Search Engine Optimisation for Cannabis Companies
If you run a cannabis company, you know that it is not all about providing good quality cannabis products to your customers. While this is an integral aspect of running a company, you also face many business challenges on a day-to-day basis. One of these difficulties is gaining new customers. Unfortunately, word of mouth and personal recommendations from existing customers are often not enough to provide a steady stream of new customers for most cannabis companies. But, in today’s technology-focused society, more and more potential customers look to the internet to find cannabis products. As a result, many cannabis businesses are starting to create websites for their companies in the hopes of finding new clients online.
There are many ways business owners in the cannabis industry can draw people to their website. For instance, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media marketing, and search engine optimisation (SEO) are all very effective at attracting people to your website. These options vary in terms of their pros and cons. For example, PPC and social media marketing will give you instant results because people will start visiting your website as soon as you launch your ad campaign.
However, these options are costly and do not give you long-term benefits or results. New website visitors will only keep coming to your site as long as you keep paying for ads. On the other hand, search engine optimisation methods usually take several months to start bringing real results. But, if you invest in SEO, your website’s positions in search results will improve, bringing more organic traffic to the site. And your website will keep these positions even if you choose to stop using SEO services in the future. This means you can continue getting free traffic indefinitely.
In the long-term, investing in SEO services is a far superior option to paying substantial sums of money for PPC or social media ads year after year. Moreover, potential customers will trust you more if they find your website organically through search results rather than seeing ads for your products online.
But, as many other dispensary owners, you may be wondering, can cannabis companies genuinely attract new customers using SEO? The answer could not be more simple. Yes! Below, we will show you just how successful your business can be if you employ an effective SEO strategy.
Search Demand for Cannabis on Google
The above screenshot displays Google search data on the term ‘cannabis dispensary’. As we can see, people globally search for this term 57 thousand times a month on average. Roughly 50 thousand of these searches occur in the United States and 1.6 thousand in Canada. This popularity is down to the legality of cannabis in these countries. Furthermore, we can see that this term has a huge traffic potential at 605 thousand, which shows that there is a significant number of people looking for cannabis products online every day. Thus, effective SEO can help you attract thousands of visitors to your website every month.
And we can see that Google Trends presents a similar picture. The above screenshot shows clear growth in the popularity of the ‘cannabis dispensary’ search term from 2004 until the present day. This basically means that an increasing number of people are seeking out cannabis products online each year. Consequently, if you choose to hire an SEO company to promote your cannabis company website in search results, you will be in good stead to continue getting an increasingly high return on investment (ROIs) for years in the future, especially as PPC and social media ads are becoming more expensive and competitive.
Since the online cannabis market isn’t saturated yet, you have an incredible opportunity to get in on the ground floor, get to the first page of Google, and stay there while people who start their SEO efforts after you will need to put in significantly more money and resources to achieve the same results amidst growing competition.
People Use Lots of Search Terms to Find Cannabis
It is important to be aware that ‘cannabis dispensary’ is just one possible search term, and there are countless other keywords people might use when looking for cannabis products. One vital part of SEO is keyword research, during which experts examine search queries and determine which pages need to be created on the website and optimised for keyword usage to draw maximum traffic. Here is just a small number of examples of search queries people enter on Google when they look for cannabis products:
- ‘Cannabis shop near me’
- ‘Cannabis dispensary in…’+ location. For instance, ‘cannabis dispensary in Ontario’.
- Descriptions of particular strains of cannabis.
- Descriptions of specific types of products such as edibles, flowers, and vapes.
The images below display the average monthly search volume for a range of cannabis-related keywords. As you can see, there are millions of people searching for these key terms each month, meaning that a good SEO-optimised cannabis company website can draw thousands of free visitors every month just by showing up for these keywords on Google.
Other Cannabis Companies are Already Getting Results from SEO
Effective search engine optimisation can bring incredible results, helping websites show up higher in search results as well as potentially saving website owners thousands of dollars on advertising every month. But don’t just take our word for it! Below, we consider several examples of cannabis company websites that are enjoying a fantastic return from their SEO efforts.
