Cannabis and CBD Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): A Definitive Guide
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a type of strategic digital marketing channel, whereby it is the efforts taken to attract a greater amount of audience (i.e. traffic) to a certain webpage. This involves trying to improve the website’s organic (i.e. non-paid) rankings in a search engine results, and thus eventually be recognised as the overall best result for an individual’s keyword search.
This is an extremely crucial role, especially for companies with an online presence, because online searching offers an enormous source of traffic. Approximately 60% of the total web traffic typically begins with a search on Google. And interestingly, if one were to accumulate the total number of traffic originating from other widely used search engines such as Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, and YouTube, it is estimated that nearly 71% of the population are researching information via these channels.
How does SEO work?
A search engine works by utilising an algorithm that functions in real-time to present their best-possible search result to the user, based on various criteria. In general, the criteria set in order to rank these websites include its relevance (meaning that the search engines consider whether the webpages relate closely to the user’s keyword input), authority (this is a method of assessing the accuracy and trustworthiness of the content presented on the website), and its usefulness (defined in this scenario as the interaction of the users with the presented search result). Hence, the process of SEO is essentially to optimise a particular website or webpage for the search engine that a firm or individual hopes to be ranked highly for.
Understanding the key SEO factors
In reality, SEO is a complicated computational machinery that comprises more than 200 ranking factors. However, there are three areas which are considered to be the most important components influencing the search engine rankings, and so they should be heavily prioritised. These are namely: research, content development, backlinks, and on-site technical SEO.
Research
SEO initiatives usually begin with an exploration on search engines like Google, coupled with learning from free data tools like Google WebMaster and Google Analytics to gauge the current search performance and user interaction statistics of an organisation’s website. These tools can be installed into a website within minutes and provide valuable data for improvements in future SEO work.
As part of the research process, keywords and trends research is the first step that any SEO campaign ought to start with, whereby it is critical for one to pinpoint the exact search queries (i.e. words and/or phrases) that potential customers type in as an input for the search engine. Important aspects to identify these keywords would be their search volume, level of difficulty, number of clicks, and the parent topic. Upon determining the appropriate keywords, a common strategy employed by companies would be to ensure that each page or post on their respective websites contains at least one primary keyword.
Broadly speaking, keywords tend to be allocated into either of these two categories, namely product keywords or informational keywords. Product keywords can be defined as keywords used by customers to find a certain product to purchase, whereas informational keywords are keywords that the target customers use in the event that they are not shopping for a product. In order to have a successful SEO campaign, it is imperative for a company to optimise their website pages so that they contain both categories of keywords. Therefore, keywords research is the most efficient way to help one select the best ones to be included.
For individuals or organisations who are new to SEO, it would often be a good idea to place an initial focus on determining long-tail keywords, whereby these are basically search terms that have a relatively lower search volume. This is because although the search volume is compromised, these keywords are typically not as competitive and hence a higher conversion rate could be expected. Over time along with an accumulated amount of experience employing SEO, the organisation can begin to target other keywords that are considered to be more competitive with more confidence. Common useful SEO tools to help with the research and analysis process include Google Autocomplete, Answer the Public, Google Keyword Planner, Ahref, Moz, SimilarWeb, and Alexa.
Content development
The key ingredient to a great SEO would be having loads of visitors, and it is clear that having SEO-friendly content helps a lot as an important boost to a website’s search rankings. With that in mind, the content generated should be well-aligned with the topics that the customers are consistently searching for.
Taking into account that the main goal of these websites is to convert browsers into leads and customers, it is also vital to ensure the product and service placements within the contents of the webpage. This serves as an excellent platform to promote the features and benefits of the products and/or service offered by the company, which would ideally draw a customer’s attention.
Besides writing about new product launches, promotions, events, or industry news, creating high-quality blog articles is another viable strategy to bring in more traffic into the website. MarketMuse reported that the publication of “topically relevant” content (meaning that the post effectively explores one topic in depth) can significantly outperform a less in-depth content although both sources may be discussing the same topic. This is because Google, theoretically, values depth over superficial writing. So, having an extremely comprehensive and detailed content is a useful strategy to help websites rank higher in the search engine results.
