Consumer habits are nowadays accompanied by digital practices as well. No successful business can exist today outside of the online arena. That includes the cannabis market as well. Up to 80% of consumers do some internet research before making a purchase. So having an online presence is crucial to attract new customers and earn their trust before they get to spend a dime.
To set the stage, you opened up your cannabis business, you set up an informational or e-commerce website, and now you’re waiting for someone to make those clicks and engage with you. As easy as it may seem, because the internet is free and open to all, there is fierce competition for every second of the public’s attention. Getting a top ranking in the search results is crucial in this aspect.
And in order to be ranking on the top position of an online search, you need an SEO strategy – that is Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of improving a website’s configuration in order to attract more traffic to it, by making it more easily findable, relevant and popular for users.
In other words, an SEO strategy helps you build brand awareness, obtain more qualified website traffic, and increase your online visibility. And the trick about SEO is that it’s inescapable, and it affects you whether you pay attention to it or not. Because if your competitors are doing it better than you, that leaves your business at the bottom of the search results, which means that less potential customers might be clicking through your website.
This article contains five crucial SEO tips to come in support of your business’ visibility in the online space.
Where Are You Starting From?
Hopefully your starting point is not not a blank canvas. Make sure you’ve set up your Google Business account, so that you can use your Google Analytics account to find out significant data you already gathered. You can check out our article on best practices in order to increase your cannabis business ranking on Google.
Getting back to SEO, it’s important to know your point of departure – what is working well for your website? What pages have the most visitors? How many people visited your website recently? Knowing the state of things can help in crafting an approach for the next steps.
Do Your Keyword Research
The next step is to do some keyword research. This is a volatile, yet significant aspect – the popularity of keywords changes over time. There are numerous tools online you can use for your keyword research to find out not only what people are looking for, but how they formulate it.Â
Then you can look for how competitive these words and phrases are in other searches – if you opt for something very popular, chances are that it’s going to be difficult to score a good ranking. However, not just anything works – please keep in mind how the keywords you use match your product.
Having created a keyword selection, the next step is to implement it on your website. While maintaining the reading experience as natural as can be, integrate these keywords on your website, in titles, product descriptions, various pages, even blogs (especially blogs).
Mobile Optimization Is The Future
Increasingly more traffic online is coming from mobile phones, and the tech giants will take a cue from that. Google opted for a mobile first indexing, which means it will first show results of websites optimized for mobile use. This is why, no matter how good your keyword game is, having the website configured as mobile friendly will get you far better results.
But having your website configured for a mobile experience is not enough on its own. The loading times for pages should be as short as possible, around 1-2 seconds in order not to lode the attention of your visitors. If your pages take too long to load, your visitors will bounce to a competitor’s website in no time. One strategy to tackle this is making the size of your photos smaller, so that they have enough time to load.
Social Media Is A Great Nudge
While it’s not officially a ranking factor, having activity on your social media will improve your chances of being ranked higher. If your social posts get attention, and spark engagement such as shares, comment, reprosts and such, the algorithm takes the activity as a positive “social signal”, and it will likely index such pages much higher in comparison to others. It is rather a high correlation of facts than a causation, but it definitely does no harm.
Blogging For All The Right Reasons
Blogging for your cannabis business is valuable for so many reasons, including raising brand awareness, establishing authority and shaping your brand voice, but also for educating your audience and providing real value to your customers. It is also a great tool for your SEO strategy.Â
Blogging is a great opportunity to implement your keyword research into your website, in an organic manner which is packed with other benefits. You can create various blogs which support each other, group them into topics and have them interconnected through internal linking. This way you keep the audience engaged and create a sense of coherence across your materials.
In Closing…
Your SEO strategy is never a done deal – but an ongoing project to keep your online presence alive. This should not scare you, but show you all the possibilities for growth that come instead.Â
The SEO playing field is already active, so the best time to implement your SEO strategy is now. Luckily, the dedicated team here at Clout Brands can help you with all your SEO needs for your cannabis business to succeed in the online ranks. Contact us today!
