Battle of the Brands: Lyre’s vs Naked Spirits
There are lots of reasons people quit drinking: health, lifestyle, preference…
And now, it’s a whole lot easier with the introduction of non-alcoholic spirits.
While most drink purchases happen in-store, it’s still important for brands to have a presence on Google, especially for a new, growing market where people are researching.
So, who decided to invest in SEO the most among two popular non-alcoholic spirits brands, Lyre’s and Naked Spirits?
The market
According to the latest data from the market analytics firm IWSR, the volume of the market for non-alcoholic drinks grew annually by eight per cent between 2019 and 2023.
Google Trends shows an increase in interest in non-alcoholic drinks.
There are a few different terms people use when searching for this type of product
alcohol free spirits (110 searches/month - 30 keyword difficulty)
zero alcohol spirits (70 searches/month - 22 keyword difficulty),
non alcoholic spirits (390 searches/month - 29 keyword difficulty)
The keywords
Lyre’s
Ranks for 3936 keywords with around 16.6% on the first page of Google.
Regarding keyword intent, 62.8% are informational, 7.6% are navigational, 10.7% are commercial, and 19.5% are transactional.
The estimated average monthly cost to rank for the organic keywords in Google Ads is $20.6k.
62.2% of traffic is from branded keywords, while 37.8% are non-branded.
'Lyres' gets approximately 1.3k searches/month, and 'lyres spirits' receives 590 searches/month.
They rank #1 for the keyword ‘non alcoholic spirits’
Naked Life Spirits
Ranks for 757 keywords with around 16.6% on the first page of Google.
Regarding keyword intent, 64.1% are informational, 7% are navigational, 6.1% are commercial, and 22.9% are transactional.
The estimated average monthly cost to rank for the organic keywords in Google Ads is $2.1k.
74.4% of traffic is from branded keywords, while 25.6% are non-branded.
'Naked Life' gets approximately 1.3k searches/month, and 'naked life spirits' receives 90 searches/month.
They don’t rank for the keyword ‘non alcoholic spirits’ but do rank 88th for ‘non alcoholic spirits australia’
Winner of this round - Lyre’s
Lyre’s clearly wins, ranking for a huge number of keywords compared to Naked Spirits and ranking number one for the most commonly searched related keyword - ‘non-alcoholic spirits’ and they rank 6th for another relevant keyword - non alcoholic cocktails.
Naked Life Spirits rank for fewer keywords but have the same number of branded searches because their parent company is Naked Life - their spirits offering came later.
Based on their Google Search Console, it would be interesting to see which site brings more traffic for the keyword ‘Naked Life’ - do they search that keyword when searching for the spirits site, or are people only looking for the original drinks site?
Lyre’s has been around for two years longer than Naked Spirits but only really started gaining a lot of momentum keyword-wise at the beginning of 2022.
Lyre’s has also managed to gain a tonne of SERP features, especially for recipes (although this has started to drop recently).
The website
Lyre’s
Domain authority of 34
The mobile site has a First Contentful Paint of 2.2s and 1.7s on the desktop
Naked Life Spirits
Domain authority of 25
The mobile site has a First Contentful Paint of 2.6s and 1.9s on the desktop
Winner of this round - Lyre’s
Not much to report here - Lyre’s is the winner.
The on-page
Lyre’s
Lyre’s has a great optimised title tag and meta description, including their target keyword and USPs. They’ve used their target keyword at the start of their title tag and included a few different variations in the meta description. Their meta description is quite compelling and interestingly doesn’t mention anything about buying their spirits, just learning more about their products and how to make cocktails with their products.
Lyre’s seems to have more products than Naked Life so their product listing pages have multiple products. They also have category copy at the bottom of the page - a classic eCommerce SEO move - which includes multiple keywords but also make sense when read - not such a classic eCommerce SEO move #shotsfired.
Lyre’s has invested heavily in its recipe content ranking for around 1.6k keywords related to mocktail recipes. This would help them be more discovered by their target audience, who may be looking for the raw mocktail ingredients and aren’t aware they could easily purchase Lyre’s to make the same mocktail.
On the site, the recipes are kept under the ‘Shop cocktails’ menu, where people can browse cocktails by occasion, type, pantry items, featured and alcoholic content. Once clicked on, customers can navigate to specific recipes, which are also linked to products they can easily buy. The recipes are also easily downloadable.
Lyre’s has a Discover section which has articles, news and drinks inspiration. Discover isn’t a very imaginative name, but the content is good. They have articles like ‘How to reduce your alcohol intake’ and ‘How to date without the booze’, which would be interesting to their audience and could make for great social media posts and email content.
Naked Life Spirits
Naked Life has integrated their brand name with their target keyword to create a single phrase. Their meta description is slightly long and focuses on the unique features of their product while using a purchase CTA.
Naked Life has a small amount of copy at the top of the product listing page, but it seems more for marketing than SEO. If they wanted to rank the page for specific keywords, this copy could easily be updated to be more SEO-friendly.
Because of their smaller product range and the fact that their cocktails are premade, they don’t have individual categories for alcohol like Lyre’s. Instead, they have individual landing pages for their products that highlight tasting notes and serving suggestions and then link to the individual product page. This is a double-up, and the landing page content could be added to the product page. If they wanted to improve their optimisation, they could instead use this landing page to target keywords like ‘non-alcoholic gin’ (1000 searches/month) or ‘non-alcoholic gin and tonic’ (140 searches/month) to increase their real estate in the search results.
Their blog, called ‘The Buzz,’ is a great play on words considering their industry. They’ve chosen to focus on recipes with their products, awards and other general news. With such a great name, they could start creating more editorial-style content (interviews with sober influencers, interesting opinion pieces, etc.) to help get more clicks to their site. If they wanted more traffic from Google, they could write more in-depth recipes and articles to match search terms people use.
Winner of this round - Lyre’s
It’s easier for Lyre’s to optimise their site because they have more products and aren’t pre-mixed. This means they’re naturally able to target more specific keywords, like ‘non-alcoholic gin’. Naked Spirits has all the basic on-page SEO elements, which is a great start. However, some slight improvements to the on-page elements could drive more organic traffic to the site.
The backlinks
Lyre’s
596 referring domains
2.9k backlinks
55% of backlinks are no follow
48% of referring domains have an authority score of 0-10
3% of referring domains have an authority score above 71
Naked Life Spirits
176 referring domains
69.6k backlinks
99% of backlinks are no follow
61% of referring domains have an authority score of 0-10
3% of referring domains have an authority score above 71
Winner of this round - I guess probably Lyre’s
Naked Life has an incredible amount of backlinks but from only a small number of referring domains. Most of them seem to be from a site called Black Box Reviews, and they are all no-follow - not sure what’s happening there. Their referring domains seem to be growing at a steady rate, which is good.
Lyre’s has fewer backlinks but more referring domains. However, their backlinks and referring domains seem to be decreasing. It hasn’t seemed to affect their rankings yet, but they should probably keep an eye on this.
Another clear winner…
Ok, so Lyre’s wins this round, but likely because of the nature of their product. Naked Life is doing something new that is not highly searched for yet (‘mocktails in a can’ only gets 20 searches/month), an issue most innovative brands have.
The best thing they can do is make the most of what they have, continue building brand awareness so people start searching for their products more, and increase their organic search visibility for related keywords in the ‘non-alcoholic spirits’ realm.
