CBD Search Engine Marketing and CBD SEO Are Important For Your Wellness Business
There is an incredibly huge demand for information about CBD, CBD oil, and other CBD products in the United States. But not all people are ready to buy your CBD products just yet.
According to new research published in October 2019, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), there were 6.4 million Google searches for “CBD” or “cannabidiol” in the month of April 2019 alone!
That’s a 160% increase in CBD searches during 2018 compared to the previous year.
To put this into perspective, the researchers have described these Google searches for CBD as no reaching the numbers for Google searches for yoga and e-cigarettes.
So what does this mean for your hemp CBD business?
It means that you’re in the right business for sure. Six million searches in 30-days show that there is clearly demand for information about CBD and soon, that demand will translate into huge sales.
In this article, we’re going to show you how to attract some of this qualified and keen interest in CBD to your company website and acquire new customers.
Your Target Demographic is Interested In Information About CBD
The results of the JAMA study show us that people have been interested in CBD since 2004 and that CBD searches on Google were relatively stable up until 2014.
As the image below shows, searches for CBD started to substantially increase in 2017.
For example, CBD search volumes increased by 125.9% during 2017 compared with 2016, then increased 160.4% during 2018 compared with 2017.
The exciting part is that CBD searches are expected to be 117.7% higher during 2019 than 2018 based on observed and forecasted volumes.
There were 6.4 million CBD Google searches during April 2019, the last month data were collected.
What do you think is going to happen in 2020 and beyond? If you’re thinking that CBD searches are going to continue and skyrocket, you’re probably right.
Searches for CBD during April 2019 eclipsed those for acupuncture by a factor of 7.49, apple cider vinegar by 5.17, meditation by 3.38, vaccination by 1.63, exercise by 1.59, marijuana by 1.13, and veganism by 1.12.
Searches were higher during 2019 in states that had legalized recreational marijuana than in states with medicinal marijuana or marijuana prohibitions.
What Geographic Region in the USA Showed Increases in CBD Searches?
The increase in CBD searches encompassed all states, ranging from a 211% increase (2014-2018 to 2019) in Oklahoma to a 605% increase in Alabama.
During 2019 (January to April), Vermont, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Oregon had the most searches for “CBD” or “cannabidiol”.
- Vermont: 7164
- Wisconsin: 6121
- Tennessee: 6096
- Colorado: 5816
- New Hampshire: 5391
- Oregon: 5369
What CBD Marketing Tactics Are Most Effective To Reach People Interested in Your CBD Products?
So now that we know that at least 6.4 million people in the United States are searching for information on CBD, wouldn’t it make the most sense to create and publish that information on your company website?
If you did, and you implemented a solid SEO and keyword strategy, your content could appear on the first page for any relevant searches about the health benefits of CBD.
This way, anyone searching for this information would likely click on your search listing, land on your website, be introduced to your brand, and read your article.
This interaction benefits your company in the following ways:
- You get “free” relevant and qualified traffic from organic search to your website.
- You increase your brand awareness with a new audience.
- If your content is high-quality, you’ve created brand trust with new prospects.
- You increase the time spent on your website which in turn increases website engagement and positively affects your search rankings and overall SEO.
How do you make this happen?
Here are 3 digital marketing tactics for CBD businesses to increase brand awareness, brand trust, time spent on your website, SEO and search rankings by targeting people who are looking for information on CBD and hemp-derived CBD products.
1. CBD Keyword Research
This is the best place to start.
If people are searching Google and Bing for information about cannabidiol, CBD oil, hemp CBD tinctures, etc., keyword research will help you find out exactly what questions your potential customers are asking.
Keyword research for CBD marketing is a core SEO task that involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines in an attempt to figure out what type of topics to write about in a CBD blog content marketing strategy.
It’s also the same tactic that CBD SEO professionals use to figure out what terms they want to rank for on page 1 of search engines.
Researching keywords gives CBD marketers and CBD companies a better understanding of how popular the demand is for certain keywords.
It also helps us identify how hard it would be to compete for those CBD related keyword terms in the organic search results.
