Cannabis SEO – How to Build Backlinks

Introduction

The Internet is arguably the prime and most effective form of marketing and advertising products for most businesses. Well, for most businesses, it’s pretty straightforward, but not for CBD and cannabis businesses. Why? Because most governments and virtually all social media platforms have some sort of restrictions over their marketing and advertising.

For this reason, you must greatly maximize the few means available. This leads us to cannabis SEO and cannabis backlinks. SEO is perhaps the most important tool CBD online marketers have, but it is also the broadest. Many factors and aspects have to be optimized for proper SEO, and backlinks are one of them.

In this article, we will walk you through cannabis backlinks, why you need them for your business, and, of course, how you can build them.

What are cannabis backlinks?

Backlinks or inbound links are references or links from one website to a page on another website. In simple terms, they are the links you find on someone else’s page that redirect the reader to your own page.

You must have come across them sometime somehow before. Imagine you’re browsing through the internet for a particular topic. Then you find a very good link, and you get engrossed in it. Then, later down the line, the good website you find has hyperlinked another website in their own website. So, if you want more information, you need to check out that new website. That new website you checked out was a backlink on the original website you opened.

Cannabis backlinks are simply backlinks related to cannabis SEO.

Why do you need cannabis backlinks for your business?

Now that you have an idea of what cannabis backlinks are, the next question that pops to mind is – why? Are cannabis backlinks such a big deal? Why do I need them for my business?

The three questions have the same overriding answer – cannabis backlinks are one of the most important tools to boost SEO rankings, which determines how good or bad your website will rank.

To be frank, many people don’t take SEO too seriously in the CBD and cannabis industry, and that’s shocking. Cannabis SEO is one of the very few marketing and advertising means where you have a great deal of control and can target a specific audience without committing a crime.

If your cannabis SEO rankings are good, the chances of you appearing early when a particular topic is searched for is very high. And this means better visibility and more chances for conversion. And given that backlinks are critical to SEO rankings, you should be very particular about them.

The way Google views backlinks is the same way you will view backlinks. When you see a backlink to a website on another very reputable website, you are assured of the credibility of the website backlinked. What are we saying? If you are on the WHO page, for instance, and you see them referencing another website through a backlink, your trust in the website they backlinked will be quite high. Compare this to when a new startup blog by a 13-year-old references the same website.

Google feels the same way. They essentially believe that prominent websites referencing you through a backlink means they trust what is on your site. In their words – “if other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.”

If you can get enough prominent websites to backlink you, then you are proving to Google that you are a trusted source. And they reward this by moving you up in SEO rankings.

How to build backlinks for Сannabis SEO

There are many ways to build cannabis backlinks – some legal, others, not so much. Below are some of the best and acceptable ways of building cannabis backlinks.

Create linkable content

This is the most “honorable” way to get backlinks. We’re calling it honorable because it is the one that involves the least work from your site as regards actively seeking backlinks. If you create linkable content, you will have little to do in the long run, as your content will work for you.

Creating linkable assets isn’t easy; we won’t lie to you. But it is definitely doable. Here are some steps that will help.

• Ensure your content is an excellent one. Low-quality content can push people away from your website, doing the exact opposite of what you want. It doesn’t matter the content type; just make sure it is a good one.
• Do proper keyword research before publishing your content. Keyword research is super important to cannabis SEO. If you consistently release content on something people don’t search much about, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. By proper keyword research, you can know what people are searching for and how you can help.
• Keep churning out content. Don’t just stop at one or two. Ensure you are consistent in your content-release efforts. This is particularly helpful as having many high-quality assets puts you in a better position of getting a backlink.

Build cannabis backlinks from link roundups

You can build backlinks by finding blog posts that are published solely to link out to quality content. This sounds so made up, but they are real. People actually publish posts to let others know of quality content. If you can get your website on there, it can greatly drive conversion. To get your content on there, you need just ask. Yes, you can simply ask that your website be linked to, and the blog post will decide if your website is a good fit. However, before asking, you need to do some research to find relevant keywords in your field. You can do this by searching “keyword” + “link roundup” on Google.

