How To Do SEO For CBD Companies

Evidence of the potential health benefits of CBD products and their legalization in many countries has led to a rapid growth of the market. At the same time, due to a lack of sufficient regulation, there are few quality and purity standards, raising concerns about the safety and efficacy of many marijuana products. On top of that, the use of cannabis products is still associated with cultural stigma. It makes it harder for CBD brands to promote their products.

Due to the nature of the industry, associated with ever-changing rules and regulations around CBD marketing, CBD brands need a specific approach to SEO. It will take into account the peculiarities of the regulated and legal cannabis trade. In this guide, we will explore some expert CBD SEO tips and strategies that will boost your online visibility, help you reach more potential customers, and grow your business.

Why is SEO Important for CBD Brands?

The simple answer is that it works great. Cannabis consumers turn to search engines like Google to find and purchase a product or get information about it. Users trust search engines, which means that it is important for any CBD brand to gain search engine trust in order to get to the top of search results.

Using the right CBD SEO strategies wisely will help you build trust and encourage Google to recommend you based on the fact that your products and content are exactly what your target audience needs.

Now, what do the numbers say? According to BrightEdge research, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. This means, that by taking advantage of organic search, cannabis dispensaries will provide themselves with traffic. It can convert into a loyal customer base and, therefore, into ongoing, growing revenue streams.

Ultimately, buying a first-line property in a search engine, through SEO for CBD brands, is the most profitable and promising deal for the prosperity and growth of your cannabis business.

How Do You Build a CBD SEO Strategy for Your Brand?

If you're running a CBD company, you know how challenging it can be to stand out in a crowded market. Below, you'll find concrete steps to help you improve your SEO and drive more traffic to your website, which will ultimately increase your business's revenue.

We'll talk about why it's important to decide on the type of business you're running, learn how to leverage your competitors and share a detailed guide to building your own CBD SEO strategy.

Key Points of the CBD SEO Guide:

Step 1: What type of business you are going to run?

Step 2: Know your competitors 

Step 3: Build your own CBD SEO strategy:

• Find keywords to rank in relevant search results
• Make a Content Plan for the CBD Website
• Do On-Page Optimization on a website
• Make a link-building SEO Strategy

Step 1: What Type of Business Are You Going to Run?

Local Business

For cannabis brands whose target audience is within a city or region, local SEO for CDB will be the preferred choice of promotion. This method focuses on location-based strategies and the placement of keywords in a specific area.

Successful implementation of a local SEO promotes a regional CBD business by optimizing its resources for local potential customers, who are most likely to indicate geolocation when searching for cannabis products. The principles of ranking in the regional SERPs have their own peculiarities. Optimization here requires the mandatory use of some methods that are not so important when the site is promoted at the global level.

Nationwide Business

CDB companies that want to develop their business within a particular nation can resort to strategies that fall within the scope of nationwide CDB SEO. This method convinces Google that people across the country should know about your wonderful cannabis products, regardless of your business address or the searcher's location. This is achieved through the right set of techniques and settings. They include the use of the right non-local keywords. The competition is fiercer at the national level than at the local one. To get top ranking and nationwide visibility, the marijuana business needs to have a really good national SEO roadmap.

Step 2: Know Your Competitors

As the popularity of CBD products continues to grow, competition among CBD companies has become increasingly fierce. In such a crowded market, it's more important than ever for CBD companies to have a solid SEO plan in place. However, building a successful SEO strategy requires more than just selecting the right keywords and optimizing on-page content. CBD companies must also understand their competitors' SEO efforts in order to identify opportunities and avoid pitfalls. This includes analyzing competitors' website structure, services offered, backlinks, and content strategies. By doing so, CBD brands can gain insights into what works and what doesn't. They can also tailor their own SEO plan accordingly to stay ahead of the competition.

What Do Your Competitors' Websites Look Like?

Analyzing competitors' websites is a crucial step in developing a successful SEO strategy. By understanding which sites are currently occupying the first position and why, businesses can discover areas for development and tailor their own approach accordingly. This involves examining factors such as website structure, content quality and relevance, backlink profile, and user experience. By taking a comprehensive approach to analyzing competitors' sites, CBD businesses can gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn't in their industry. Later they can make informed decisions concerning the best ways to optimize their own site for better search engine rankings and increased traffic.

What Kind of Content is Posted on Your Competitors' Websites?

Content is the pith of any website: it plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining visitors. Knowing what kind of content your competitors are posting on their websites is essential to staying relevant in the competitive cannabis niche. By researching your competitors' websites, you can gain valuable insights into what topics they cover, the type of content they publish, and the tone and style of their writing. This information can help you tailor your own content to appeal to your target audience and stand out from the crowd. Remember, in the world of digital marketing, content is king, and investing in quality, relevant, and engaging content can significantly boost your online presence and bring traffic to your website.

