How to Do SEO for CBD Companies Right?

Search engine optimization is crucial for the success of businesses of all scopes and sizes that want to establish a strong online presence. It is particularly true for CBD companies, as the cannabis market is already highly competitive. Moreover, the specific regulations and strict ad policies of some advertising platforms can make it challenging to promote through traditional marketing channels. In this blog post, we will discuss some effective techniques to implement SEO for businesses in the CBD niche.

Importance of SEO for CBD Businesses

In today’s digital age, more than simply having a website for the CBD brand is needed to stay ahead of the competition. It requires developing and implementing a powerful and thorough CBD SEO strategy for CBD companies so their platforms can dominate their rivals. 

Various optimization tactics will work on improving your website to boost its visibility when users search for products or services related to your cannabis business on search engines. The higher your rankings, the more traffic can be acquired from those searches. Hence, the higher conversion rates are because potential clients immediately find what they seek.

Moreover, SEO is essential for a CBD business as it is the safest and highest ROI marketing option. Sure, PPC and social media placement can grow visits to the site, but search engines will ultimately serve as the source of most online traffic. At the same time, SEO is also one of the only techniques that will pay off long-term without requiring additional investment.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Whether you hire SEO experts or perform optimization on your own, understanding this thing is the crucial starting point before any SEO techniques can be performed. Knowing how optimization works helps create a robust strategy and kick it off correctly. 

Basically, search engines employ crawlers to crawl the web, visiting one platform after another and collecting data on them before indexing them. In the same way, web pages are indexed by search engines so that they understand where those pages are when they need to be fetched upon users’ requests. Search algorithms check the content of the websites in the index, employing many confirmed ranking factors for that purpose. With the help of those signals, bots decide in what order platforms will be shown in search results for a specific query.

Best Optimization Practices for CBD Companies

Now that you have a more explicit picture of what SEO is and what value it brings, let’s go over what can be done to enhance the visibility of your cannabis business.

#1: Create and Submit a Sitemap

First of all, consider creating and submitting a sitemap. Having an updated sitemap as part of your CBD company’s optimization plan is essential. This point is especially important for new websites that have low domain authority.

A sitemap implies a list of pages on a platform in XML format so search engines can read it. The sitemap is what helps get your pages indexed. However, Google does not index them solely because you have submitted an updated sitemap. Its bots index them because they located and crawled them, and they regard them as of sufficient quality to be worth indexing. Given that, it is necessary to say that by submitting an XML sitemap to search engines, you give them a clue that you consider your site pages of exemplary quality for CBD-related search queries worthy of indexing.

The challenge for new CBD companies trying to rank their websites for popular search phrases is that their platforms likely have a low DA and little to no backlinks. In that case, Google may not crawl and index the website’s pages as often as you would like. Yet, using a sitemap, you can speed up the indexing, which helps reduce the time it takes for your platform to start ranking for keywords.

#2: Target Less-Competitive Related Keywords

It is a common mistake for those who start a new website to hope to rank for competitive keywords like “cbd gummies.” That is because it is almost impossible for new platforms to rank for these highly competitive phrases. SEO is a long-term game, which, depending on the niche specifics, can take considerable time to earn the trust and authority needed to rank for such keywords.

When you start out with your CBD business online, your best choice is to focus on less competitive words and phrases. They may be related to the competitive keywords you want to rank for. Although they may not have the same search volume, they appear to be much easier to rank for. As your platform develops, you can slowly begin targeting competitive phrases.

#3: Use Meta Tags to Your Advantage

Meta tags must be optimized according to the page content. They are an important piece of the puzzle regarding SEO optimization for your CBD platform and should not be overlooked. These text snippets deliver data about the page’s content and help search engine bots understand what the page is about. That way, algorithms can decide whether to include it in the search result pages.

Among the many meta tags, the two most significant ones for SEO objectives are the meta title and the meta description. While the title tag is necessary and is displayed both in the web browser tabs and SERPs, the description is an optional element positioned below the title tag only in the search results. Both tags must be filled with keyword-rich and relevant content that perfectly represents the page.

Search engine bots do not use page meta descriptions in their ranking algorithms, so they do not directly affect where a page appears in search results. Still, they are an essential part of a good SEO strategy because, when used appropriately, they make people more likely to click on the link to your platform, ultimately bringing traffic to it and raising the CTR (click-through rate) on Google.

#4: Create an Internal Linking Strategy

SEO for CBD businesses works better with an optimized internal linking strategy in place. In fact, every single site needs to build up its link juice to rank well in the SERPs. Initially, Google “spiders” crawled the websites and determined their relevance by what other platforms were linking to them. For that reason, a quality backlink profile has been regarded as the strongest factor impacting a website’s position. Hence, both external and internal links must be an integral part of the SEO for your CBD business.

However, when it comes to external linking, the websites chosen to place your links should be highly relevant and authoritative on the subject. The process of gaining quality external backlinks is pretty time-consuming and not easy to do. That is why a new site with low domain authority and few backlinks can take advantage of optimized internal linking.

This technique can significantly help the optimization of your site. Pay attention to creating relevant and related content on your CBD platform that you can cross-link to each other. Adding internal links from the old content to the newer blog posts helps them be indexed faster and moves them up in the rankings. This approach is beneficial if the internal links come from relevant pages with decent rankings on search engines.

#5: Conduct Technical SEO Audit

A regular technical audit of the site is critical for providing good performance and maintaining a steady flow of users. SEO for a website is a complicated and ongoing process, so technical SEO audits need to be done every so often to make sure the site does not run into any problems.

By performing a technical audit, you can determine and resolve any potential cases that could be holding your platform back from ranking better in SERPs. With the aim to improve the optimization of the CBD website, this step is vital for ensuring that you head in the right direction. Pinpointing the errors in the platform’s backend and frontend promptly ensures you will fix them on time and keep up its fine performance. Among the most frequent and common issues are the following:

• broken links (can cause the website to break down);
• duplicated content (occurs when two or more versions of a page exist under the same domain and may lead to penalties);
• slow site speed (tend to happen due to heavy traffic loads, such as videos being shared across the platform at once; ultimately can cause users to get frustrated and abandon the site).

Since SEO is a field that is always changing, a good technical audit can help you keep your CBD site up-to-date and running at its best. Consider using tailored SEO audit tools to locate and fix any technical problems on the CBD platform.

Coming to the Upshot

The above information provides CBD businesses with some solid pointers for improving their SEO. Generally, CBD SEO is not much different from any other niche SEO. The only distinction is that the cannabis industry is highly competitive; considering its specifics, it also requires some extra measures to earn Google’s trust.

Moreover, it is essential to remember that SEO is not a one-time thing, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution in that field. Your CBD company’s optimization plan should be tailored to fit your brand and align with your promotion goals and budget. That way, it is sure to bear fruit in the long term perspective.