Optimizing Your Cannabis Website for SEO
These days, several cannabis websites can be just as competitive and excellent as yours. This makes it hard for some brands to effectively stand out and get their target audience to visit their cannabis websites. Like other business industries, digital marketing strategies such as search engine optimization can be of great help. But first, what is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a digital marketing strategy that can help your website increase organic traffic from the search engine results page or SERP. It also helps improve both the quality and quantity of your website traffic and its exposure. Despite the acronym, search engine optimization is much more about the audience than search engines themselves.
In fact, it is about understanding what your audience is looking up on the Internet, the questions they need answers to, and most of all, the words they use when looking for specific information. When you know the answers to these questions, reaching the right audience looking for your cannabis products will be much easier and quicker. Thus, cannabis SEO is a must for your website.
In this blog, we’ll give you a few helpful tips to effectively optimize your website for SEO. So make sure to keep reading until the end of the article.
Tips to optimize your cannabis website for SEO:
1. Local SEO
Local map
A local map pack is a SERP feature that shows the top 3 businesses that audiences see first when searching for a location-based query. Commonly, the top 3 businesses that show up are often the closest businesses to the searched location. However, cannabis businesses with more reviews and frequent posts are more likely to appear in the map pack than cannabis businesses that do not stay on top of those things.
Structured data
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a particular page and classifies the page content depending on its services. Structured data plays a significant role in search engine optimization because the information it collects is provided to Google. This can drastically improve your search rankings when done correctly.
National SEO
If local SEO is trying to get customers near you to purchase from your cannabis business, national SEO is being used to increase brand awareness and position your cannabis brand as an expert in the cannabis industry. However, some may wonder why it matters to increase brand awareness to audiences far away from their location and might never purchase their products.
The answer is for SEO value!
Generating more traffic to your website will tell Google that people are engaging with your cannabis brand and that it is worth showing off!
2. Onsite SEO
Content
SEO content creation is not only helpful in increasing your search rankings but is also ideal in educating your audience about the products you sell. When writing SEO content, you can communicate with your audience more freely and on a more personal level. Besides, customers always have questions about cannabis products, so why not take advantage of them and create compelling content?
Keywords
Creating content is simple, but adding relevant keywords is extremely necessary for it to be more effective. Finding the right keywords is simple; you only need to think about the words or phrases that your target audience searches for on the Internet. Some terms that are relevant to cannabis business can include “weed,” “cannabis,” “marijuana,” and the like.
Short tail keywords
Typically, short tail keywords are high in search volume, competitiveness and less conversion-focused. This is why some businesses do not use them when creating their content. But, it does not mean that short-tail keywords must be ignored. In fact, they can also be beneficial, and you can rank them using the right strategies.
3. Off-Site SEO
Backlinking
They say that backlinking is the heart of off-site SEO because search engines use them to indicate the linked-to content’s strategy. It is extremely valuable since it tells search engines that your website is more important than your competitors on the web.
Domain authority
Domain authority is a huge consideration for backlinking because it describes the ranking given to a website that measures credibility. One of the best ways to increase your domain authority is to improve your cannabis website’s overall SEO health by focusing mainly on the quality and quantity of external links pointing to your website.
Reviews
Testimonials are one of the most effective ways to increase credibility and gain your customer’s trust. Thus, getting reviews from your customers is extremely necessary if you want new customers to view your website and trust the products that you are selling.
Website business profile
Google My Business is a free listing service that local businesses use to manage their business profile. It is used to manage their company’s name and display their address and contact information. This gives your customers an accurate way to find you, so you must always keep your information updated.
Listings on reputable directories
Getting your cannabis brand listed on popular social platforms and cannabis-related industries helps ensure your business shows up in places that your target audience is looking for. This can also be beneficial to increase high-quality links to your website.
Utilize social media
Social media is always one of the most effective ways to engage with your target audience directly. You can share relevant industry-related news, tips, and practices with your social media followers to encourage them to check out your website. That way, you can direct traffic back to your cannabis website.
Maintain blog
As mentioned, writing content or blogs is an effective way to boost your SEO ranking. Publishing original content regularly allows your website to be up to date and positions you as an expert in the industry.
Final Thoughts
Search engine optimization has several advantages when done correctly. Aside from driving organic traffic to your cannabis website, a high-quality cannabis SEO strategy also delivers an impressive return on investment. Although this may take quite a while, it is considered one of the most significant benefits for many companies.
Not only that, but by ranking your website with the help of SEO, you can gain credibility and trust. Besides, SEO is also an excellent way to promote your cannabis website 24/7. This is because once you publish your content on your website, search engine optimization efforts do not stop after work hours.
Ultimately, SEO is a great long-term marketing strategy. Implementing thoughtful strategies such as content creation and on-page optimization can guarantee great results, but remember that it must be done correctly.