What are the best keywords to use for an effective CBD SEO strategy? How Do you find the best CBD keywords to implement on your site and content strategy? Here are the 5 best tips on keyword research for CBD websites.
5 Tips on Keyword Research for CBD Websites
Keyword research for CBD companies is an essential part of your online business and is essentially the foundation for an effective CBD SEO strategy.
If your keyword research is done well, you’ve implemented an effective CBD SEO strategy on your e-commerce website, and you’ve also established a content strategy for what type of content you should be writing and optimizing for.
However, if your CBD SEO keyword research isn’t comprehensive enough, or was completed by someone without much keyword research experience, your CBD SEO strategy will not help you increase sales in your online CBD store.
In this article, we’ll outline the best practices for keyword research on CBD e-commerce websites. Here’s how to find the best keywords for your CBD SEO strategy.
CBD Keyword Research For SEO
There are basically two major tactics to execute your CBD keyword research:
- You can start from scratch – and use your own research – or hire an experienced CBD SEO agency.
- You can get stealth and spy on your competition.
Before you get started, we’ll break down the various factors that go into good CBD SEO keyword research. The following are 5 important things to consider when choosing your target keywords.
1. Search Intent of The CBD User
When choosing targeted keywords for CBD SEO, it’s important to always consider the intent of the searcher when using a specific search query/keyword phrase.
When it comes to CBD e-commerce SEO, you want choose search terms like “buy cbd vape oil”, “buy cbd oil online 1000mg”, and “buy CBD vape juice near me”, as opposed to broad phrases such as “what is CBD”, “does CBD get you high”, and “how much CBD oil do I take”.
Looking at the keyword suggestions above, you can clearly see that the former 3 search terms have more of the intent to buy CBD oil online now, while the later 3 terms have the intent of learning more information.
2. Search Volume For Popular CBD Search Queries
Search volume is the metric that most free and paid keyword research tools use to show the average number of monthly searches for a given keyword phrase, in a given geographic territory (city, province/state, or country).
If the search volume for a given CBD keyword search phrase is high (exact match), this means that there are many people searching for that given term or a semantically related term.
So does that mean that search term is a good one, and should be one of your target CBD SEO keywords? Well, yes, and no.
If a keyword search phrase is super popular, that likely means it’s also super competitive. Meaning, many other brands are trying to rank for that same keyword search phrase, because it’s so popular.
Higher search volume can sometimes mean higher competition for getting your content to rank/outrank for that term.
The key here is to be super careful and realistic when comparing search volume to ranking difficulty as it all has to do with your website’s domain authority.
New websites, with thin content, will usually have a low domain authority (DA). Older sites, with quality backlinks, traffic, and high-quality, relevant content, will have a higher DA and therefore rank higher than low DA sites.
3. Ranking Difficulty For Your CBD Ecommerce Website
Ranking difficulty is another metric that is used by free and paid keyword research tools to provide CBD SEO specialists to identify which terms will be harder to compete with for existing search results versus terms that would be easier.
As mentioned, this part of CBD SEO keyword research is highly dependent on your site’s domain authority in the e-commerce CBD products niche.
So what exactly is domain authority?
Domain Authority, or DA, is a score developed by Moz that hints on the “strength” and relevance of a website for a specific subject area or industry.
It’s a logarithmic scale of points, typically ranging from zero to 100, which predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).
The higher the number of points, the higher is the website’s DA. Note that DA is different than Page Authority (PA).
While DA tells us about the overall ranking potential of the entire domain or website, PA is the ranking potential of a single web page.
So how can you improve your site’s DA?
It’s impossible to objectively increase your domain authority directly or suddenly, but these tactics can improve your position over time:
- Create lots of high-quality blog content on your website with a tight internal linking structure.
- Work on earning lots of high-quality inbound links, both in terms of external source authority and link relevance (these can point to any page).
- Remove any bad links pointing to your site (any page).
4. Search Relevance of CBD Search Terms
Search relevance is subjective but should be used as an objective technique. It’s also similar, but different, then “search intent” mentioned above.
When doing CBD keyword research you’re going to find many popular search phrases. Just because you find a keyword with high search volume that you’re confident you’ll be able to rank for, you need to consider its relevance to your specific CBD website and what CBD products you’re selling.