Furthermore, outstanding website contents constitute a sound structure. This involves having a neat arrangement of content pages, thus easing the visitors in finding the things that they are searching for. Another method includes establishing internal links, which would be helpful for search engines to understand how the different pages are related to each other.
Writing styles play an important role, too, with a compelling introduction being one of the main priorities. This arguably is the most critical part of an article’s content, as it essentially captures and holds the users’ attention on the website. An exceptional introduction would be good at achieving three objectives, which are: (1) discussing topics that resonate well with the readers’ worries and concerns, (2) establishing trust, and (3) proposing a solution that effectively resolves the readers’ problems. Following the introduction, authors should concentrate their writing on readability, in which having breaks between different contents using subheadings, images, quotes, videos or other tools assist in ensuring the engagement of users with a short attention span for reading. To provide some perspective to the previous point, it is interesting to note that approximately 50% of the population in the United States have a reading proficiency falling below eighth grade of elementary school. Henceforth, this necessitates the use of short and simple paragraphs and sentences, alongside a reduction of unnecessary jargon and adverbs that may confuse the reader.
In addition to that, organisations should aim to publish articles regularly, where it was revealed that companies with a consistent frequency of publication enjoy a 350% increase in web traffic in comparison to those who did not invest much time into proper content development. Moreover, frequent and high-quality publications create “linkable assets”, meaning that the contents on the website become worthy links and references for other web domains. It was also found that lengthier contents usually enjoy a higher ranking in search engine results compared to shorter articles. As a matter of fact, the average length of Google’s first page results is 1,890 words. Therefore, the optimal article length that one should aim for is between 2,000 to 5,000 words. A plausible explanation for this finding is due to the opportunity posed for longer content to improve the topical relevance of a webpage, thus providing Google with a deeper knowledge of the topic of discussion. In the meantime, it is also a good practice to ensure the articles’ presence on a diversity of platforms such as Medium to gain greater traction of viewers.
Crucially, there are three pillars of a framework known as E‑A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) which should be practised during content writing.
To begin with, the Oxford Dictionary defines an expert to be an individual as being “very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area”. One strategy to develop expertise would be essentially to determine what exactly are the visitors on a lookout for, using the data obtained from keywords research. This is followed by gaining a greater understanding of the visitors’ intention of searching these keywords and writing articles that strikes a fine balance between being all-inclusive and simplicity. The creator of the main content should then brainstorm about any other future possible queries that their users are likely to have, and ultimately prepare for the availability of content that effectively addresses those queries too.
Having authoritativeness of the main content itself and the website, on the other hand, means that the company’s name (or brand) becomes synonymous with the relevant customers’ topics of interest. An example to illustrate this would be when customers think of Amazon the moment when one talks about “online shopping”, or when Internet users immediately connect Facebook with the term “social media” during a casual conversation. There are several key performance indexes that could be used to evaluate a webpage’s degree of authoritativeness. This includes the number of links from other relevant and authoritative websites that the creator’s website possesses, how often the website was name-dropped in the news, the value of the webpage’s Majestic ‘trust ratio’ score (the closer the score is to 1.0, the more authoritative a website is). Also, it should be taken into account to what extent the generated content is shared across different social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, being a trustworthy creator of the main content as well as the website is associated with numerous criteria. Firstly, it is important to showcase an explicit and clear method for visitors to contact the website owners should they have any further queries. This also includes being able to connect the website with an actual physical location, such as the office headquarters or their nearest store addresses. Commonly, the footer of a trustworthy web page would contain a link for users to access the terms of business (also known as terms of conditions) page with no difficulty. In addition to that, including an easily accessible privacy policy at the footer whilst ensuring that the website domain is fully secure at all times are critical components to securing and maintaining the public’s trust. If the website involves the acceptance of transactions, proper refunds and returns policy statements must be clearly indicated, along with detailed and complete product/service specifications and relevant safety advice for companies with websites that are selling products and/or services. Whilst for web pages that are sharing insights on a particular topic, it is important for authors to cite credible and relevant external sources and/or quotations, which ideally would be other authoritative websites. This would signify to the visitors that the research conducted by the firm is all based on trusted and verified sources.