What Are the Keywords Targeted by Your Competitors?

Analysis of competitor websites should include keyword research, during which you will find out: what target keywords your competitors have; which pages rank for those keywords; and what content is on those pages. How competitive those queries are is the next step. Identifying effective keywords that work for other sites in your niche but are somehow missing from yours will help you build a workable content strategy.

What backlinks do your competitors have?

Analysis of competitors' backlinks is needed to understand the volumes required to reach the top of search results. You should as well consider the dynamics of backlink growth, as well as the sources from which competitors receive links. Anchor list analysis is carried out to understand the correct ratio of anchor and non-anchor links. All this will allow you to put together a plan for building your link profile and building a reputation as an authoritative source for your cannabis website in the most effective way.

Step 3: Build your own CBD SEO strategy

Building an effective SEO strategy for your CBD business involves more than just using a few keywords or optimizing your website's content. To truly stand out in the competitive CBD market, you need to develop a complex strategy that incorporates a range of SEO tactics, from on-page optimization and link building to content creation and social media engagement. Take a look at some brilliant insights and actionable tips from the experts who have already blazed the trail.

Find keywords to rank in relevant search results

Using the right keywords in your cannabis-related content is your ticket to the top rank of search results. To identify and research related keywords, a cannabis SEO specialist uses special tools without resorting to guesswork. Then, your keywords are listed by their commercial potential, search intent, domain authority, and ranking difficulty.

CBD SEO keywords strategy should include both short-tail keywords and long-tail ones. Long tail phrases are more specific and attract the target audience to the site. What’s more, due to the combination of several words in the subject, long keywords contribute to a sharp decrease in competition in search queries.

If you google the keyword “buy CBD oil”, the number of sites returned by the system will be more than 65 million.

By changing the search query to “buy unflavored CBD oil”, the search circle will narrow down to about 2 million sites.

Make a Content Plan for CBD Website

Once you have the semantic core in hand, you can start creating compelling, relevant, and up-to-date content for your cannabis blog (yes, you can't get by with an online store alone!). Think about your target audience: what interests them and what they want. In addition to the main articles, don't ignore supporting articles like "CBD hot drink recipes for cold days" or "How to Recover from Running" with subtle commercial interest. To generate regular organic traffic, publishing content must be on a regular basis and in sufficient volume. Ideally, your cannabis content should be updated with one main article and several supporting articles for each new topic or category of keywords. Also, don't forget that content is not just about text, but also about illustrations, videos, gifs, and other elements that add value to your site.

Do On-Page Optimization on a website

In addition to the collection of semantics and content plans for competently and systematically filling the site with quality content, there are other important aspects to consider while working on your CBD website. On-page optimization, also known as internal optimization, includes elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. By optimizing these elements of your CBD website, you will make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate. In addition, this way you will increase the likelihood that your web resource will rank higher in search results.

Title tags

Using the right tags and headings will improve the overall readability of the text and enable search bots to follow the hierarchy from the most important on the page to the least important. It's the very first thing users see in search results and on social media.

The title tag is a great opportunity to grab the user's attention and encourage them to click through to the page. Determine the page you want to rank for each target keyword and then make your title stand out from the rest. Here are some tips for writing title tags:

• use concise (50 to 60 characters) but informative titles;
• match the search intent and the title tag;
• do not duplicate title tags with site content;
• use numbers if appropriate;
• audit multiple heading tag variations.

Meta description

A meta description is a snippet of the HTML code of a web page with text that appears immediately below the title tag. The purpose of the meta description is to convey to the user a brief, informative description of your page with competitive advantages that encourages the user to click.

Meta description is like a storefront, only in text design. The user, after reading it, must decide: “Yes! This is exactly what I'm looking for!" Here are some tips for writing meta descriptions:

• use between 150 and 200 characters (about 20 words);
• match the user's search intent;
• do not duplicate the text anywhere on the site;
• use target keywords at the beginning;
• encourage specific action.

Header tags

Tags allow you to highlight headings and make your article easier to read. In addition, they ensure your site's ranking advantage by streamlining the html code of the page. In total, there are 6 heading tags in HTML - from < h1 > to < h6 >.

This is what the heading hierarchy looks like:

H1 is the main heading that contains keywords and reflects the topic of the page:

H2 - a subheading that reveals the topic of the section;

H3 - a subheading that fills keywords with content and gives a description;

H4, 5, 6 - subheadings to separate small elements of the page from the main text.

Make a link-building SEO Strategy

One of the significant indicators of site ranking in the search is its authority and the presence of backlinks from other Internet resources. Therefore, after you have made sure that there are no technical errors and have carried out internal optimization, you can start promoting your CBD website externally with links.