For example, here’s some context. Consider the value of 10 qualified potential customers driven by search over 1,000 unqualified people who will never actually buy anything.
These people will likely bounce from your site, i.e. leave immediately, when they see your website fails to deliver on what they were hoping to find due to a relevance mismatch.
5. What Pages Do You Need To Optimize?
CBD e-commerce websites can have a lot of content to optimize while others can have very little other than the home page and the product pages.
The most important pages for you to optimize with a CBD SEO strategy are in fact your homepage and all of your product pages, but definitely, do not stop there.
We highly recommend you optimize the following pages on your CBD e-commerce website:
- Homepage
- All product pages
- All images on all pages
- Your About page
- All of your blogs
If you’re not blogging on your e-commerce website you’re missing out on a ton of highly qualified, top of the funnel prospects and free traffic from organic search.
If you’d like to implement an SEO, keyword, and blog content strategy on your CBD e-commerce site, please contact us today to discuss your goals.
The 3 Kinds of CBD SEO Search Intent
When it comes to CBD SEO and CBD keyword research it’s important to note that there are actually three (3) types of search intent:
- Navigational
- Informational
- Transactional
However, Google has updated these to four (4) types of search:
For the purpose of this article on CBD SEO keyword research, we’re going to focus on 3 types of searches related to your CBD business. We call these: Informational Intent, Investigational Intent, and Transactional Intent.
Informational Intent
Informational intent type keywords typically signal that the user is looking for information and has questions that need answering. These types of search queries would put this type of user at the top of the conversion funnel.
According to Practical Ecommerce, optimizing for these types of keywords probably won’t lead to a sale, but they still represent ways to engage with potential CBD customers early in their buying process.
Informational intent keywords usually answer questions (how, how to, what to, where to, etc.), and are most ideal for creating and publishing high-quality CBD blog content that provides tips and answers the questions your target is asking.
If your CBD marketing strategy includes positioning your brand as an authority and wanting to educate your customers about your CBD products, then choosing keywords that optimize for informational intent is highly recommended for you.
Investigational Intent
An investigational search can be described as something between an informational and transactional search. This one is set in between these two types of searches for a reason.
These types of searches aren’t directly transactional because there’s a chance that users searching using these queries may not be ready to make a purchase. But, more importantly, they represent users further along in the sales funnel compared to informational searches.
Investigational intent isn’t normally included with the top three types of search intent, but it makes sense to expand on this hybrid type of search intent when considering CBD e-commerce.
Note that when users make an investigational search, they may be trying to compare prices and various product specs, or furthering their understanding of CBD by doing research.
In general, optimize for these keywords as part of your CBD SEO plan to create content that convinces your potential customers that your CBD products are better for them than your competition.
Transactional Intent
Transactional searches are those performed when the customer is ready to buy CBD. These are usually referred to as high commercial intent keywords.
Some keywords that indicate transactional intent include sale, coupon, price, buy, for sale, free shipping, where to buy, discount, and review.
When users use specific product keywords (“cbd oil near me”, “cbd vape juice online”), or specific products, and branded searches can also be keyword signals for transactional searches.
Use these keywords to optimize your product pages and your local SEO content.
We Can Help You With Your CBD SEO Keyword Research & Strategy
Hopefully, you have a better idea of how to do SEO and keyword research for your CBD dispensary business, but if the above information blows your mind and/or confuses you, it’s completely understandable!
CBD SEO and keyword research are not easy, requires a lot of search marketing and user profiling experience, and Google doesn’t make it easy for anyone to get accurate data from their free keyword research tool.
The good news is that there are other CBD keyword research tools that are free, and paid, that actually do provide keyword search volume, ranking difficulty, and average CPC data for cannabis and CBD related keywords.
Our CBD search marketing team has been “doing SEO” since 2004 and are highly experienced, Google Analytics certified search marketing professionals.
Check out our CBD SEO Case Study: How We Get Website’s Indexed & Ranked For 11 Keywords in 30-Days.
If you’d like to discuss a custom CBD SEO & keyword strategy for your e-commerce website, please reach out for a free 30-minute phone consult, or contact us to request a quote.
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