SEO For The Cannabis Industry
The cannabis industry has continued to grow astonishingly despite the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States alone, there are over 28,000 cannabis businesses. Many cannabis businesses can make it difficult to separate your business from the crowd. Since March 2020, dispensaries have been deemed essential businesses following increased sales.
SEO is important and plays a crucial role in online cannabis marketing. It is a well-known fact that promoting a cannabis business online is difficult as major social media companies such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Google have restrictions concerning marijuana advertising and pay-per-click. SEO solves these issues by directing potential customers directly to your virtual marketing channel, your website.
Learning to leverage the power of cannabis SEO will boost the online visibility of your cannabis business and enable it to expand and control its share of the cannabis business market.
Understanding The Basics Of SEO
It is necessary to understand the basics of SEO before understanding the application of cannabis SEO. Potential customers will typically find your website through a search engine. To ensure that its users find the content they need, search engines prioritize sites that appear best suited to their search queries. Search engines usually determine this by how long visitors to your site stay and how frequently visitors also click to visit your site from search listings.
The strategy employed to rank at the top of these search results and increase traffic to your website is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Most optimization initiatives concentrate on targeting the right keywords to achieve the greatest ranks possible. The search terms your target audience enters into Google, and other search engines are made up of these keywords. Additionally, optimization guarantees that your website is constructed in a way that makes it simple for Google’s crawlers to browse and comprehend the information.
Optimizing your website increases its chances of appearing amongst the top-ranked searches, enabling it to be seen first by potential partners, buyers, and curious individuals. For any business to succeed online, a strong SEO strategy is required. SEO remains one of the best ways to enhance your brand’s online image and increase sales.
Key Strategies For Cannabis SEO
Every business may benefit from SEO. SEO becomes even more important for new products in markets with much market fragmentation. These highly fragmented markets usually have a lot of players but very little historical information. This makes it challenging for Google and other search engines to decide who is the best as there are no obvious market leaders. This indicates that the field of play is still level and gives businesses the perfect opportunity to build domination and lead the market. For this to happen, a good SEO plan is required.
SEO for cannabis can be divided into an On-page SEO and an Off-page SEO.
On-page SEO:
It involves the following steps:
1. Selecting the right keywords: It can be difficult to find the right keywords due to the strict regulations in the cannabis industry. Remember that the tried-and-true Google Keyword Planner only displays terms that, by Google’s guidelines, are appropriate for ad campaigns. You might have noticed that there are no results when you type “medical marijuana” in the Planner because it is unlawful to market medicinal cannabis.
The lack of results does not imply that searches for “medical marijuana” are not popular on Google. However, it does imply that it is more challenging to locate the keywords that are effective in the cannabis sector. To find the right keywords, extensive research is usually required. You should be able to do competitive analysis and determine what whitespace your brand can fill using manual research and keyword planning tools.
Focusing on your specific niche and remaining targeted will reduce your competition. Using title tags, header tags, meta description functions, image ALT-text, and URL structures in addition to keywords can optimize your on-page SEO.
2. A blog is necessary: You must blog if you want to raise the rating of your website in search engines. Using a blog, you may elevate your website above other cannabis businesses in search rankings. This is because a blog can help build trust among visitors to your site. When ranking keywords with your target audience’s potential educational search intent, the most effective format to utilize is a blog.
A keyword like “would cannabis relieve headaches?” is an example of one that probably has less competition than “cannabis for headaches.” You can develop quick trust with potential consumers by writing a blog post that addresses this query while also introducing them to your products in a way that puts value and information before sales. With blog posts, you can encourage readers to stay on your site longer by consistently producing material and offering your important audience information, which will cause Google to improve your ranking in search results.
3. Technical SEO and Site Structure: To boost your rankings, you should ensure that both search engine crawler bots and human users can access and easily navigate your site on all devices. Your site must also be fast, mobile-friendly, secure, free of dead links and duplications, and accessible to crawlers to meet technical SEO requirements required to boost search rankings.
Off-Page SEO:
The number of other websites that link back to a given website is one of the most important elements that search engines like Google consider when determining a site’s authority. A solid off-page SEO plan may support the effort you’ve put into your website and give you the best chance of obtaining the rankings you need to connect with your target audience. Off-page SEO involves Backlinking and Link building.
Backlinking refers to other websites that direct users back to your site, and link building involves getting websites to link to your website. There are various methods you can use to earn backlinks. Some of the most common methods include:
1. Link exchanges: Reaching out to blogs and websites that cover themes related to your own to offer link exchanges in which you’ll display a link to their site in exchange for them featuring a link to yours is one of the easiest ways to get backlinks. You should aim to obtain backlinks from websites with better domain authority than yours, as this will assist your site gain some of their trust among search engines. You can also add your business to reputable cannabis directories to gain backlinks.
2. Backlinking agencies: You can also work with a backlinking agency to steadily increase your backlinks. Backlinking agencies collaborate with independent authors to produce content for popular websites that link to your brand.
3. Public relations: PR efforts can help your business obtain backlinks from websites with high trust and domain authority.
Applying SEO strategies to your cannabis business requires you to be patient. You won’t see results right away. Businesses that succeed at SEO have made the appropriate time and money commitments. Patience is required to build trust with search engines. However, your business will become unstoppable as soon as you gain the trust of search engines.
The cannabis industry is expanding, and there is increased demand for growing cannabis companies. Applying SEO strategies to your cannabis business can enable your business to capture a good portion of an ever-growing industry, improve customer trust, and boost sales.