CBD SEO: The Definitive Guide

Introduction

It is safe to say we are now fully immersed in the digital age. Everything happens online now, even job interviews! You must have heard of SEO somewhere before; I mean, virtually all industries leverage it to boost sales and drive growth, and the CBD industry is no exception. However, CBD businesses need it even more because it is one of the very few legal and acceptable ways to advertise CBD products. This has made it necessary for every CBD business to know what SEO is and how to improve their CBD SEO scores. And this is where we enter the picture with a definitive CBD SEO guide.

What is CBD SEO?

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. As the name strongly suggests, it is a way of optimizing your web pages for search engine rankings. In simple terms, it is how you make your web pages rank high on various search engines, particularly Google.

CBD SEO is simply SEO for CBD websites.

Why is CBD SEO important?

SEO is one of the most valuable tools for any business that wants to survive in the online world. It is even more crucial for CBD businesses, given the limited avenues of advertising products. If you already have a CBD business, you will understand what we mean. For newbies to the CBD industry, most sites and social media channels frown on CBD advertising. Luckily, though, there are still ways of advertising your CBD products online, and at the very top of that list is SEO.

CBD SEO is important for two main reasons – traffic and conversions. The more traffic your website can generate, the higher the chances of making sales on your CBD products. To achieve this, you need to increase the ranking and visibility of your website.

SEO involves getting your website and web pages to rank high in Search Engine Result Pages. This means your website pops us quite early when someone searches for something related to CBD.

You can get your web pages to rank high organically or inorganically. Getting your web pages to rank high organically means improving rankings without paying for it. Your website ranks high solely off your content and the like. SEO is the way to go if you want to improve your website rankings organically.

Visibility implies prominence in Search Engine Result Pages. When your website has high visibility, it is visible for many relevant search queries. Which, in turn, means more people can see it.

How to improve your CBD SEO score?

Okay, you now know SEO is important. The next step is knowing how to improve your CBD SEO score. SEO is so wide a field that no single article can do justice to all of its components. Notwithstanding, we have curated a list of some of the essential factors you need to keep in mind if you want to improve your CBD SEO score.

Content

Content is one of the most important parts of SEO. There is no SEO without content. When optimizing SEO, one of the main things you are actually optimizing is the content. In other words, you’re making your content more relevant to a greater number of the people you want to be seeing that content.

So, what is content? Well, basically everything. Text, videos, audio, images – basically everything about any particular subject. Anytime someone searches for something online, they want to see the most relevant content about what they search for. And it is your goal to make sure your website contains enough relevant content about CBD products. To achieve this, you have to optimize your content. More on this shortly.

When your content is right, your website has higher visibility and rankings, which means more traffic and conversions. Google and other search engines rank content with their algorithms, and content optimization is a way of using the algorithm instructions and rules to get your content to the top. Let us briefly consider it.

Content optimization

Content is simply any form of information about a particular topic or subject. This is one of the major areas search engine algorithms assess when ranking a website.

• The first step to content optimization is keyword research. Keywords are such an important part of SEO that we have a whole detailed section dedicated to them. You can have nice content, but your website will not rank too high if you don’t use enough of the right keywords.
• After keyword research, you need to decide on the type of content best appropriate for the particular subject. It may be a 2000-word blog post or a simple 1-minute video – you decide.
• Then to actually creating your content. We will advise you to check out competitors’ websites, particularly those high up in SERP rankings, before creating yours to know the areas you have to be better at.
• Keep churning out new content. Don’t just stop at one or two or three, or you get the point. Many sites are targeting the same topic as you, meaning you always have to be on your toes. And aside from dropping new content, you also need to update the ones that need updating because things change fast in the CBD world.

Keywords

This could be a whole article on its own, and we still would not exhaustively discuss it. Keywords are the backbone of content optimization, which is the backbone of SEO optimization. SEO keywords are terms added to online content to improve search engine rankings for those terms.

Consider a CBD business in New York that specializes in CBD products for dogs, for example. If that business wants to release a blog post that will promote their products, the keyphrase should be something like “CBD products for dogs New York.” This means anyone that searches “CBD products for dogs in New York” should be linked to your site if your content is perfectly optimized for that keyword. Never underestimate how important keywords and keyphrases are to CBD SEO.

There are usually primary keywords for every post or article. These keywords are exactly what your article seems to target. Your title and content have to reflect it.

After the main keywords, there are other keywords – secondary and additional – that you should “sprinkle” across your post.

Secondary keywords are complementary keywords to the primary keyword. Let’s go back to our friends that sell CBD products for dogs in New York. Some of the other keywords they can add are “CBD oil for dogs,” “CBD dog dosage,” “best CBD oil for dogs,” etc.

Additional keywords are synonyms or variations of your keyword, as they will ensure your website only shows up for relevant searches.

Tips for using keywords

• Research for keywords and use only relevant ones. When doing keyword research, there’s the possibility that you will find several keywords about a particular subject. It is your responsibility to choose the relevant ones as your primary, secondary, and additional keywords.
• Use SEO tools to generate keywords. Developing relevant keywords isn’t the easiest of tasks to do by one’s self. This explains why many use Google AdWords to search for keywords that best fit their content. Unfortunately, Google AdWords doesn’t allow searching for CBD keywords as of now. But some sites can assist, like Moz Keyword Research Tool.
  
