Why You Need An Experienced CBD SEO Agency
How do you find the best CBD SEO agency for your unique business and fits within your budget? What is CBD SEO anyway?
Why do you keep hearing so much about it being the most effective digital marketing strategy for your CBD store? Can you do your own SEO for your CBD website or should you hire an experienced CBD SEO company with a proven strategy?
These are just some of the questions we’ll answer in this article in hopes of helping you learn a little bit about SEO (search engine optimization) as a CBD marketing strategy and what you should look for when hiring a CBD SEO agency.
To kick things off, here’s the data on why you should invest in a CBD SEO agency:
– 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google search.
– SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
– SEO leads have a 14.6% online conversion rate.
– The average top-ranking page in search engines also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords.
– 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
– 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
– The #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 31.7%.
– Our SEO team has been implementing successful CBD SEO strategies for B2B & B2C companies since 2004.
If you’re ready to learn more about using SEO to market and sell your CBD products, keep reading as we discuss why using a CBD SEO agency is essential for your business.
What is CBD SEO?
CBD SEO is a strategic process of getting targeted potential customers to a website that sells CBD products by optimizing the website to rank higher in search engines like Google & Bing when someone searches for something related to CBD products.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and as a professional CBD SEO agency, we focus exclusively on CBD keywords, CBD content strategy, and CBD SEO strategy.
Why is a CBD SEO Agency Essential For CBD Companies?
The majority, if not all, of your potential customers, will start with a search engine when they are looking to learn about CBD or when they are ready to purchase CBD.
Change My Mind.
SEO is the most viable and cost-effective way to both understand and reach customers in key moments that matter. When it comes to successful CBD marketing, the need for a CBD SEO company is at an all-time high because of the advertising restrictions around cannabis & CBD products.
The main reason why you want to start your marketing strategy with CBD SEO is that organic search is a critical component of the CBD buyer journey/funnel and ultimately gets users to complete some sort of website engagement or online sale.
CBD is a relatively brand new wellness product and people have a ton of interest in CBD and the various products offered to help manage health issues like pain, anxiety, insomnia, inflammation, etc.
Therefore, potential customers have several questions they need to be answered before they’re able to purchase CBD, and you want them to find this information on your company website in order for you to create brand awareness and product trust.
Why does our CBD SEO agency love search marketing? Simply because 81% of people search online for a product or service. 35% of product searches start on Google.
Google and other search engines also have a smaller window of time between when consumers search and then purchase a product.
On average, people are more likely to make a purchase through Google in 5 days or less due to the fact that Google searchers know exactly what they’re looking for.
This is precisely why a CBD SEO agency with a proven SEO strategy is essential for CBD businesses, especially NEW CBD businesses.
Paid Advertising Requires a Larger Investment Than CBD SEO
This is a major factor with many of our clients deciding between a full-on paid advertising strategy for CBD over a fully organic CBD SEO strategy or a hybrid strategy using SEO & sponsor content ads.
Not only are we an experienced CBD SEO agency, but we’re also highly experienced in paid CBD advertising using Google search, programmatic display, native and sponsored content advertising.
Should you target the middle and bottom of the funnel with Google search ads and drive people to your website who are actively searching to buy CBD? Sounds good right?
But, will these “warm” & “hot” CBD customers with purchase intent actually make a purchase from your site if this is the first time they have been to your site, experienced your brand, and checked out your products?
The answer is no.
Simply because CBD is a fairly new wellness product and is not a commodity item where the prospect knows what they’re going to get and can purchase it from anywhere that’s most convenient to them.
CBD doesn’t fit that model as a product. This is why we preach to all new clients that they must focus on building brand awareness & developing product trust first and foremost before they focus on sales.
Using CBD SEO as a marketing tactic helps you target customers at the top of the funnel who are interested in using CBD for its health and wellness benefits but need “customer service” (i.e. information, education, and some ‘hand-holding), before they’ll purchase the product from you – or any CBD business.
By implementing an SEO strategy, your CBD SEO agency is able to touch these people early in their journey by publishing high-quality SEO optimized content on your site which answers the CBD questions they need answers to before they buy any CBD products.
This in turn helps your business build awareness of your brand, trust with your products, and moves you closer to acquiring a new customer for life.
Where Does Paid Advertising Fit?
By no means do we suggest you only use CBD SEO as your main marketing strategy, as we highly believe in the effectiveness of using Google search ads combined with programmatic display advertising & retargeting to sell CBD.
However, we only recommend using a paid advertising strategy for CBD if your brand has significant awareness, trust (website traffic & engagement), and a reasonably sized email database.
If your brand has a decent amount of each of the above factors, you are much better set up for an effective paid advertising campaign where you’ll likely be profitable within 30-60 days.
Do CBD Ads Get Approved Without Issue?
We have been running CBD advertising campaigns on Google search in the USA, Canada, UK, and other EU countries since 2017 and are currently running several paid search campaigns for our clients.
Our various 3rd party DSP partners for programmatic display/banner advertising & retargeting do allow for CBD advertising so ad approval is not an issue.
