Wine Club Canada | eCommerce Content Marketing Case Study
Campaign Overview
Wine Club Canada is a national wine gifting and subscription service with nearly 15 years of experience connecting Canadians to boutique, VQA-certified producers. While the business had built a strong foundation offline, its online presence didn’t reflect the quality or uniqueness of its offering.
In November, we kicked off a content marketing campaign designed to change that—just in time for the holiday season. The goal wasn’t just short-term visibility. We wanted to build something sustainable: a strategy that could increase organic traffic quickly, but also set up the brand for long-term lead generation and growth.
Here’s how we approached it.
The Goal
Provincially run retailers like LCBO and BC Liquor maintain a near-monopoly over wine and alcohol sales in Canada. When Canadians think about purchasing wine, these government-operated stores are often their first—and only—consideration. This made brand awareness the primary challenge for Wine Club Canada at the outset of the campaign.
Wine Club Canada offers a unique alternative. The company provides both wine gift baskets and wine club subscriptions, featuring monthly deliveries of premium Canadian wines and expert tasting tips. What sets them apart is their focus on boutique wineries from across the country, many of which are award-winning producers not available in provincial liquor stores.
The service is one of the most accessible ways to experience Canada’s diverse wine regions—something that strongly appeals to wine lovers, provided they’re aware it exists.
Our objective was to build that awareness. The campaign focused on creating top-of-funnel content to attract targeted, intent-driven audiences and guide them toward high-converting sales and collection pages.
The Content Marketing Strategy
With an emphasis on brand awareness and the holiday season right around the corner, we needed to move fast. But we also didn’t want a short-term spike that would disappear come January. The strategy had to work right away and keep working long after the holidays ended.
We focused on content. Specifically, blog posts built around what people were already searching for: wine gift ideas, LCBO alternatives, and seasonal gifting topics. But we didn’t just throw content at the wall. Every post was based on research and tied to a clear intent. Each one linked back to the most relevant sales or collection page so it had a real path to conversion.
This wasn’t about traffic for the sake of traffic. It was about making sure the right people could find the site—and giving them a reason to stick around once they did.
Here’s how we tackled it.
1. Keyword, Competitor & Target Audience Research
We started by digging into what people were already typing into Google—things like wine gift ideas, subscription boxes, and holiday gifting terms. Some were seasonal, some were evergreen, but all of them had one thing in common: they showed intent.
Alongside that, we took a look at what the competition was doing. LCBO, WineCollective, gift box companies—you name it. The goal wasn’t to copy them but to figure out where the gaps were and how we could position Wine Club Canada in a way that felt more helpful, more relevant, and more visible to the right audience.
2. Topic Mapping
After building out the keyword list, we started grouping things into clusters based on search intent. Every cluster was tied to a specific sales or collection page—like Wine Christmas Gifts or Wine Gift Baskets—and the supporting content was built to help those pages rank better and feel more complete.
It wasn’t about stuffing keywords. The idea was to create a structure where each blog post added value, gave us a new way into the search results, and helped connect people to the product they were already looking for.
This setup made internal linking a lot cleaner, helped show search engines what each section of the site was about, and gave us way more reach across related search terms.
3. Content Calendar & Brief Development
With the holidays coming up, we built the content calendar around seasonal opportunities first. That meant prioritizing Q4 topics we knew people would be searching for—things like gift ideas, Christmas wine baskets, and alternatives to LCBO gift cards.
Each post had a clear purpose from the start. We weren’t guessing. Before writing anything, we’d put together a quick brief that outlined what the post needed to hit. That usually included:
- The main keywords we were targeting
- The intent behind those searches
- A rough outline or structure
- Internal pages we wanted to link to
- A few quick SEO checks to make sure we covered the basics
It wasn’t overthought—it was just enough to make sure every post was written with direction, not just added to the blog to fill space.
4. Content Creation
We stuck to a steady pace of eight blog posts per month. The focus was seasonal content and gift-related topics that matched what people were already looking for—especially leading into the holidays.
Here’s a sample of what we published:
- Gift guides for different audiences—dads, moms, coworkers, you name it
- Seasonal topics like Best Wines to Serve at Christmas
- Practical posts like How to Create a DIY Wine Gift Basket
Everything was written to feel useful and aligned with what people were actually searching for. We worked in schema and snippet formatting when it made sense, but the main goal was to make sure each post could pull traffic and naturally guide people to a product or collection page.
Content cluster example
5. Performance Analytics
We tracked everything through Google Search Console and SEMrush. Not just site-wide, but by content cluster—so we could see what was actually pulling its weight.
The main things we looked at were:
- Clicks and traffic
- Keyword growth and SERP feature wins
- Impressions and average ranking
If a cluster was doing well, we built on it. If something fell flat, we shifted focus. Simple as that.
The Results
The campaign delivered what we needed it to—fast results during the holidays and steady growth afterward.
December traffic more than doubled compared to the previous year. That gave us the holiday visibility we were aiming for, and the early momentum didn’t stop once the season passed.
Organic Growth
- 238% increase in organic traffic within the first three months
- 7,200 more clicks compared to the same period the year before
- SERP feature wins jumped from 30 to 368—a 1,127% increase
- 336 keywords ranking in the top 10, up from 168
- 3,671 total ranking keywords, up from 1,243
Where It Came From
- Blog content was responsible for 72% of the traffic growth
- Blogs also drove 83% of the increase in impressions
- Collection pages brought in 14% of new traffic
- 47% of impression gains came from collection pages, with 30% tied to the ones we optimized
Even after content production paused, the blog posts we published kept climbing. That’s the power of a solid structure—topical authority keeps working, even when you’re not actively adding to it.