Case study
Distillery Marketing for Southern Distilling Company: A Faster Site That Counts Its Visitors
Distillery marketing that started under the hood, with technical SEO fixes, a much lighter homepage for phones and tracking that counts tour‑booking clicks for the first time.
The client and the situation
Southern Distilling Company, a distillery in Statesville, North Carolina, describes itself as "the artisan bourbon maker proudly reigniting the North Carolina whiskey tradition." Its website has several jobs, from showing off the bottles to sending visitors on to book a tour or find a store that carries them.
When our distillery marketing work for Southern Distilling started on June 24, 2026, the site couldn't tell anyone how well it was doing any of that.
From June 2025 to September 2026, Southern Distilling's GA4 counted zero key events, so for 16 months there was no record of a single tour‑booking click, phone call or newsletter sign‑up coming from the website. The homepage was also heavy for a phone. On Google's PageSpeed Insights test on October 6, 2026, the mobile homepage weighed 11,139 KiB and took 10.4 seconds to show its first content on a simulated slow phone connection. Search engines had their own trouble with the site, which answered on more than one host and sent visitors through extra redirect hops.
What we did
We started with the technical SEO foundations in September 2026. The site now answers on one canonical host, and we fixed its robots.txt and sitemap, removed the extra redirect hops and swapped the age check for a lighter age notice. The speed work came in October 2026. We re‑encoded six product videos from 146.6 MB down to 39.9 MB and created 8,240 WebP copies of the site's images, so phones download far less to show the same page. On October 9, 2026, a new Google Tag Manager container went live with our rebuilt tracking, which counts tour‑booking clicks, directions, phone clicks, newsletter sign‑ups and where‑to‑buy clicks as key events in GA4.
We also built new pages and search content in the same month. On October 14 a landing page for custom‑labeled bourbon gifts went live with its own inquiry form. On October 15 we put new search descriptions on 15 pages live, along with a new homepage title and Organization schema, and on October 16 we published three seasonal blog posts.
Results, and where each number comes from
The clearest change is on the homepage. Google's PageSpeed Insights mobile test, run on a simulated slow phone connection, showed first content at 10.4 seconds on October 6, 2026. Two runs of the same test on October 27, 2026 showed it at 3.7 and 3.6 seconds. Over the same dates the homepage's page weight fell from 11,139 KiB to 2,560 KiB, which makes it 77% lighter.
Real phone visitors show the change too. For phone visitors in Chrome's field data, the homepage now passes Google's Core Web Vitals, with 75th‑percentile Largest Contentful Paint going from 2,617 ms on October 6 to 1,922 ms on October 27, 2026. That field data is a rolling four‑week window, and on October 27 part of it still came from before the speed work.
Tracking is the other result, and we report it as a measurement. In the 18 days from October 9 to October 26, 2026, GA4 counted 429 key events on the site, after 16 months of zero. Those included 363 clicks to book a tour, 24 clicks for directions, 20 phone clicks, 15 newsletter sign‑ups and 7 where‑to‑buy clicks. The tour figure counts clicks through to the booking page, and completed tours are counted in the booking system itself. The zero before October means nothing was being counted, so these figures show what the site can see now and can't be read as growth.
Homepage weight on a phone: 77% lighter
Key events counted: 429
What's next
The new search descriptions and blog posts went live in mid‑October 2026, which is too recent for a fair read of what they did in Google. In the meantime, the new tracking gives Southern Distilling a running count of tour‑booking clicks and phone clicks to plan around.
If you run a consumer brand that sells online or brings people through the door, you can read how we run campaigns and the measurement behind them on our page about e‑commerce marketing. Our other case study is on the work page, and every number in it says where and when it was measured.
Talk to us about your site
If your website is slow on a phone or you can't see what visitors do on it, we can help you find out where it stands. Book a call and tell us what you sell and how people buy it, and we'll show you what we would measure and fix first.
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