Are you the owner of a cannabis dispensary or CBD business? If so, you probably know that the market is becoming increasingly competitive. But don’t worry; there’s a way to make your business stand out online long-term, called cannabis SEO.
More and more people turning to the internet to find dispensaries and CBD products. That’s why optimizing your website for search engines has never been more important. And let’s not forget that other forms of search engine marketing, such as PPC advertising, are heavily regulated and may be ineffective within the cannabis industry.
In this article, experts from Alpha Efficiency will show you different search engine optimization strategies for boosting your brand’s online visibility. You’ll learn why weed businesses rely heavily on SEO to reach new customers and secure long-term success. And we’ll also give you some practical tips and discuss best practices for boosting website traffic. So sit back, relax, and let’s get started!
Table of Contents:
- Why is Cannabis SEO Crucial for Your Brand?
- What Types of Cannabis Businesses Need SEO?
- 5 Essential Cannabis SEO Services
- Partner Up With The Best CBD and Cannabis SEO Company
Why is Cannabis SEO Crucial for Your Brand?
Cannabis is still a highly regulated substance, so when building a strong online presence for your business, you need to be extra careful about your digital marketing strategies. For example, weed businesses can’t use Google and Facebook ads. Ignoring these restrictions can lead to severe consequences.
But that’s where search engine optimization comes in. It’s one of the most potent ways to drive traffic to your website and increase your online visibility. The cannabis industry is highly competitive. Without a solid SEO strategy, your website will likely get lost in the sea of other dispensaries and cannabis businesses.
Here are just some of the benefits you can taste by working with a professional cannabis SEO company:
- Website traffic and rankings boost: Optimizing your website for search engines like Google can help people find your e-Commerce store more efficiently. With a strong keyword target list and well-rounded SEO strategy, you can rank your website high in SERPs for search terms people use daily when searching for cannabis products and services.
- Improved user experience: Ranking high on Google without a powerful cannabis web design can be challenging. But even if you achieve high rankings for some keywords, if your website doesn’t provide a smooth user experience, all the website traffic will go to waste. To help you achieve long-term success, a professional cannabis SEO company will take the necessary measures to improve the user experience on your website and help people enjoy exploring your cannabis eCommerce platform.
- Increased authority: People naturally trust cannabis businesses with lots of positive reviews, quality content, and well-designed websites. And by taking your domain authority responsibility seriously, you can achieve much better rankings in search engines.
- Grow business despite various cannabis digital marketing restrictions: With a strong SEO strategy in place, you won’t need to worry about heavy advertising regulations for the cannabis industry. And what’s best is – search engine optimization is more cost-effective than PPC advertising. You won’t have to pay each time someone clicks on your web pages in SERPs.
What Types of Cannabis Businesses Need SEO?
All types of cannabis businesses can benefit from SEO. Search engine optimization can help you increase your website’s visibility and earn more organic traffic. This naturally leads to acquiring more customers.
So no matter if you’re a cannabis dispensary, cannabis delivery service, or you manufacture cannabis edibles, the search engine solutions we’re going to explore in this article can serve you well in the long run:
- For dispensaries, SEO can increase foot traffic by making it easier for potential customers to find one of your locations.
- For growers and manufacturers, SEO can help you make your products easier to find for dispensaries and customers.
- For cannabis e-Commerce stores, SEO can make it easier for customers to find and order your products.
But please note that it takes time for noticeable SEO results to come. It is a continuous process that requires constant monitoring. The time span between initial results and the desired website traffic boost will mostly depend on the competitiveness of your niche, your current online presence, and available resources.
If you’re not experienced in SEO, mistakes are inevitable, and it might take over a year to see noticeable results. But our experienced cannabis SEO company can help you start on the right track and significantly increase online visibility and sales within months.
5 Essential Cannabis SEO Services
As you can see, search engine optimization is key to unlocking the full potential of your cannabis business. But SEO is complex, and it can be challenging to know where to start. In this section, we’ll explore five crucial elements of every successful cannabis SEO strategy:
Keyword Research for Cannabis Businesses will Boost Your Visibility
Keyword research is the process of finding words and phrases that people use when searching for cannabis products and services online. For cannabis businesses, keyword research is fundamental, as the whole industry is relatively new and heavily regulated, so many companies compete for the spotlight in search engines. By conducting profitable keyword research, you can find valuable terms people search for and strategically include them on your cannabis website.
There are many great tools for keyword research, and our cannabis SEO agency found SEMrush to be the most precise. Once you enter your seed keyword, these tools will generate a list of related keywords and phrases potential customers are searching for. By checking search volume, level of competition, and other important metrics, you can decide which keywords to focus on. It is also a good idea to check which keywords your main competitors are targeting, as this can give you a deeper insight into their search engine optimization strategies.
And remember to include long-tail keywords in your keyword target list. As short-tail keywords tend to have higher search volumes, they are also very competitive. Not to mention that these can be too broad when it comes to users’ search intents.
Chasing long-tail keywords will give you real chances of ranking on the first page while improving your website traffic quality. After all, keyword research is all about understanding your target audience and its goals.
Content Marketing will drive SEO results and Help You Connect with Customers
Content marketing is a crucial part of every cannabis digital marketing strategy that revolves around creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage your target audience. When done right, it will help you build trust and authority with potential customers and eventually turn them into regular ones. And strong content marketing is a cornerstone of cannabis SEO since it can significantly increase your visibility in search engines.
