Key Points
- Google and Bing do not allow the advertising of vape products. As a result, vape SEO strategies are the best way to promote your business and attract traffic to your website.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) sets up your vape shop website for long-term growth by increasing credibility, brand awareness, and search rankings. It requires a strategic content and SEO approach, which entails on-site and off-site optimization, creating relevant content that answers the searcher’s intent, and implementing white-hat techniques to grow and maintain traffic over time.
- SEO is time-consuming, requiring expert knowledge and resources to get it right. Doing it internally can be a massive and also risky investment. For example, what if the people you hire lack knowledge of the vape industry, and you have to spend too much time getting them up to speed? Hence, investing in expert SEO services is a cost-effective and foolproof way to attract millions of website visitors through organic searches.
- When effectively implemented, SEO has the potential to attract as much free, organic traffic to your website as you would normally get from spending thousands of dollars on PPC advertising.
- Growth agency NUOPTIMA understands the vaping industry and also understands the healthcare industry. Hence, our experts know how to optimize your site to comply with Google’s strict algorithm and produce significant results with our vaping SEO services. Interested? Book a free discovery call today to discuss a custom-tailored vape SEO strategy that NUOPTIMA will develop specifically for your business needs.
The U.S. e-cigarette and vape market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.6% by 2030 [1], with some research suggesting it will be worth around $170B. In other words, there has been no better time than 2024 to start or grow your vape business.
Unfortunately, this also means more competition for your business. The solution? A marketing channel that works long-term and, what is more important, that operates on a zero-sum game model. To put it in layman’s terms – when you win, everyone else loses.
Search engine optimization (SEO) fits this description perfectly. For one, it is, by definition, a zero-sum game (when your ranking improves, everyone else’s declines). Secondly, vape SEO is the only long-term online marketing channel that can bring you predictable revenue.
This is mostly due to the fact that paid advertising options are non-existent since Google, Bing, FaceBook, and actual legal authorities prohibit any and all advertising of vape companies and shops online.
In essence, if you want to build or grow your vape business in 2024 and beyond, SEO becomes more than just a predictable and cost-effective way to boost your online sales and comes to focus as basically the only marketing channel that makes any sense.
Why is SEO for Vape Shops Important?
SEO is a marketing tool (in marketing terms, a channel) that helps you optimize your website for search engines such as Google or Bing.
When done right, SEO can boost your web pages to the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Most people don’t click past the first page of Google, making it crucial to increase search positions if you wish to get people on your website and grow revenue.
However, it is important to point out that the goal of doing SEO for your vape shop should never be just driving more and more traffic, as this in itself does not guarantee more sales.
Good SEO brings the right kind of traffic, makes it easier for visitors to find their way around your online vape shop, streamlines their buyer journey, and helps you build a lead base that you can later approach through other channels, like for example, email marketing.
Another reason why SEO makes for a great marketing channel is the long-term results it brings when done right.
While advertising, like PPC and social media ads, provides a fast (and relatively expensive, by the way) method for getting people to your site, it only benefits your business while paying for these services.
When the ads stop, so does the traffic.
Comparatively, SEO increases search positions organically through strategic website updates, content optimization, and keyword targeting. This generates free, organic traffic and sustains your search rankings over time – even if you stop paying for a vape SEO service.
Importantly, SEO for vape shops is the best way to grow your e-cigarette business, especially considering the advertising ban on tobacco and vape products.
(Full disclosure – you should expect your search rankings to slowly deteriorate if you decide to stop doing SEO).
A Brief Overview Of Vape SEO
You have probably noticed that we have used the “when done right” disclaimer a few times already. The reason for this is that SEO is difficult and requires a lot of time, hard work, specific resources, and expertise.
Here are just a few things that NUOPTIMA’s work for a vape shop entails:
- Keyword research services
- Local SEO services
- Competitor research and analysis
- Technical SEO services
- On-site optimization – Page loading speed improvements, internal linking, site structure, sitemap management, meta tags management, etc.
- Off-site optimization – Digital PR and link building, inbound and outbound link hygiene,
- SEO copywriting services and content management (this alone is a major, ongoing investment)
- Tracking results and making appropriate changes
Remember, this is just a high-level overview of everything that goes into it.
If you (or someone already employed by your company) do not have experience with SEO, doing all of this with your existing resources is nearly impossible.