Our first example is https://cookies.co/, a well-established US cannabis company founded in 2008. The website has 141 thousand average monthly visitors. These are people who visit the website after seeing it pop up in Google search results.
At the same time, the website’s average monthly traffic value is roughly $196,000. This means that the website would need to spend $196,000 each month to buy the same amount of traffic they get organically if they were to use contextual advertising systems such as PPC ads. Therefore, this means that the website’s owner can save almost $200,000 per month because their website enjoys great positions in Google’s search results that allow them to get great organic traffic.
The image below shows which pages on this website get the most traffic.
As we can see, a variety of different pages on this website bring in traffic from Google. An excellent SEO expert can examine the pages currently on your website (and on competitor sites), optimise existing pages to assist in attracting even more people, and create brand new pages that will collect as much organic search traffic as possible. Naturally, this is only one aspect of SEO work, and there are countless other things SEO agencies do to promote websites.
And this company’s excellent SEO results are not a one-off. Let’s take a look at another example of a cannabis business that enjoys a steady stream of customers from Google.
Clearly, even for a newer company, the results are encouraging. This Canadian cannabis company was established as recently as 2018. BC Cannabis Stores attracts roughly 145 thousand website visitors each month and has a traffic value of about $29,900. This website ranks highly on Google for the search term ‘Canada cannabis dispensary’ and many other keywords. This website receives almost $30,000 worth of free traffic from Google, which means they can save this money that would otherwise have been spent on PPC adverts.
The key factor to remember is that PPC adverts involve essentially buying traffic in exchange for money. So it follows that once you stop paying for these ads, you also stop getting traffic. But, with SEO, you will maintain your search positions and continue to get traffic even if you no longer utilise SEO services. By hiring an expert SEO agency and boosting the rankings of your site on Google, you can save money and keep your website’s traffic without having to spend money on advertising channels such as PPC.
Let’s now consider the pages that bring the most visitors to this website:
Again, informational pages and blog posts from this website collect significant traffic from Google. Some of the keywords that bring the most traffic to these pages include ‘cannabis store near me’, ‘cbd strains canada’, and ‘weed pen’. This again shows that there is a substantial variety of keywords that your website can use to collect free organic traffic on Google. A qualified SEO agency can effectively create, optimise, and promote those pages, bringing further business to your company.
Local SEO
Local SEO techniques are used to ensure that a website is shown to people who search for particular services locally. For instance, if you were to enter ‘cannabis dispensary near me’ on Google, you will see websites run by cannabis companies in your local area. Local SEO is critical for businesses offering services and goods in-person, such as cannabis stores. But, simply adding your website to Google My Business and putting the location on Google Maps will not bring you as much traffic as you might like. Only comprehensive search engine optimisation of a website can lead to actual results and help your website rise in search engine rankings.
What Does an SEO Company Do?
While SEO is, without doubt, a fantastic investment for cannabis companies, attaining great results takes a lot of expertise, skill, and hard work. This is no exception for websites that provide services. Google has high standards to ensure that low-quality websites do not reach the highest positions in search results.
However, NUOPTIMA has been working with brands in a variety of industries for numerous years. Our experts have a wide expanse of experience doing SEO for clients, such as medical clinics, real estate, startups, e-commerce, and SaaS. Therefore, we know exactly what to do to get your website to appear on the first page of Google. Here are just a few things that we can do to improve your cannabis company’s Google rankings:
- Arrange link placements on reputable cannabis store directories and databases.
- Create SEO-optimised content to help your website rank for more keywords on Google.
- Optimise existing pages to make sure they comply with Google’s best practices and rules.
- Creare all the necessary pages to help your website collect as much organic traffic as possible.
Efficient search engine optimisation can bring incredible results if done correctly and properly by qualified experts. At NUOPTIMA, we have a large SEO team full of expertise to help your website achieve fantastic results. Book a free discovery call with our professional team today to discover how we can use SEO to get outstanding results for both your website and your cannabis business.
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