What is CBD SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the more neglected branches of CBD marketing. SEO can organically grow your return on investment (ROI) and completely transform your conversion rates. The main goal with SEO is to increase organic traffic to your site and encourage visitors to convert.
The idea is to be at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). When people search for “CBD” and anything related to your brand, your CBD products are easily found. This is where keywords comes into play.
Although SEO can be challenging, you need to develop a strong digital presence for your CBD business. That’s why we’ve compiled our top local SEO, mobile SEO, and pay-per-click (PPC) hacks you can use for your brand.
Mobile SEO for CBD
Content and on-page elements play a large role in the user experience for mobile SEO. Pages optimized for mobile should employ CBD keywords that:
- Are local-centric (e.g. “CBD in Massachusetts”)
- Encourage immediate action from the user for your website and store
In 2020, Google announced mobile first indexing. This means the search engine looks at the mobile version of your website before the desktop version.
If you have pages that aren’t mobile-friendly, you could miss out on the potential to rank for CBD keywords. Optimize your page speed and follow Google’s best practices for load time.
A good mobile experience should eliminate elements that slow down the load time or interfere with smooth transitions. Scale down elements such as images, animations, and other rich media to improve speed. When these elements are optimized, your mobile page loads fast and conveys professionalism and security to the user.
Local SEO for CBD
Practicing local SEO is particularly useful if your CBD brand has a brick-and-mortar retail location. Optimizing your website for an audience that’s physically near you will help them find your store. In fact, 88% of local searches for businesses on a mobile device either call or visit that business within the same day.
A strong CBD website is optimized for both your customers and search engines. Local searches have two main characteristics:
- They tend to be on-the-go in nature (“CBD store near me”)
- They often have a higher purchase intent than that of an informational search (“What is CBD?”)
Google My Business for CBD Businesses
One local SEO technique to drive foot traffic to your location is to optimize your Google My Business (GMB) page. GMB is a free tool for business owners to manage the way their business listing appears in search results.
With Google My Business, you can manage your location on Google maps, respond to customer reviews, edit your business hours, and so on. Although there are drug policies for Google’s paid advertising, GMB guidelines say that regulated goods are allowed as long as geographic and age restrictions are set.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) for CBD
Due to the federal legal status of cannabis, the internet has restrictions on paid advertising for CBD products. For instance, Google has drug policies for pay-per-click ads, shopping ads, in-app ads, and video ads.
These restrictions make it both difficult and risky to use paid advertising for your CBD brand. However, some advertisers have found a workaround by substituting prohibited keywords such as “THC” and “cannabis” for words like “herb” and “greens”.