As a result, you have two options – hire internally or find an SEO company for your vape shop. Before we investigate what would be a better choice for you, let’s take some time to dig deeper into some of the things we listed above and take a look at how some vape companies are using SEO to grow revenue.
Search Demand for Vape SEO Keywords on Google
Using the keyword research tool Ahrefs, we could pull the above data, highlighting the popularity of the vaping industry online. This image shows us that the keyword ‘vape’ has a global search volume of 1.4M, indicating the average number of people searching for ‘vape’ each month. This data also shows us the average monthly searches for each country:
- India – 205,000
- The United States – 151,000
- Indonesia – 118,000
- Germany – 91,000
Understanding the search volume for niche keywords highlights that hundreds of thousands of people are searching for vapes in different countries. Investing in SEO services for vape shop websites dramatically increases your potential to access this traffic and boost your sales.
Moving forward, the above data comes from Google Trends, displaying how the search demand for ‘vape’ has changed over time. Here, we can see a clear upward trend as vaping became more popular. However, as demand increases, it’s essential to use the right marketing techniques to access this traffic.
Keyword Research for Vape Companies
Keyword research is an integral part of any vape SEO strategy. Without it, you may target irrelevant, low-volume, or incorrect search terms that do not correlate with your ideal customer persona. Hence, with the right SEO software, such as Ahrefs, Semrush and even Google’s free Keyword Planner, you can discover exactly what your ideal customer searches for when they want to buy vapes or e-liquids.
Vaping has many synonyms, but some phrases will be better to target as they have more search volume than others. For instance, ‘e-cigarette’ is technically correct, but it’s a long and awkward word, whereas ‘vape’ and ‘e-juice’ are more popular.
Other factors may also affect how people search for vaping companies. For example, some of them are looking to purchase from physical vape shops that are near them, while others may only be looking for some information about vaping or e-juice. That is how you end up with searches such as these:
- ‘Vape shop near me’
- ‘Vape store in…’ + location (for example, ‘vape store in South London’)
- Specific vape products (for example, ‘CBD vape’ or ‘no nicotine vape’)
- Questions about vaping, e-juice and how to find vape stores.
Some of these are long-tail keywords, which are easier to target and broaden your traffic scope.
After identifying the best keywords for your website, an SEO professional uses these to optimize current web pages and create new ones to maximize traffic potential. Together, keyword research and content optimization help your target market find your site easily amongst the competition.
The above image shows keywords associated with the term ‘vape juice’ indicating your customers’ interests. For instance, we can see that ‘CBD vape juice’ has an average of 48K monthly searches. If it’s relevant to your store, a professional will create pages about this topic, answer questions (like in the image below), and optimize new pages. If your vaping company ranks for thousands of keywords from your niche, you can potentially reach millions of people.
Of course, this is just scratching the surface of keyword research as you will be digging deeper and deeper into various topics and keyword clusters that can be used to target those topics with appropriate content.
Another aspect that cannot be ignored when discussing keywords is the search intent, which refers to the underlying purpose behind a user’s search query on search engines – in simple terms, it explains “why” people are searching for a certain keyword or phrase.
Search intent is usually classified into four main categories:
- Navigational, where the intent is to navigate to a specific website
- Informational, where users seek information or knowledge about a topic
- Commercial, indicating a user’s intent to explore and compare products before making a purchase decision
- Transactional, where users are ready to make a purchase or perform another specific online action
For example, if someone types in “vape juice prices” in a search engine, they are exploring and comparing their options – putting them in the commercial intent bucket.
Hence, understanding search intent is critical for content creators and SEO practitioners to ensure the content they serve on their different pages aligns with the users’ needs and search objectives, thereby improving the relevance of your content and its impact on search engine rankings.
As you might expect, keywords that imply commercial or transactional intents are more difficult to rank for, which is why comprehensive content strategies are created – building credibility, covering a range of related topics, and directing the readers (and Google’s algorithm) toward what is called a pillar page which will be the money-maker or send people directly to the money-maker page through calls-to-action.
Of course, this takes time and a lot of expertise to pull off.
Writing Content for Your Vape Shop
This conveniently brings us to the next piece of the SEO puzzle – content writing and management.
As we already mentioned, you will need to have a lot of content on your website if you plan to target many keywords and build entire content units that will enable you to rank for truly competitive keywords.
One option is to write this content yourself or have someone in-house to do it. Keep in mind, however, that this is a full-time job. It also requires a decent grasp of the industry and at least a basic understanding of SEO in general.