• Use keywords in the right areas. Ideally, for main keywords, you should have them in the title, URL, Heading-1 tag, first paragraph, meta description, and alt text for images. If not all, at many as possible. This way, Google understands what your post is targeting and will be able to group it under that particular subject when people search for it. Also, as a rule of thumb, target a keyword every 150 words you write.
• Use between 3-8 relevant keywords per post, depending on the length of your article, of course. One of the keywords should be the primary keyword, serving as the main purpose of your article. There should be between 1-4 secondary keywords and 1-3 additional keywords.
• Don’t spam your article with keywords. Whatever you do, ensure you don’t spam your article with keywords. This will do the exact opposite of what you want, as Google will rank your site poorly. Then there’s also the problem of your content losing its flow.
• Add keywords naturally. Some people don’t spam their content with keywords but just add them anyhow. They add them just for adding sake and don’t care about how they are used, as long as they are used. This again can give you negative rankings, aside from making your content look stupid.

Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links are references or links from one website to a page on another website. In other words, they are references to your content on other websites. So, if someone searches for something and clicks on a website, and the website they click on uses your own website as a reference, you gain a backlink to your site.

While backlinks are not the primary metric for CBD SEO success, they will gain you higher SERP rankings faster. This is because another site, particularly a reputable one, quoting your own site is telling Google your site is a trusted source or reference. And that’s not us guessing; that is literally what Google thinks too. According to Google, “if other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.”

How to increase backlinks naturally

1. Ask reputable websites about guest blogging opportunities. At times, it’s as simple as just asking other sites for the opportunity to backlink your own web page.
2. Track sites that mentioned or referenced your webpage but did not backlink it.
3. Ensure you churn out relevant and top-notch content that others can backlink. In fact, this is the most “honorable” way of getting a backlink. You don’t need to ask anyone for anything; your content will speak for you.
4. You can get backlinks from companies you have great relationships with. They may be companies you have backlinked on your own website or just companies with which you have an existing relationship.

On-page CBD SEO optimization

On-page optimization is simply all SEO elements on your own website. They are things you have control over. So, yes, even the keywords and content we discussed are part of on-page SEO optimization. The technical parts, the quality of your content, the keywords you use are all things you can control and things that can help your website rank highly.

Technical SEO and keywords, in particular, are two areas you have to pay special attention to if you want good CBD SEO scores. If your keywords are right and your content is good, you will have good rankings. The same applies to the technical aspects of your website.

Another underrated part of on-page SEO optimization is user experience. Some argue that this falls under the technical aspects. Either way, it is an on-page factor you have to optimize. People will not use a site they cannot navigate easily or an overly complex one.

There are certain platforms you can employ for total on-page SEO optimization. We will recommend the Yoast SEO plugin and WordPress. The good thing about both is they can help you fix many of the technical challenges you will face when setting up your site without needing too much technical knowledge.

On-page CBD SEO optimization includes the SEO factors you can directly influence, so do so.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO has to do with the technical aspects of your website – duh! Seriously, though, if you want your website to rank highly, you have to focus on how you can make your website response fast, easy to navigate, and simple. No one wants to use a website that takes forever to load or one with a poor user experience.

Below are some of the characteristics of a technically optimized website:

Fast

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, no one wants web pages that take forever to load. People will simply go for alternatives that load faster if your website is slow. In fact, the definition of slow as regards website loading time is three seconds. Three! People don’t want it, and Google knows this, so you may find yourself at the bottom of SERP rankings if your website is slow to load. There are platforms online that can allow you to test your website speed, such as GT Metrix Website Speed test or others.

No dead links

Dead links are links that don’t open. Do you ever have these moments where you are enjoying the nice content on a site, and you see an interesting link and click on it but find out it’s a “404 error” page? We know you hated it. Search engines do too. This is why you have to update your web pages regularly to mop up all of these dead links, reducing them to the barest minimum at any moment in time.

Crawlable

There are things called crawl robots that just move around your site to determine the type of content on it. You can block the robots from reaching content you don’t want them to see and also guide them around your site. The meta robots tag is a great tool to direct these robots to not follow links on a page or not let the page appear in search results.

Secure

You may have seen “HTTPS” in the URL of sites when surfing the internet. You can also see it as a padlock on the search bar of many browsers. They denote that the connection to that site is secure, and no one can intercept data transmission between the browser and the site. The implication is that the credentials of guests on a site are secured. Your website should be secure.

Conclusion

CBD businesses don’t have the freedom many other businesses have of advertising their products easily and without any legal backlash. This is why all the available ways to advertising CBD products, especially online, have to be jumped at and maximized. One of these ways is CBD SEO. This article will guide you on some of the critical areas to consider when trying to improve the CBD SEO score of your business.

If you need extra professional help and advice about CBD SEO, you have us at Digital Octane to help out! Our team of experts is always willing and ready to help CBD businesses advertise their products and grow their businesses. Let us help you!