Report broken links

This method is fast gaining prominence today, perhaps because of how simple and effective it is. Broken links are links with the 404 error. You may have seen them several times when surfing the internet. These are websites that are no longer available for whatever reason. They suck a lot, and web admins know this, meaning they will be very open to the idea of replacing them as soon as they see them. And this is where you take maximum advantage.

This method entails fishing for broken links on cannabis or hemp-related sites. When you find the broken links, report them to the web admin and, even more importantly, suggest your own high-quality content to them. What’s more, searching for broken links is quite easy. You can use the Check My Links Chrome extension, and you’re good to go.

This method is very effective because you are basically doing all the work for the web admin, including suggesting a link to replace the broken link with. If your content is good enough, you can be sure you have gained a backlink.

Guest posting

Also known as guest blogging, guest posting is the act of writing content for another company’s website. This is one of the best ways of building backlinks for your own website. The key here is to write awesome guest posts for quality and trusted websites in the cannabis industry. A quick word of warning – write only for sites that can help you; don’t go about writing for just any website.

Reviews

Customer reviews are valued highly by businesses. This is why on most websites, there is usually a comment section for what customers think, and this is a way to build backlinks to your website. You have to be very smart about this, though, as you may end up annoying the original website if you just spam your links. Find an appropriate way to incorporate your link in the review section, and you have successfully backlinked your own website.

Another angle to this is offering bloggers your product and letting them decide if it is worth reviewing. Here, you find quality bloggers in the cannabis, hemp, or related industries, and you pitch your product to them. If they review this product on their website, you can be sure they’ll drop you a backlink.

However, the downside of this method is that you may be violating Google policy if you do it wrongly. Google frowns at offering products in exchange for a backlink or review, so be very mindful of your language all through the pitching process.

Link reclamation

As the name implies, in this method, you are reclaiming links to your website. It is called link reclamation because the website has already referenced you, but there is no backlink to you. You can find some of these websites that have referenced you by using tools like “Mention.com” Most websites will have no problem giving you a backlink when you reach out to them.

What type of backlinks is important for cannabis SEO

Note now that all backlinks are not the same. There are different types of backlinks with different effects on your cannabis SEO rankings. We will briefly consider the types best suited for your business.

Backlinks from trusted and prominent sites

Getting a backlink from a trusted and prominent site will carry far more weight than a relatively unknown site. That’s what Google thinks, and it makes sense when you think about it. Remember the WHO and 13-year-old newly established blog we compared earlier? Backlinks from these two sources are not even in the same stratosphere as one another. People trust one of these sites a lot more than the other; as such, the more trusted one is more important to your cannabis SEO rankings than the other.

With that established, when building cannabis backlinks, ensure that you aim for trusted sites, as they can carry more weight than hundreds of unknown and relatively untrusted sites.

Backlinks from sites related to you

If your website gets a backlink from a site related to your business somehow, it will be more useful than a site unrelated to you, given they have similar SEO rankings. Assume you get a backlink from a trusted and reputable CBD website and one from another trusted site, but this site focuses on cleaning household items. Both sites may be leaders in their respective industries, but one of these sites will be more useful to you as far as backlinks go. Can you guess which?

Backlinks from first-time websites

This implies that websites backlinking you for the first time are more useful to you than websites that have backlinked you several times in the past. This basically means subsequent backlinks from the same website will carry less weight than the first backlinks. This is, therefore, a warning not to rest on your laurels when you secure backlinks from a trusted website. You need to find other trusted ones as the SEO impact of the one you have secured will only diminish with time.

Backlinks that are “dofollow”

There are links known as “nofollow links.” These links have a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them, and they tell search engines to ignore that link. These nofollow tags have absolutely zero influence on SEO rankings. Google doesn’t even crawl these links. What you want are “dofollow” links, which, as you may think, are the opposite of nofollow links.

Conclusion

Backlinks are one of the most useful cannabis SEO tools when properly used. Because of just how vital SEO is to marketers today, particularly in the cannabis and CBD industry, it is essential to know how to build backlinks. You must be careful, though, not to violate Google policies when building backlinks. The methods contained in this article are perfectly legal and acceptable ways of building cannabis backlinks. For even better results, you can try more than one. Good luck.

If you want extra help with building backlinks and cannabis SEO in general for your CBD and cannabis businesses, you can reach out to us today. At Digital Octane, we are always willing and ready to help you out with your CBD needs.