Another way to go is the AI route – using ChatGPT or one of the innumerable tools based on it. While it is possible to produce copious amounts of content this way, and some people swear that this is a viable strategy, most SEO experts agree that the results are usually temporary.
One thing is for sure – purely AI-written content will only decline in effectiveness as time goes by and at an ever-faster rate.
It can still be a useful tool when researching and writing content, but you have to be very careful that the content you actually post on your website has at least been checked by a human. For one, you have to make sure that the content written by AI is unique and that it does not sound too “ChatGPT-ey,” which is a common occurrence.
The third option is to hire experts to write content for your vape shop. Every respectable vape SEO service will include dedicated content writers who will know the industry and ensure that all of your output is working towards the ultimate goal – increasing sales.
Vape Shop Link Building
Link building is essential for good search engine rankings, and vape shops are no different. In essence, what you are doing is trying to get as many websites to link to one of the pages on your website as possible.
Why are backlinks important for SEO?
To cut a long story short, despite all of their efforts, companies behind search engines are yet to find better, more precise, and equally scalable signals that a certain piece of content is valuable to people. Sure, there are other factors, but backlinks are still among the most impactful signals.
This can be done in a variety of ways:
| Editorial Links | These are naturally occurring links from websites that find your content valuable and choose to link to it without any direct action on your part. |
| Guest Blogging Links | Obtained by writing articles for other websites, where you can include a link back to your own site. |
| Backlinks in Business Profiles | Creating profiles for your business on various online platforms often allows you to include a website link. |
| Webinar Links | Hosting webinars and sharing them on various platforms can earn backlinks from attendees or those who share the webinar. |
| Free Tool Links | Creating free tools relevant to your industry can attract links from users and other websites that find your tools useful. |
| Infographic or Research Links | Designing and sharing informative infographics or research can attract links from websites that use or reference them. |
| Forum and Comment Links | Participating in forums or blog comments with valuable insights can lead to link-building opportunities, but this should be done cautiously to avoid being seen as spam. |
Some of these are obviously more valuable than others (especially when you factor in the no-follow attribute that can be assigned to a link), but a healthy backlink portfolio is essential for high SERPs.
However, building and maintaining a healthy backlink portfolio is among the most difficult things in SEO. It requires plenty of knowledge and experience, as well as hard work. It is not uncommon for companies to have entire teams working on building links for them. And it’s not just small or medium companies doing this, as established companies also employ this.
Hence, everyone does it, and everyone does it for a good reason.
How Other Vape Companies Are Already Getting Results From Vape SEO
We previously mentioned that we would be looking at some vape shops that are doing SEO and that are reaping the benefits. The last sentence of the previous section provided the perfect segue for this.
Below, we have reviewed two companies using vape SEO to improve their online presence.
Vapestore UK
Ahrefs, an SEO tool, allows us to compare competitors in the vape industry and review their SEO efforts. For instance, the above screenshot shows an overview of www.vapestore.co.uk. Thanks to their SEO efforts, their pages rank for over 38K organic keywords and generate 236K visitors from organic searches. We also review the traffic value to understand how this compares to other marketing techniques.
The Traffic value metric shows how much the website owner would have to spend on PPC ads to get the same amount of traffic. Although vape businesses can’t advertise, this is a handy way to illustrate the per-dollar value of vape SEO.
Google search data also shows which pages attract the most traffic. The image below reveals first position rankings for keywords ‘vape store’ and ‘vape liquid,’ with one of these pages attracting over 100,000 website visitors on average every month.
The above example depicts a larger site, so it’s natural to see positive results. However, we want to show you that SEO can also benefit smaller vape businesses, even if you’re still establishing yourself in the market.
The screenshot above examines www.88vape.com. The SEO overview shows the site attracts 23.2K visitors monthly through organic searches. By optimizing their site and working on organic growth, they have generated free, organic traffic equivalent to spending $12,600 on paid advertising. Although this site is smaller than the previous example, their SEO efforts still get significant results that would otherwise be expensive if advertising with PPC.
Looking at the top-performing pages, they have good brand awareness and use this to their advantage. The search term ‘88 vape’ has an average volume of 10,000 searches a month, for which they hold the first search position. They also rank in position four on the first page of Google for the search term ‘deluxe vape.’
An SEO agency would analyze this data to determine where this company thrives and how it could improve its SEO efforts. They may utilize other keywords to maximize traffic potential and attract customers who don’t know the brand by name.