By creating engaging, informative, and engaging content that is keyword rich, you can reach more search engine users and guide them through their buying journey. Here are some content types you can include in your strategy:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Testimonials and reviews
- Social media posts
For example, if you own a cannabis dispensary, you can create blog posts about the benefits of different cannabis tinctures, how to use cannabis to treat various medical conditions, or how to properly store products you sell. But focus on the quality of your content. If you provide value with each content piece, people will want to keep exploring your website. This will send positive signals to search engine algorithms and result in higher rankings.
And even if you don’t have an in-house content team, you can manage to regularly share high-quality content with professional copywriting services our cannabis SEO company provides.
Local SEO will Help People find Your Dispensary More Easily
Those who don’t want to travel across the town to buy cannabis products often search for dispensaries in their area. Local SEO allows you to reach them and increase foot traffic. It revolves around optimizing your website, so it appears in SERPs whenever someone searches for local businesses like yours. For example, if you’re a dispensary from Chicago, you’ll be able to reach those potential customers who use keywords such as “cannabis dispensary Chicago,” “cannabis dispensary near me,” and similar.
Use the following tips to get started with local SEO for your cannabis business:
- Create a Google My Business account: To get started with local SEO, create an account on Google My Business and include relevant information about your business. Remember to add a phone number, hours of operation, and address, as these can prove valuable to potential customers and reduce the friction on their buying journey.
- Optimize your website for local SEO: Your website also needs to be optimized for local searches. Add your city and state to your title tags and meta descriptions, and include local keywords in your content. Don’t hesitate to include your neighborhood in your website’s content or popular landmarks near your physical location.
- Encourage customer reviews: Having lots of positive reviews is crucial for building trust with potential customers, and it also shows search engines that you’re a reliable business. You should encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on Google.
- Utilize social media: While social media marketing doesn’t directly impact local SEO, it can help you boost brand awareness, promote your content pieces, and connect with your local audience. And by adding local keywords to your about pages and bios, you can help Google associate these keywords with your business. If daily activity on social media feels like a daunting task, hiring a professional digital marketing agency is better than avoiding this crucial aspect of your online presence.
Link Building is crucial for securing long-term SEO success
Link building is all about obtaining high-quality backlinks for your website. Here are just some of the benefits of link building:
- Better rankings
- Additional channels for driving website traffic
- Higher domain authority and other metrics
- Increased trust in your brand
Search engines use links to crawl the web; the more links you have pointing to your cannabis site, the more likely your website will be indexed and ranked high. And it also helps you establish authority within your niche by showing that other websites trust and recommend your content. For example, if a reputable cannabis news website links to one of your blog posts, search engines will understand that it’s valuable to those interested in the cannabis industry.
Many businesses make the mistake of not investing enough effort in link building. If you write high-quality content, someone might eventually link to it. But that’s not enough to take domain authority responsibility and thrive in cannabis SEO. Here are some of the most effective strategies our cannabis SEO company uses to build a strong backlink profile for our clients:
Creating highly shareable content:
Creating infographics, blog posts, videos, statistics, and interesting facts about cannabis-related topics is a proven way to earn more backlinks. Make your content engaging and informative; others will naturally want to share it with their audiences. Such content will help them communicate desired messages more effectively and help you get the link juice flowing in your direction.
Broken link replacement:
No one wants to have links that don’t work anymore on their website. You can take advantage of this fact by finding broken links on authoritative websites within the cannabis industry and offering similar content pieces on your website that they can link to instead.
Publishing guest posts:
Guest posts remain one of the most effective forms of link building because many weed businesses want more content pieces on their websites. Once you identify an authoritative website within your niche, contact the owner and offer to write an article in exchange for a backlink. They’re likely to accept the offer if they’re interested in providing their visitors with a fresh perspective.
Boost User Experience with an SEO-Friendly Web Design
Shiny cannabis websites don’t always perform best in terms of search engine optimization. Achieving the desired website look might be faster when using templates, but taking care of the user experience and overall functionality is more important for cannabis SEO.
Our web design agency in Chicago can help you boost your cannabis SEO in a few ways. By designing a visually appealing and user-friendly website, we’ll increase the time people spend exploring it and reduce bounce rates. And by following the best practices when creating your site structure, we’ll make sure it’s easy for search engines to crawl and understand your content. Here’s what a perfect SEO website build needs:
- Mobile responsiveness: More and more people use mobile devices to browse the internet, and it’s your job to make it easy for them to navigate your website. Google has stated that it uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor when forming search results. If your competitors have a website that perfectly adapts to each screen size, and you don’t, it will be tough to achieve significant SEO results.
- Page speed: Page speed has a powerful impact on the user experience on your website, and search engines know it. When a page takes too long to load, people will likely get frustrated and leave the site. As Google wants to provide the best possible experiences for its users, it gives an advantage to fast-loading cannabis websites. To boost user experience and conversion rates, you need to minify your code, optimize site structure, utilize a content delivery network (CDN), and take other necessary measures for boosting page speed.
- Site architecture: A well-structured website makes it easy for users and search engines to navigate and find the content they want. You need a clear and logical hierarchy for your website pages. Using categories and subcategories on your website is crucial for cannabis SEO. For example, if your e-Commerce store sells cannabis tincture and marijuana strains, you should organize your products accordingly. Using clear URL structures and submitting a sitemap will make it easier for search engines to find and index your content.
Partner Up With The Best CBD and Cannabis SEO Company
Are you looking for an experienced cannabis SEO company? Our SEO agency in Chicago can help you elevate your cannabis or CBD business to new heights.
Alpha Efficiency’s team of SEO experts utilizes a unique blend of advanced search engine optimization strategies to boost your rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website. We understand the complexity of cannabis digital marketing and will use only proven and secure methods to target your specific audience.
But don’t just take our word for it. Get in touch today, and let us help your business bloom.