We also are able to run sponsored content advertising on the world’s most popular websites in order to amplify your blog content, help your SEO/search rankings, and highly qualified traffic to your website.
Social Media Advertising vs CBD SEO
Since we’re talking about advertising CBD online, let’s briefly discuss if you can advertise CBD on Facebook & Instagram and why you may not want to even consider social media ads and focus on CBD SEO.
Facebook will allow for the advertising of hemp-derived CBD products that are topical creams, lotions, and salves, only, and you must remove any and all mentions of CBD, hemp, or cannabis from the ad content and your website.
The best way to handle this is to create a new “all-hemp e-commerce site”, on a clean domain, that sells the same CBD products on your main site (your “CBD site”), but the labels on the website photos only will replace the word ‘CBD’ with ‘hemp’.
All e-commerce would need to be done on that “all-hemp site”, not your CBD site, and there can be no link/URL from the “all-hemp site” to the CBD site.
There are a few other things that need to be done/hoops that need to be jumped through, but the point I want to make here is that social media advertising for CBD is a waste of time.
You could invest in the additional infrastructure mentioned above as well as the management of it all only to target people on a platform where the last thing they have the intent to do is to shop for CBD or even learn about CBD.
People don’t do that when they are on any social platform – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or whatever.
However, when people are searching Google, they have the intent to find information, education, destination, or to buy a product.
That’s why organic search marketing, implemented by an experienced CBD SEO agency, should be the choice over social media when deciding on where to spend your marketing budget.
Social media is fleeting. Short term. If you get banned you lose everything including all your audience data.
SEO is for the long-term. It drives free traffic from organic search to your website. It will promote your brand in organic search for years.
CBD SEO agencies build awareness and trust through targeted impressions in search results. The more people see your content/links to your website in search engines, the more they start to trust your brand as a leader in CBD products regardless if they click on your listing or not.
You’ll also get way more traffic to your website and more website engagement from SEO & organic search than you will with social media.
Why? Because people on Facebook who click to your site will likely want to get back to Facebook to continue their scrolling.
Whereas someone who searched for an answer to a question and who ended up on your site via an organic search result, will want to read more and get their question answered – they’re not distracted by getting back to their social media feeds.
CBD SEO + CBD Keyword Research = Access To Customers At All Stages of The Sales Funnel
In order for a CBD SEO agency to be effective, they need to make sure they’re optimizing for keywords that target each stage of the sales funnel, and not just optimizing for targets at the bottom of the funnel who are ready to purchase.
The reason a funnel is used as an analogy is that it shows that there are many more people at the top of the funnel – the widest part of the funnel, and then there are at the bottom of the funnel – the narrowest part.
That’s why we recommend using CBD SEO and blog content marketing to target people at the top of the funnel and who are looking for information & education about CBD and how it can help them live a better life.
Your CBD SEO agency can use keyword research and competitor analysis to identify the most relevant CBD keyword phrases, with high search volume, to craft your blog content strategy.
Your CBD agency’s content writers can focus on writing high-quality, SEO-optimized content that answers all the questions your target demographic is asking about CBD and that are related to your CBD product line.
You don’t always have to optimize for the most popular CBD keywords because the most popular CBD keywords will also be the most competitive. This means new CBD websites with less content and a lower domain authority score will have a hard time ranking on page 1 or 2 for competitive popular keywords.
The best way to craft a CBD SEO and content strategy is to do comprehensive keyword research, including identifying all keywords that you and your competitors share, as well as the keywords your competitors rank for and you do not.
Then, map those keyword phrases to each stage of the sales funnel – top (awareness), middle (evaluation), bottom (purchase) in order to create blog content that speaks directly to the stage each potential customer is in.
A good CBD SEO agency will also look at the content that is currently ranking on page 1 for their target keyword phrases and task themselves with the goal of creating better content, more informative, more relevant, and more authoritative articles than the content that is already ranking.
The key point is to be intentional and strategic with your CBD SEO content strategy. Make sure the content you’re writing target’s the appropriate user and the appropriate stage of their customer journey.
For example, for new CBD websites, there’s no advantage in writing content targeted to people at the bottom of the funnel, who are ready to purchase, if you’re a new CBD company that needs to target the top of the funnel and create brand awareness and product trust.
When it comes to choosing blog topics and CBD keywords, sometimes a good CBD SEO strategy is to focus on “low hanging fruit” and optimize for search terms that are highly relevant to your business but may not have a high monthly search volume.
Chances are, your CBD SEO company can get your site to rank for these types of keywords much easier (and much quicker) than trying to rank for highly competitive keywords with super high search volume.
We Want To Be Your CBD SEO Agency!
ColaDigital has been a professional CBD SEO agency since 2017. We have experience in cannabis and psilocybin SEO strategy as well.
Our CBD SEO experts have helped companies in the USA, Canada, UK, and other EU countries increase their online visibility, search engine rankings, website traffic, and e-commerce conversion rate, and we can do the same for you.
I personally have been implementing B2B and B2C SEO strategies since 2004 and have been doing CBD SEO exclusively since 2017. I am a Google Analytics certified digital marketing professional, also certified in Google Ads.
Please call us for a free 30-minute phone consultation or email us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!