Popular types of content found amongst successful (i.e. high-ranked) websites come in various forms. For example, some pages include complete lists, whereby these are a comprehensive record of tips, advice, techniques, ideas, items, or even recipes that serve as a one-stop site for everything that relates to a specific keyword or genre. These lists are typically a compilation of information from a variety of credible information sources. Another example would include a thorough step-by-step guide on how to do or achieve something that the visitors hope to be able to accomplish, whilst some users may greatly appreciate websites containing data-driven content. This means that having external references and authoritative research are essential. Writing complete guides is also another option. These are not necessarily equivalent to writing a complete list, and guides are an all-inclusive coverage on every existing angle that is available on a specific topic. This, therefore, spans a great breadth as well as depth, with the main objective of providing readers with everything they need to understand about a single topic within a single page of the website. Not to mention, having visual elements within the content of the pages like infographics, videos, flowcharts, and screenshots, are also incredibly useful ways of increasing the number of visitors to the website.
The effort does not always end there. Having an active social media campaign is also another way of attracting viewers, and this could help to boost the SEO if it was organised properly and professionally. The most suitable social media platforms for each business is largely reliant on the specific marketing strategy that the management board intends to adopt. However, it is almost a universal expectation that every company ought to have an active Facebook and Google+ page as a bare minimum.
Taking all of these aspects into consideration and implementing each of them, the future steps would really be for companies to continuously repeat and expand their SEO initiatives. This would involve having to constantly monitor reports and conduct competitor analysis frequently, as there is a need to gain a full overview of what each and every competitor is doing for other respective SEO campaigns. For instance, it is important to identify the specific keywords employed by the competitors, as Google will rank between the companies based on which business offers a more reliable source of information for the specified keyword. And although building trust takes time, it is essential to understand that everyone else would also be competing to win the search engine’s trust too.
Meanwhile, by finding out the external authoritative websites that the various competitors are linked to, there may be a very realistic chance that the creator’s website could form links with the same authoritative websites as well. Thereby, it is a necessity for content creators to stay on top of and study current trends, medical research, and customers’ interests and search inputs in order to pinpoint new topic areas to write about. In the long run, this assists in building a loyal community of repeat customers.
Backlinks
Also known as “inbound links”, “incoming links”, or “one-way links”, backlinks are defined as links that connect a website to another page of a different (but relevant) website. These backlinks are classified as “up-votes” for a specific page or website due to each of these votes essentially endorsing the value, usefulness as well as credibility of the written content. Thus, it is expected that pages with a higher number of backlinks are more likely to enjoy a higher ranking in the organic search engines.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that not every single backlink was created equally, meaning that there is a standard of quality associated with each of them. This translates to one high-quality backlink being more powerful in terms of gaining up-votes than having a thousand backlinks that are of low quality.
Top backlinks tend to have several key common features. Firstly, they typically originate from authoritative and trustworthy websites. This concept is also known as “domain authority”. As indicated by Ahrefs Domain Rating’s research, there is a strong correlation found between a website’s overall domain authority and higher search ranking results. Furthermore, it was shown that increasing the number of link authorities to your website may also improve the ranking results for other available pages.
Moving on, top backlinks also include targeted keywords in the anchor text of the link. Anchor text can be defined as the part of a link that is visible as a text to the viewers. Having targeted keywords within the link’s anchor texts would help to gain the visitors’ attention to your website. However, there is a fine line for this, as websites that are caught to be going overboard with keyword-rich anchor texts are most likely to get penalised by the “Google Penguin” algorithm. “Google Penguin” can be described as a website-filter, whereby they specialise in removing websites that develop backlinks using anchor text with an exact keyword match. This is considered as a typical “black hat” link building strategy.
