We all know the cannabis industry has experienced many highs and lows since disrupting the marketplace. In 2019, hundreds of new brands joined in what is already being referred to as The Great Economic Market Disruption of Cannabis.
And the most interesting thing to me about the conversations around CBD-based products is how it fractures conversations around politics, finance, health & wellness in ways than most other products don’t do – giving us ways to create data rich blogs that drive SEO and SEM results for our clients.
Blogging helps you boost the SEO quality of your page by positioning your website as a relevant answer to a potential customers’ questions. Blog posts that utilize a variety of on-oage SEO tactics will be given more opportunities to rank in search engines such as google, bing, yahoo, etc. and get customers to visit your site.
Blogging also helps get people to your website so you can remarket them. More about that at a later date.
Here are a few things I’ve personally learned while launching several CBD brands and products this year including topicals, elixirs and skin care.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – This is the method in which we optimize your website to rank higher on Google (getting you to Page 1 of Google Search Results), resulting in natural, organic and recurring traffic to your website.
HTTPS SECURE – If you are asking for payment or for sensitive information over your website you will want to have a secure website. This ensures their data is remains private, which we all know is very important. Having an insecure website will negatively impact your Google Search ranking.
META TITLES – Plain and simple, these simple words help search engines (like Google, bing, Yahoo & Altavista) understand what your page is about. This is what Google is looking for when you search for a product or service (it’s the purple/blue link directly under the page title). You’ll want to make sure your key words are located in your meta titles.
META DESCRIPTIONS – This is the information that people will see as a result of searching for your product, service or brand. You’ll want to make sure your key words are located in your meta description.
SCHEMA RICH SNIPPETS – If you’ve ever searched for a product on Google and have seen extra information such as reviews, price or stock quantity pop up then you’ve seen these rich snippets. These are relatively new to the SEO conversation and help users get more valuable information about the product, service or brand they are searching
ALT DESCRIPTION – These text tags are attached to images you upload to your website and describe what your image is about, which Google uses since it’s bots can not “see” what an image is (yet). This data-rich tag is important if you want your images to show up on Google Images.
SEO-FRIENDLY URLS – Ever see those super long web links? There’s a reason why… Google reads a pages URL and uses that information to decide how relevant your page is to a user’s search phrase. It’s also a factor in where you rank in search results, meaning the more relevant Google things your page is to the search term at hand, the closer you will be to the top of page 1 search results.
PAGE SPEED OPTIMIZATION – Before I lose your attention, let me explain how important your website’s load time is… If your website is too slow, not only will you lose interest from potential consumers, you’ll also lose ranking in search results. Google considers a website’s load time as a key factor in their algorithm to ensure users are having a good search experience.
BACKLINKS – These are links that appear on other websites that lead back to your website. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website within your niche-category (this is an important detail!), the higher you will rank in search results. For example, if you’re launching a CBD skin care product a backlink from a beauty blog would provide you with a higher ranking result than a backlink from a finance blog.
While marijuana, CBD and hemp-infused products are legally sold in most states in the US it’s still against most advertisers terms of service to sell or advertise those products, but fear not as it is still possible to navigate these difficult-to-manage PPC Campaigns to get big results.
