The Greatest Cannabis Marketing Growth Hack Opportunity Today: SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) covers a lot of ground. I’m going to give a brief background on SEO’s origins, and where the greatest cannabis marketing growth hack opportunities are today.
SEO Origins
SEO structure was wisely based off academia research papers when the first search engines were made. In academia, if a paper is cited by multiple other papers, it’s considered to have a high degree of authority. Websites rely on this academic architecture to help provide searches with relevant, high authority answers to their search queries. Google is constantly updating its SEO algorithm to better serve its users and make more from their advertising platform.
The Current Online Cannabis Landscape and SEO Opportunities
It’s important to remember that SEO is constantly changing because technology and how we consume content is changing. The best place to spend your time with SEO efforts specifically is video, followed by blog content publishing platforms. Let’s cover these key areas starting by order of importance.
Youtube Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & SEO
We can now skip to the front of search results when we title our youtube videos and meta info the right way. I have a big list of youtube trigger words for this but you can often trigger a video search result within Google by including a verb in the present participle (ending in “ing”) at the beginning of your video title, video file name, description and tags. I cover the Youtube SEO walkthrough starting here.
If you’d like cannabis marketing SEO help now, just send me a Linkedin connection message saying “Cannabis SEO help” in the invitation.
Don’t have any video for Youtube? You can turn any of your existing blogs or recent press releases into video pretty easily these days with tools like Wave or Lumen5 and post them on all other social media channels too!
Quora SEM & SEO
It won’t give us backlink juice (it’s a nofollow backlink), but it can propel us to the top of Google searches using Quora as the vehicle. How this works is by answering questions that your potential customers are asking. For example, take the cannabis question “What are terpenes?“. My answer was emailed to over 10,000 people. Again, we’ll get into the What to do’s after how cover these important How’s.
Other Popular Content Publishing Platforms for Search Engine Marketing
Medium, Linkedin Pulse and Facebook are just a few examples of some of the great places you can repost existing content to get further SEO reach quickly. You’ll get extra points for doing blog promo videos like we did for Instaleaf App here.
Wondering how we got that kind of viewership and engagement on Youtube, that’s for another growth hack. If it’s urgently needed, please reach out to me by either Linkedin or email and I’ll respond as soon as possible
Image SEO & SEM
Naming images properly will give you that extra edge to your SEO, much like an Olympian athlete who appreciates the importance of even a fractional improvement to their performance. Image SEO adds additional context to your blog or website in terms of how the search engine indexes it. If you’re uploading files with names like IMG_0123.JPG, search engines have no idea what is in the image. But if you upload it correctly, it’ll really help. The way you name video or image files is as follows: No capital letters, no spaces, no underscores. Search engines get cut off indexing with spaces and shift+number symbols as well. Here’s how it could look if I was uploading my company logo for example.
this-one-marketing-logo.png
Have specific SEO questions for your business? Consult us for your SEM and optimization needs today!
Next, we’ll deep dive into the mechanics, instructions and what to do’s for each of these critical growth opportunity areas.