Doing keyword research will help your CBD marketing team identify which blog topics are best suited to your company’s product line and content marketing strategy.
The idea is to create a blog content plan that is specifically targeted to one of your focus demographics as opposed to being everything to everyone.
For example, if your company sells CBD skincare products like tinctures, creams, and salves, my suggestion would be to target women, 45-64+.
Your blog content strategy should be made up of answers to questions that women over 45 are asking about CBD. You can indirectly find this info via keyword research.
Then you create a blog content calendar and posting schedule using topics from your keyword research. We recommend 1 x 1200-1500 word SEO & UX optimized blog article per week as a good place to start.
2. Blog Content Writing
So now that you’ve completed your keyword research, how do you choose the best CBD blog topics and who will write and optimize the content for you?
The best way to choose topics is to identify your most lucrative demographic and create a content strategy optimized to target these people and drive to your website.
If your company is set up to target all age demographics, you should identify who your best customers are and build your content plan around them.
Or, conversely, you can identify a demographic that you want to attract and grow, and create a content plan specifically to educate them on your brand, your business, and your CBD products.
Once you have your topics and targets confirmed, you’re ready to write the blog yourself, or get the blog written by a professional and experienced CBD content writer. We highly recommend the latter over the former.
Before you hire your CBD marketing agency or content writer, you should write a content brief including some general direction for what you’re looking for, samples/examples of the type of article you’d like, sub-topics you’d like discussed, and the keywords you need included.
Once you hire your content writer, the brief will be super helpful for them to deliver exactly what you want.
If this all sounds like a pain in the ass for you, no worries, we can help! If you’d like our cannabis and CBD marketing team to handle your blog content writing, contact us today.
3. Native Ads & Sponsored Content To Promote Blog Articles
Publishing relevant, high-quality belong content about the health and wellness benefits of CBD is great, but in order to be most effective, you need to amplify the content on your site.
Unfortunately, just because you published an educational article about CBD on your website, that doesn’t mean that it will automatically rank on page 1 for relevant search queries.
Search engine rankings take time. You need a lot of relevant and optimized content on your website in order to increase your site’s domain authority (DA). Sites with a higher DA will typically always outrank sites with a lower DA.
That said, with publishing regular blog content that is SEO optimized, you will get some traffic from organic search. It may not be as much as you’d like in the early stages.
So how do you promote all the great informational and educational content on your website? Use native ads/sponsored content ads on popular websites.
Focus on These Goals & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) To Measure Success
Your goals for this should be to drive traffic, increase time spent on website, and to capture as many email addresses as you can.
Your goals should not be for sales and online revenue. Why? Because this type of marketing focuses on targeting people at the top of the funnel who are looking for information – not to buy anything, yet.
Therefore, we recommend you track the following key performance indicators to measure the success of the CBD marketing tactics discussed above.
- Total number of clicks from organic search
- Total number of clicks from native ads/sponsored content ads
- Average time spent on your website by all users
- Average number of website pages viewed per user per visit
- Total conversions (email address)
- Total cost per conversion/cost per acquisition of each email address
The good news is you can get all the above data from your website’s Google Analytics, and it’s FREE!
If you don’t have a Google Analytics (GA) account and don’t have GA implemented on your site and collecting data, you should get your web team to get that done asap today.
If you need help implementing GA on your site and making sense of the data collected, please contact us for a free 30-minute consultation or to request a quote for our SEO & UX Audit services.
We Can Help You Educate Your Potential Customers!
If you agree that the majority of the US population who is interested in CBD products needs more information and education before they are ready to buy, we can help you!
If you want to attract these top of the funnel people and get them into your CBD marketing mix, educate them, and when they’re ready, offer them special deals on their first product purchase, we can help you!
Our recommendations would include Search Engine Optimization, Blog Content Writing, and Native Ads/Sponsored Content Ads on popular websites, in order to target the top of the funnel.
We’d then suggest layering Google Ads to target the bottom of the funnel and implement email marketing automation to pull top of the funnel people through your funnel to where they’re ready to purchase from you.
Ready to get started? Please contact us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!