Starting an online cannabis business is thrilling, but it can also be stressful. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is evolving every day, and if you’re a slight lag behind you’ll miss substantial organic traffic on search engines.

A few wrong SEO moves and your new business can suffer, and all the time and resources you have spent in getting it up and running will go down the drain. 

But even if you’re struggling to rank, all is not lost. You can still use effective SEO practices to beat thousands of businesses who don’t know the secrets.

In this post, you’ll learn about the 5 SEO tips that top-ranking cannabis business websites use to achieve high rankings. 

Now let’s dive in!

Search Engine Optimization Tricks for Your Cannabis Business Website

1. Build Valuable Backlinks

To rank your cannabis website in 2020, you need to have an effective link-building strategy. Backlinks are links from other sites leading to your website. The search engines use the links to tell if your site is trusted and recognized. It’s more a matter of votes. So, the more backlinks you have, the higher your site will rank.

However, having many backlinks may not always work. The links need to be valuable and from high authority cannabis-related sites. So, how can you build quality Cannabis SEO backlinks? You can do this by building valuable backlinks using ethical practices. Start by collaborating with trustworthy cannabis sites and ask for links to your site. Other ways include guest posting, contributing to cannabis forums, and commenting on reputable cannabis-websites. 

2. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

If you don’t have a Google business profile, you could be losing customers to your competitors. When customers need a product, the first step is to search for them online. The chances are high that they choose from the businesses that show on the search results.  

You can tap on this traffic by optimizing your business profile on Google. That means indicating your business details, name, phone number, and address. If it’s well-optimized, then you’ll enjoy more success in your local SEO. This means more customers and more sales for your cannabis business. So, go ahead and sign up to create your profile. 

It doesn’t stop there; you can do more to establish your presence online and rank high. You need to list your cannabis business on the leading directory listing sites such as Local, Yellow pages, and Yelp. These make your website visible and provide quality links. Also list on reputable directory sites in the cannabis industry such as Weedmaps and Leafly to achieve better results.  

3. Use Effective On-Page SEO Techniques

Your website is at the core of SEO processes, and that’s why on-page SEO is crucial for higher ranking. This technique, also called on-site SEO, simply implies the practice of optimizing your site’s pages to improve its ranking and gain more organic traffic. 

It contains many elements ranging from the technical development of quality codes, texts, visuals, to building a user-friendly site. The goal is to deliver high-quality content and improve user experience. This culminates to more trust and authority. 

If you’re a beginner, you may need help from cannabis SEO experts to craft quality content and handle the technical aspects. 

Here are some of the top on-page SEO strategies to use:

Keyword strategy: Keywords are crucial because they link between what you’re offering and what customers are searching for. Doing proper keyword research will allow you to identify what customers want and provide more precise targeting in your content. 

 

Title tags: When customers do a search, they’ll see a title tag that shows them what to expect on your page. It also helps the search engine to determine how relevant your page is for the search query. Make sure to use the appropriate title in your content. 

Header tags: It turns out that search engines value organized content. Headers also make the content navigable and easy to understand to your readers, which improves the user experience and will result in  higher rankings. 

Image alt/title tags: These describe the image for the search engine to understand. Since Google can’t understand the image by itself, properly naming your images will improve your ranking.

Quality site development: Your site must meet certain standards for higher rankings in Google. 

4. Use Social Media SEO

Top social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, and Youtube are the perfect place to find quality links to improve your Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) ranking. Engaging with your customers creates awareness of your website, which can build trust and credibility, something that search engines value. Google will rank your cannabis site if it establishes that you’re a credible source in the industry. 

 

Social media and SEO have a close relationship. Establishing a presence in the top social media platforms is crucial to improving your SEO ranking. However, never forget that content is king. Stick to posting relevant cannabis content for better ranking. 

5. Run A Blog

A blog is an important source of the traffic to your site. Google favors sites with large valuable content. Blogs give you an opportunity to increase the number of URLs on your page in the form of blog articles with quality content. Blogging also allows you to use other SEO ranking techniques such as keyword optimization. But you can also use the blogs to promote your products and discuss cannabis industry news or events. 

 

However, it’s not just about blogging. Instead of improving your ranking, low-quality pages may hurt the site’s ranking. The quality of content makes a huge difference in the ranking. Your content must always be relevant and up to date. 

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is vital for the success of your cannabis business. Although there are many techniques that you can use to increase your ranking, these are some of the top practices. Make sure to implement them to improve your site’s traffic, conversions, sales, and profits.