Blogging is often viewed as something that’s only done for fun or to share an announcement. But when it comes to SEO in the cannabis industry, it’s a necessity for growing your presence.
Leveraging a blog with fresh content is one of the best ways to get to the top of search results. Our cannabis marketing agency has jump-started blogs for many happy clients, helping them climb the search engine results pages (SERPs) with strategic content.
Here’s how a blog can improve the relevance of your site, grow traffic, and more.
1. Blogging Improves Domain Authority and Relevance
Site relevance is important to rank for the cannabis keywords you care about. Let’s assume you operate a medical dispensary in Newton, Massachusetts (where our agency calls home). Think about the phrases your audience searches for that would lead them to you.
If the content on your site doesn’t talk about dispensaries, medical marijuana, or Massachusetts? Well, search engines may not see it as relevant as other websites that do talk about those topics. Per Google, the most basic signal of relevancy is when your page contains the same keyword as the search query. If that keyword appears on your page in any capacity, the content is more likely to be relevant.
Blogging allows you to continuously improve upon your website’s domain authority and relevance. By publishing blog posts on a regular basis about topics like questions to ask budtenders, consumption methods, and so on, you’re building a wealth of helpful information for both search engines and users. You’re becoming an authority.
Without a blog (or news section), there isn’t an ideal spot on your site you can frequently add content to.
The more content you have that’s relevant to you as a dispensary, the better chance that search engines will deem your site to be helpful for searchers. Thus, you rank higher on SERPs.
2. Blogging Improves Site Quality and Value
To beat the competition, you need to be different. Your website’s quality of experience and topical relevance are factors in how search engines determine to rank you. And a blog that provides value to readers is one way to improve the quality of your site.
Google evaluates feedback from third-party Search Quality Raters to measure the quality of search results and improve its systems. What does this mean for you? Quality is critically important, so your content should give people exactly what they’re looking for. By helping the user, you’re helping search engines to deem your website valuable.
Cannabis content that meets the criteria of being useful and relevant will be ranked accordingly on SERPs. Search engines will determine whether your site is serving the needs of searchers based on things like:
- Keyword density
- Content depth
- Readability
- Heading structure
- Page speed
- And many other factors
By blogging, there’s endless opportunity to provide value to site visitors by writing about topics that are important to you. It should be one of your pillars of cannabis SEO.
3. Blogging Attracts New Visitors
Let’s revisit the Newton dispensary scenario. Much like any other dispensary, your target audience is primarily people looking to buy cannabis. So, focusing on keywords like “dispensary in Newton” and “medical marijuana dispensary” will obviously be useful for SEO. And not to mention, reaching your audience.
But what about the people who aren’t necessarily looking for cannabis at the time of their search? How do you get in front of them?
Consider related content ideas that aren’t focused solely on you as a dispensary. By blogging about a topic like “10 things for adults to do in Newton” (and listing your dispensary as one of the things), you can reach people who weren’t even thinking about cannabis until they clicked on your blog post listing. An added benefit for a topic like this is that you’re improving the relevance of your website for Newton (as discussed in section 1).
4. A Blog Creates Link Opportunities
Links, both internal and external, have long been a cornerstone of cannabis SEO. The more you blog, the more opportunities you’ll have to link to important pages of your website. You can also link to other websites and even attract inbound links (backlinks).
Internal Links
Internal links help establish an information hierarchy for your website. They guide search engines to find every page for indexing and give users an option to engage further by clicking through to other pages.
Let’s say you’re writing a blog post about qualifying conditions for medical marijuana. There will likely be plenty of opportunities within the post to link to other pages on your website. Linking an instance of “medical marijuana” to your medical menu page, for example, does two things for SEO:
One, it gives the reader a chance to engage and click to that menu, and potentially even place an order.
Two, it tells the search engine that the page being linked to (your medical menu page) is relevant to the anchor text, medical marijuana. This can help the menu page improve its rankings.
External Links
Linking to reputable sources and websites (as an external link) is a good practice to support facts, quotes, etc. This is especially important when presenting facts in a highly-regulated space like cannabis. You need to assure readers that the content is trustworthy and accurate.
It also doesn’t hurt to show appreciation for other websites by linking to them. There’s even a chance they might return the favor and link to you (a backlink), which is a “win” for cannabis SEO. New visitors could soon have their eyes on you thanks to a backlink.