A good link-building SEO Strategy includes:

• search for all the links leading to your resource;
• analysis of link profiles: one's own and competitors;
• preparation of the anchor list;
• removal of low-quality links;
• Search for donor sites.

As for donor sites, it is naive to believe that other resources will suddenly start actively linking to you, especially since marijuana content is associated with many prejudices and restrictions. Therefore, we share several effective ways to get authoritative backlinks from external websites.

Broken-link building

Quite a fun and not obvious method for most people who are interested in how to build free backlinks. It lies in the fact that, with the help of special tools, you scan the sites you are interested in for broken links. If you find any, you contact the owner of the website and offer to replace the broken link with a working one, which will lead to your site.

Forum links

Community sites like forums are good places to promote your SBD brand. You can leave interesting thoughtful comments with links to your website. Such links are almost always a nofollow attribute. However, participating in discussions that are somehow related to the cannabis industry will allow you to present your product to a large targeted audience.

Guest posting

Guest posting is one of the oldest link building tactics. How does it work? You are writing an article for another site in your niche. They post it and you link to yourself from that article. It's as easy as a piece of cake! So look for suitable CBD or health-related websites and then post on them. Most sites are open to accepting guest posts, even if they don't explicitly state it.

Internal links

This is by far the most obvious solution: just post links on your own resources. It won't bring any outside visitors to your site. But this approach can have a positive effect on the overall SEO of your site. In addition, it will increase visitor retention and make it easier for them to navigate your web platform.

Blogger outreach

Outreach is probably one of the most effective tactics for getting quality backlinks and referrals. The idea is that you reach out to influencers, bloggers and public figures to introduce them to your cannabis products. People trust their favorite bloggers. Therefore, if a blogger shares with his large audience how CBD gummies help him cope with stress and workload, with a reference to your brand, it will be a clear victory for you.

The bottom line

Promoting a CBD business can be challenging due to the nature of the product which is often subject to controversy between federal, state, and local laws. A marijuana SEO strategy differs from most other industries in the need for ethically and legally safe targeting of your brand's audience. Therefore, cannabis pharmacies, e-commerce companies, and other cannabis businesses should turn to medical marijuana SEO companies for promotion. The help of experts will lead to the best results with a lasting effect and will help to avoid mistakes that can be critical in the mind of a tricky CBD business.

FAQ - CBD SEO 

Inhouse CBD SEO vs Outsourcing CBD SEO:  What to choose?

There are pros and cons to both options. In-house SEO provides greater control and flexibility, as the team can be tailored to meet the company's specific needs. Outsourcing, on the other hand, provides access to a broader range of expertise and resources.

Ultimately, the decision should be based on the company's goals, resources, and expertise. Businesses with a strong understanding of SEO and the resources to hire and train an in-house team may benefit from keeping SEO in-house. Companies with limited resources or expertise may benefit from outsourcing to a specialized agency.

How much do CBD SEO Services cost?

The cost of CBD SEO services can vary depending on several factors, including the size and complexity of the website, the scope of the SEO services required, and the level of competition in the CBD market.

The average cost of CBD SEO services can range from a few hundred dollars per month to several thousand dollars per month. We offer transparent pricing and a set of working-specific strategies and tactics, but first, we need to get to know you. For a quote and a free consultation, contact our CBD SEO experts.

Do Natural Links do SEO for CBD brands? Any case study examples?

Yes, Natural Links is experienced in SEO for CBD brands. One of the most recent services we provided was SEO for PureKana, a popular online store for quality products made from hemp-derived CBD. The case study showed success in the industry with clear metrics such as increased website traffic, improved search engine rankings, and higher conversion rates. PureKana's organic traffic growth has quadrupled, and keyword rankings are showing steady growth from the TOP 100 to the TOP 10 of Google.

How can I get started with CBD SEO Services?

To start your exciting CBD SEO journey, fill out a short form on the Natural Links website to request a free consultation. There you can provide a convenient channel to contact you and write the URL of your CBD site so that our specialist can make a sketchy preliminary assessment.

During the consultation, you can discuss the current status and goals of your website with one of their SEO experts and get recommendations on first-rate CBD SEO strategies to help you achieve your goals. Alternatively, you can also email us at [email protected], skype:support_70095?chat, or @naturallinks (Telegram) to schedule a consultation.

How long does it take to get results with CBD SEO?

CBD SEO can be a long-term process that requires consistent effort and patience. However, with proper implementation, it's possible to start seeing notable results within 2 to 6 months. This is because CBD is a highly competitive industry, and search engines typically take some time to recognize and rank new websites or content. 

As search engines begin to recognize the website as a credible source of information or products in the CBD industry, rankings and traffic can start to increase.

Overall, CBD businesses should view SEO as a long-term investment, but they can expect to see some initial results within a few months of implementation.