Run Your Own brewery SEO Audit in Under Two Hours — Here's the Exact Framework

An SEO audit is not a single pass through your website looking for typos. It's a structured evaluation across five distinct layers — each one contributing to whether Google shows your brewery when someone searches for a taproom, a beer style, or a venue in your area.

The five layers every brewery audit should cover:

• Technical health — Is your site crawlable, fast, and mobile-friendly? Can Google's bots actually index what you've built?
• On-page optimization — Do your pages target real search terms your future customers use, with appropriate title tags, headings, and structured content?
• Google Business Profile — Is your GBP complete, verified, categorized correctly, and actively maintained? This is the dominant factor for local pack rankings.
• Local citations — Are your NAP details (Name, Address, Phone) consistent across Untappd, Yelp, BeerAdvocate, TripAdvisor, and general directories?
• Content — Does your site have enough substance for Google to understand what you offer, who you serve, and where you're located?

Most brewery sites fail at two or three of these, not all five. The audit framework below helps you score each layer so you can see exactly where effort should go first.

One practical note: this guide is built for taproom-focused breweries with a physical location. Production-only or distribution-heavy operations will weight the local layers differently, but the technical and content layers apply regardless of business model.

Technical issues are the most common finding on brewery websites — and the most invisible. Your site can look great to a visitor while Google's crawler is missing half the pages.

Mobile performance

Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights. If your mobile score is below 50, that's a critical issue. Scores between 50–70 need attention. Above 70 is acceptable but still worth monitoring. Breweries with heavy image galleries (taproom photos, can art) frequently fail here because images aren't compressed or properly served.

Indexing status

In Google Search Console, check the Coverage report. Look for pages excluded due to 'noindex' tags, redirect errors, or crawl anomalies. If your tap menu, events page, or location page isn't indexed, Google cannot surface it in search results — regardless of how well-written it is.

Core schema markup

Brewery sites benefit from LocalBusiness schema, FoodEstablishment schema (if food is served), Event schema for taproom events, and BreadcrumbList schema for site structure. Use Google's Rich Results Test to verify any schema already in place. Missing schema doesn't directly tank rankings, but it removes eligibility for rich results and clarity signals.

HTTPS and site security

Confirm your site runs on HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings. This is table stakes in current SEO — if your site still serves HTTP pages, that's a critical flag.

Technical scoring rubric

• 0–2 issues found: Healthy — monitor quarterly
• 3–4 issues found: Needs attention — schedule fixes within 60 days
• 5+ issues found: Critical — technical work should precede content investment

On-page SEO for a brewery isn't about stuffing keywords into paragraphs. It's about making sure each important page signals clearly to Google what it covers, who it's for, and where it's relevant.

Title tags and meta descriptions

Check the title tag on your homepage, your taproom/location page, and your beer menu page. A good brewery title tag includes your brewery name, a primary descriptor ('craft brewery', 'taproom'), and your city. Example: Ridgeline Brewing Co. | Craft Taproom in Asheville, NC. If your title tag is just your brewery name, you're leaving local relevance signals on the table.

Heading structure

Each page should have one H1 that matches or closely reflects the page's primary topic. H2s should organize the main sections. Audit your key pages: does the H1 describe what the page is actually about, or is it a tagline like 'Crafted with Passion'? Taglines don't help Google — descriptive headings do.

Location and service area signals

Your taproom page should explicitly name your city, neighborhood, and any notable nearby landmarks or districts. In our experience working with hospitality businesses, location-thin pages — those that rely on the footer address alone — consistently underperform compared to pages that naturally weave location into the body content.

Content depth

A taproom page with three sentences of copy will rarely outrank a competitor page with a full description of the experience, the beer selection, parking, hours, and events. Thin content is a signal problem, not just a user experience problem.

On-page scoring rubric

• Title tags include location + descriptor: Pass / Fail
• H1 is descriptive (not a tagline): Pass / Fail
• Location mentioned naturally in body copy: Pass / Fail
• Key pages have 250+ words of substantive content: Pass / Fail

Three or more failures here means on-page work is your highest-use next step.

For most taprooms, Google Business Profile is the single highest-impact SEO asset they own. It determines map pack visibility, controls what customers see before they ever visit your website, and feeds directly into local ranking signals.