Findings
Reviewing examples of SEO for vape shops highlights the vast array of keywords you can target. An SEO company for vape shop marketing will evaluate your and your competitors’ websites. They use the data, like the one shown above, to assess where the organic traffic comes from to optimize existing pages and create new ones to target more keywords in your industry. Targeting thousands of search terms increases your website’s opportunities to generate traffic organically.
Local SEO for Vape Companies
It may come as a surprise that doing SEO for a vape shop also helps you boost “offline” sales at your shop. Here at NUOPTIMA, we advise local SEO to any company that provides in-person service besides an online shop. Although the world relies on digital, vape stores continue popping up in most cities, and some people still prefer to shop in-store. For this reason, local SEO supports your growth offline, too, helping your site appear in location-based searches for vapes or e-juice.
Hence, setting up a Google Business Profile is a good start, but it’s not enough to make a real impact. A proficient SEO company will target terms like ‘vape shop near me’ or ‘vape store in…’ + your location. They understand how to create and optimize pages that attract customers who want to visit you in person.
Should You Invest in an SEO Company for Vape Shop Marketing?
The reality is that you MUST do SEO if you want to grow your vape shop.
However, getting it right requires time, expertise, and resources to ensure your optimizations are implemented correctly and comply with Google’s strict algorithm.
This means that you have two choices – build an in-house SEO team or hire a vape SEO service vendor.
Building an in-house SEO team has its advantages – it is a team that works on your project alone, focuses all of its attention on it and, eventually, builds the kind of expertise needed to grow your business.
That being said, it is also a surprisingly costly investment.
For one, you need to hire the people. Depending on your appetites, you will need anywhere between three and infinite people. That’s at least three new salaries on the books. If you want those people to be good – three hefty new salaries. Suppose you want those people to be good and know the vape industry – three even heftier salaries.
Additionally, you need to include the costs of all the software your team will need to be effective in the slightest. If you happen to know someone who is in SEO, ask them about Ahref’s new pricing, and their reaction will give you an idea of how costly SEO tools can be.
Furthermore, building links also entails an investment. The days of building links with nothing but hard work are virtually over. If you do not have an established network of companies and websites you collaborate with on your link portfolio, get ready to fork over serious money for links.
Soon enough, you are spending far more than you expected on SEO, and unless your team is super-experienced, well-balanced, and industry-savvy, there is a chance that the business impact will be minimal.
On the other hand, investing in a vape SEO service can level up your online presence by giving you access to experts with years of experience in your industry. As the vape market is subject to Google’s extreme standards for health-related websites, you must optimize your content carefully.
Here at NUOPTIMA, we are well-versed in this industry, having helped numerous brands appear on the first page of Google. We know how to optimize web pages so Google views them as high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy. This falls under the search engine’s quality ranking system, which assesses expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T).
Our teams come from various professional backgrounds, working together to implement a unique strategy that works for your site. We have experts in SEO, marketing, content creation, analysis, technical optimization, and more.
Here are a few methods we use to implement our vape SEO service for your site:
- Create new, optimized pages relevant to your business to increase and sustain organic rankings.
- Develop SEO-optimised content across your website to boost the number of keywords your site targets.
- Arrange for links to be placed on high-quality websites that link back to your site.
- Optimise pages to comply with Google’s E-A-T algorithm and best practices.
The team at NUOPTIMA prides itself on providing a cost-effective, long-term way to promote sustainable growth. That’s why we only use white hat SEO techniques to ensure every business we work with reaps the rewards of our vape SEO service, even if SEO efforts are put on hold (either temporarily or permanently).
Simply put, the team at NUOPTIMA are growth experts and know how to tailor our SEO expertise to your business goals. Book a free call with our team today to discuss how a good SEO strategy can benefit your vape company.
Conclusion
When done right, SEO is an exquisite long-term marketing channel, especially for vape companies that are in a specific position where they cannot advertise online.It is more than just getting your website in the first few spots in SERPs, as it can be a fantastic lead-generation machine that you can leverage in a manner of ways to boost your vape shop’s sales. Consider investing in organic SEO services to maximize your online visibility and drive sustainable growth.
That being said, to do it right, you need expertise, knowledge of the industry, manpower, and the right tools.
NUOPTIMA boasts all of those, and the only thing you need to do is book a free call; together, we will determine whether we can help you grow your vape company and the best way to go about this.