To briefly explain, it is important to bear in mind that there are many “SEO agencies” blacklisted as “black hats”. These firms are notorious for their inappropriate services that could lead to detrimental outcomes for a business, including penalisation from Google or even getting blocked from the search engine results.
Coming back to the topic of quality backlink traits, most links and pages that top backlinks bring visitors to would be other websites that present topically related content. Besides that, having a large domain diversity has an enormous impact on a website’s ranking. This means that having a greater number of links from domains that have not been previously linked to your website (termed as unique referring domains) equates to a higher ranking. In other words, possessing backlinks from the same website brings diminishing returns; a website containing 100 backlinks from 100 different websites will be ranked higher than a website with 1,000 links from only one other similar website. Much of the reason for this algorithm stems from search engines trusting that having a greater number of domains is equivalent to a higher number of endorsements for your website.
On-site technical SEO
On-site technical SEO involves the ongoing practice of optimising a web page’s actual content for viewers and for the search engine. It is also known as “on-page SEO”, and there are numerous common practices to ensure a successful optimisation. This should also not be confused with off-page SEO, which involves the optimisation of signals that occur outside your page or website, such as backlinks.
This includes the use of short yet descriptive URLs. Effective URLs should provide some insights or clues for visitors on the type of content that they could expect upon clicking on the link to the subsequent webpage. These URLs usually tend to also include the target keywords, and the short description may provide search engines with a clearer overview of the true topic of the page and/or website. Likewise, including internal links from relevant places on the existing pages of the website (known as internal crosslink) is also another way to prompt visitors to explore the website further.
Other on-site technical SEOs include assigning appropriate title tags (which means that the creators label every content page with a suitable name), header tags (meaning to have a proper organisational structure for all of the website’s content), and image tags. It was revealed that content pages having a minimum of one image significantly ranked higher than those which did not publish any images. Though, it was also shown that adding more images does not significantly increase a website’s ranking.
In addition, having an optimised meta-description is made known to increase the number of clicks and overall organic website traffic. Meta-description is an element within the HTML code of a page in the website, whereby it offers a superficial but insightful overview of the page’s content. This is usually a good platform for the content writers to add important keywords and phrases that may be of interests to the visitors, and thus grab their attention to the website.
Moreover, the bounce rate is understood as the proportion of visitors who exit a website without taking any forms of action like keying in data, clicking on another link, or buying a product/service. Hence, another aspect to look out for during on-site technical SEO would be to lower the bounce rate as much as possible. To further justify this, research conducted by SimilarWeb showed that a reduced bounce rate has a positive relationship with a higher search engine ranking.
Speed is also another critical part of the on-site technical SEO process. Based on the data presented by Alexa, fast-loading web pages are ranked much higher than pages on slow-loading websites. This means that websites having a long loading time are most likely going to suffer a significant loss in traffic and also other engagement metrics like the amount of time spent on a page or dwell time. One of the most useful tools for one to evaluable the website’s loading speed would be GTMetrix. And as a general practice, organisations should aim to maintain their website’s Fully Loaded Time under 3 seconds only.
With more than 60% of searches done using a mobile device rather than a desktop, much consideration of the customers’ journey is imperative. Website owners should make sure that their pages are mobile-friendly. And not to mention, website coding and development has to be of high quality to fulfil the range of criteria imposed by Google in order to be ranked highly.
Cannabis & CBD-specific SEO and marketing
There is much expectation that the cannabis industry would be experiencing a high growth rate, especially with the ever-increasing legalisation of cannabis consumption for medical purposes as well as for recreational use, which serves as an influencing factor for its market growth.
The two main products of the emerging cannabis market are marijuana and industrial hemp. Based on a recent report by Grand View Research, Inc., the size of the global legal marijuana market is expected to reach USD 73.6 billion by the year 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.1% during the forecasted period.