GBP completeness audit

Work through this checklist against your current GBP listing:

• Primary category: Should be 'Brewery' — not 'Bar' or 'Restaurant' unless those are genuinely your primary category. Secondary categories can include 'Bar', 'Beer Garden', or 'Event Venue'.
• Business description: 750-character field — use it fully with your city name, beer styles, and taproom experience naturally included.
• Hours: Current and accurate, including holiday hours.
• Photos: At least 20 photos covering the exterior, interior, beer lineup, and food if applicable. GBP listings with active photo sets consistently outperform sparse ones in local pack results.
• Products/Menu: Your beer menu should be linked or entered directly. Google surfaces menu items in local search results.
• Posts: At least one active post within the last 30 days. Stale GBP profiles signal low engagement to Google's local algorithm.
• Q&A section: Seed it with 3–5 common questions (parking, dog-friendly policy, growler fills, etc.) and answer them yourself.

Local citation consistency

Pull your brewery listing from Untappd, Yelp, BeerAdvocate, TripAdvisor, and your local chamber directory. Compare the name, address, and phone number across all of them against your GBP. Any variation — abbreviating 'Street' to 'St', different phone formats, old addresses — creates conflicting signals. Industry benchmarks suggest NAP inconsistency is one of the more common causes of suppressed local rankings for hospitality businesses.

Citation scoring rubric

• GBP 90%+ complete: Pass
• Primary category correct: Pass / Fail (single-issue critical)
• NAP consistent across 5+ directories: Pass / Fail
• Active posts within 30 days: Pass / Fail

Not every audit finding has the same urgency. A red flag is a specific condition that's actively suppressing your visibility — not just something that could theoretically be better. Use this section to distinguish critical issues from optimization opportunities.

Critical red flags — fix before anything else

• Site not indexed: If 'site:yourdomain.com' returns zero results in Google, your site is either blocked by robots.txt or has widespread noindex tags. Nothing else matters until this is resolved.
• GBP suspended or unverified: An unverified or suspended Google Business Profile means you don't appear in the local pack at all. This is the highest-priority fix for any taproom.
• NAP mismatch on GBP vs. website: If your address or phone on GBP differs from your website's contact page, Google treats these as conflicting signals and may suppress your local ranking.
• Mobile page speed below 30: At this level, Google's Core Web Vitals data likely shows poor experience scores, which can result in ranking demotions on mobile searches — where most 'brewery near me' searches originate.
• Duplicate location pages: Multiple pages targeting the same city (e.g., separate '/asheville' and '/asheville-brewery' pages with near-identical content) create keyword cannibalization that dilutes ranking potential.

Moderate flags — schedule within 90 days

• Missing schema markup on events or location pages
• No blog or news section — limits the site's ability to rank for informational queries (beer releases, taproom events, seasonal offerings)
• Review volume significantly lower than direct local competitors
• Title tags missing city/location signal

Low priority — optimize when resources allow

• Image alt text missing or generic
• Internal linking structure underdeveloped
• Secondary citation sources incomplete (Foursquare, Apple Maps, etc.)

When you run through your audit, mark each finding with its urgency tier. If you have more than two critical red flags, the practical reality is that sequential DIY fixes are slower than having someone who runs these audits regularly address them systematically — often because critical issues interact with each other in ways that aren't obvious from the surface.

An audit without a prioritized action plan is just a list of problems. Here's a straightforward framework for deciding what to do next based on what you found.

If you found 0–2 issues total

Your site is in reasonable shape. Move into optimization mode: focus on building content around seasonal releases, events, and beer style pages. Maintain your GBP actively and work on review generation. Monitor your Search Console data monthly for new issues.

If you found 3–5 issues, none critical

Create a 60-day fix schedule. Assign issues to whoever manages your website and GBP. Prioritize local signals (GBP completeness, citation consistency) first, then on-page, then technical. These are typically manageable without outside help if you have someone with basic website access.

If you found 1+ critical red flags

Critical issues compound. A site that isn't indexed, or a GBP that's unverified, means every other improvement you make has no effect. Address critical flags first — and be honest about whether you have the technical access and confidence to fix them quickly. Indexing issues, in particular, require familiarity with Google Search Console and sometimes server-level access.

If you found 6+ issues across multiple categories

This is the scenario where professional help typically pays for itself. Working through a multi-category remediation plan while also running a brewery is genuinely difficult to sustain. At this point, the question isn't whether your site has SEO problems — it's whether you want to spend months working through them one at a time, or close the gap faster with people who specialize in exactly this kind of work.

If your audit results showed significant gaps across technical, local, and content areas, get a professional brewery SEO audit from our team. We'll map the full picture and show you what a realistic remediation timeline looks like for your specific site and market.