Hey everyone! I am excited to share my online directory & community side project for craft breweries, breweriesnearby.com. Despite barely touching this project since launching in June 2023, this site has received 1.4 million impressions on Google and 20k organic visitors. The site’s ranking on page 1 for “breweries {city}” keywords in cities like Toronto, Seattle, & Vancouver - sometimes even ahead of Yelp & Tripadvisor.

I built this for fun using no-code tools as a way of learning programmatic SEO. In case you don’t know, programmatic SEO is a method of generating 1000s of pages of website content from data in a database or spreadsheet. The oversimplified version of how this was built is the following:

  • Scraped a public directory for breweries using Octoparse
  • Structured the scraped data in an Airtable base
  • Built a CMS site in Webflow with a matching CMS data structure to the Airtable base
  • Synced data from Airtable to Webflow’s CMS through Whalesync

Other tools that have greatly helped with the site’s passive growth are Supersparks for creating a reviews community, and Finsweet Attributes for on page filtering of breweries.

Similar to what I did for Breweries Nearby, there is a trend of creators unbundling keyword niches from Yelp or Tripadvisor and then building directory sites with design, features, data, and content that better serves the niche. So if you are looking for a side project idea that can grow passively, there is a great opportunity here :).

I would love to hear any ideas or feedback you might have for improving / growing / monetizing this. Or if anyone wants to partner up, I am all ears! :)

For a more detailed explanation of how this was built, here and here are a few additional resources.

  • lanylover@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    u/RootRockRaggae congrats! That’s pretty clever!

    Hm…let’s check some ideas for monetizing that project…

    • Sell beer from listed breweries (or use affiliate links to their beer on amazon) • Sell ad space on the website to the breweries (think higher visibility) or ad space to whoever is trying to sell something to that audience • Breweries usually have guided tours. You could try to resell tickets to your users

    What are your users looking for? What are the queries they are using?

    That’s it off the bat!

    • RootRockReggae@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Thanks u/lanylover!

      All great ideas for monetization. I looked briefly into the affiliate opportunities from breweries and guided tour companies. The latter is quite promising :). Another approach I was considering was going the Yelp / Houzz approach of selling a subscription to breweries where they could improve their ranking and quality of their listing.

      The few users I have interacted with were looking for areas to brewery hop? Most of the queries are ‘breweries {city}’. One common one that I am not targeting are map related (eg. ‘seattle brewery map’), so I am planning to add a dynamic map!

      • lanylover@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Maybe try to make something about these maps premium? I don’t know what but there could be a free and a premium feature.

        Are there ares that are that dense with breweries that you could actually hop them like bars? That’s crazy!