While cannabis companies are faced with some unique challenges when it comes to regulations, compliance, and banking concerns, they then find themselves confronting the same hurdle as every other mainstream business: how to get your website the top ranking hit on search engines like Google and Bing.
Once your cannabis, hemp, or CBD business has cleared the initial legal challenges of operating in a newly legal space, you’ll have to consider how to optimize your website’s SEO to be seen by your audience. How is that done? Here are four quick tips for getting your website ranked at the top.
How Cannabis Companies Can Boost Their SEO – Tips for Beginners
1. Study Your Competition
When your customers are searching for you, it’s very likely they will find your competitors too. That’s why companies are paying special attention to SEO – to remain competitive in a Google search and land that precious digital real estate that is the top organic search result. Study your competitors’ websites for things like keywords, links, menu structure and phrases, and blogs to see where they are succeeding and identify areas where you may be able to jump ahead.
2. Research Your Keywords
Use keyword tools or resources like Moz and Manta to track the success of your target keywords over time. You should also plan to do regular searching and monitoring using Google Search Console to see how your keywords may need to change, or if there are any trends you could be writing about and using as keywords (just make sure that you provide valuable insight for your industry).
3. Be Ready to Adapt
Stay up to date with news from Google and keep tabs on SEO blogs and websites to learn how to work with the algorithm, as it’s ever-changing. The more you can anticipate any SEO adjustments you’ll have to make, the better off your site will be in the search rankings.
4. Optimize – Everything!
Make sure your site is optimized for search engine algorithms by not ignoring the SEO data that your website allows you to pre-fill when uploading pages and items like blog posts. This includes items like excerpts, meta-tags, meta-description, keyword density, target keyword, and alt-text for images.
It’s important to remember SEO changes are important, but you won’t see results overnight. An SEO campaign requires initial targeting and setup, and ongoing maintenance as new competitors emerge, market trends change, and search engine algorithms are adjusted. It will often take 3-6, and up to 12 months to see the results you’re looking for but keep at it!
If you’d like NisonCo’s SEO team to identify areas of opportunity for your website, contact us today for your free SEO audit.