Nonetheless, the SEO strategy for the cannabis industry would not be the same as in other industries. This mainly stems from several issues concerning its legality, data drought and sales, which are unique to this industry. Given the largely ambiguous legal arena that the cannabis industry is currently situated at, it is clear that cannabis companies faced numerous challenges in adopting several traditional marketing and advertising methods. In some paid advertising platforms, their terms of services essentially restrict the promotion of cannabis-related products. To make matters worse, Google has harsh restrictions on cannabis search data, with the majority of them hidden in AdWords. Thus, these scenarios make the cannabis industry an extremely tricky one to optimise for search engine rankings.
Despite all these difficulties, the medical and recreational cannabis market continues to enjoy a significantly fast pace of growth, with countries like the United States gradually expanding their legislative efforts to decriminalise these substances. In addition, there are no restrictions in the advertisement when companies utilise engine optimisation tactics to assist in their cannabis and CBD product marketing efforts. This, in essence, makes organic SEO the ideal method to bring in traffic to an organisation’s website. Nevertheless, with the intense competition levels in the cannabis market, cannabis- and CBD-specific SEO is, therefore, coming increasingly competitive.
Case study on alphagreen.io and their core SEO metrics (as of April 2020)
Shifting the spotlight onto Alphagreen Group (alphagreengroup.com). Founded in late 2019, they are the leading distribution platform for superior CBD and alternative healthcare products in Europe.
Much of Alphagreen’s growth strategy is focused on obtaining greater website traffic, and then eventually converting the visitors into customers. Although UI, UX, and front-end web development are critical components, these alone would be insufficient for the company to achieve its goals.
SEO plays an additional big role in the company’s success. In just 4 months from going live the domain obtained a Domain Authority of 48 with more than 2k indexed keywords and 2.9K backlinks, growing exponentially day by day. Much of Alphagreen’s success is attributed to the company being hosts for the Alphagreen Academy & Medium webpages, with top contents being interviews, product reviews, videos, and articles addressing frequently asked questions (FAQs). For general SEO tools, the company uses Ahref and Moz, as well as Google Analytics and WebMaster for Analysis.
Composed of a team of SEO professionals and highly skilled web developers, Alphagreen is in the best position to offer you help with gaining web traffic for any cannabis- and CBD-related businesses, as well as other alternative healthcare and nutraceutical products. For further inquiries regarding Alphagreen services, send an email to aman@alphagreen.io, who will be happy to provide additional information.
Summary
In conclusion, it is relatively apparent that search engine optimisation is the best possible way for any company to increase its online visibility as well as inbound sales. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that SEO is an ongoing long-term process, with the average top ten search result pages being slightly above two years old. As a matter of fact, the average number one page in search rankings tends to be approximately three years old!
So realistically, this campaign requires a whole lot of patience, coupled with having an in-depth understanding of how the system functions. Although SEO strategies differ across various industries, common tasks associated with SEO will still involve conducting loads of research to optimise content around particular keywords, investing into high-quality content, establishing backlinks, and consistently studying the market and existing competitors.
Taking all these factors and putting them into action, these will ultimately help a website develop a brand and maintain a positive online identity naturally over time.
Verified by a Healthcare Professional
Anastasiia Myronenko
Anastasiia Myronenko is a Medical Physicist actively practicing in one of the leading cancer centers in Kyiv, Ukraine. She received her master’s degree in Medical Physics at Karazin Kharkiv National University and completed Biological Physics internship at GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, Germany. Anastasiia Myronenko specializes in radiation therapy and is a fellow of Ukrainian Association of Medical Physicists.
This article includes the promotion of products and services sold on Alphagreen and affiliate links to other businesses.
Alphagreen and its materials are not intended to treat, diagnose, cure or prevent any disease. The information and products presented on this site are not intended for medical use nor do they make any medical claims. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified healthcare provider for any questions you have regarding a pre-existing medical condition, are pregnant and/or are breastfeeding, and before undertaking any diet, exercise or another health-related program.
