)
• 61% increase in Yalumba’s organic traffic (439 to 707 sessions)
• 73% increase in Dalrymple Vineyards’ organic conversions (86 to 149)