More and more countries are legalizing marijuana and allowing people to grow it for recreational and medicinal purposes. Dispensaries and seed banks are regularly opening. Some of these have physical locations, and some are just online.
The most successful businesses have one thing in common – they use great CBD keywords and SEO techniques that ensure their content reaches as broad an audience as possible. But it’s no use just cramming in random keywords and hoping for the best. Google has become wise to tactics like that, and your website can be at risk of being pushed down search results pages or even penalized.
In this guide, we’ll teach you how to use CBD keywords in your business so that it can rise up the search results and attracts more online visitors. That way, you’ll see an increase in your sales and be able to invest more money in high-quality SEO.
We’ll cover:
- The Basics of Keyword Research
- Understanding CBD Keywords
- Cannabis SEO Tips
The Basics of Keyword Research
The world of SEO has evolved considerably over the last decade, and it’s now a vital practice for businesses that want to succeed. If you’re not using SEO, then your competition will rise above you and take the lion’s share of your target audience.
Keywords can be divided based on their search volume, popularity, and general intent. By doing this, you can find what your audience is looking for and provide it to them. That’s how businesses succeed using good SEO.
How To Do Keyword Research for CBD
You can follow several steps when researching what keywords to use, and we’ll cover them in this section. It’s essential to follow them closely to get the best results from SEO so that you avoid penalties from practices like keyword stuffing.
List Relevant Topics
Keywords can be categorized by the topics they fall into, and most people who use search engines will be searching for particular topics. Your business will have particular topics, and now is the time to list them out. Ideally, you should look for 5-10 of them to give you a large pool of keywords to choose from.
If you’ve had your business for a long time, you can reflect on the topics your prospects raise in sales conversations and what they talk about in their feedback. This can give you a good idea of what keywords to use to appeal to people who see your website. Sometimes you can use particular software to help you do this, but there’s no harm in making a list manually.
Add Keywords To The Topics
When you’ve created your list of topics, it’s time to go and find keywords that relate to them. To find these, think about what people would type into the search bar when thinking about that topic. If you find the right ones, this can make all the difference because your business will start appearing in search results if the text on your website mirrors what people are searching for.
If you were a dispensary looking to sell weed, you might use phrases like ‘buying weed online’ or ‘how do I get weed online?’. The precise phrases that will work for your business depend on what people are looking for. At this stage, you need to guess that as best you can and list out as many phrases as possible.
Figure Out Intentions
Once you’ve got all your phrases, you need to factor in user intent. This is essential when learning about keywords and the way SEO works. Search engines are now much more advanced than they used to be. One of their functions now is to present the information they think a person intends to find. That way, the user is satisfied with their experience using the search engine.
However, because search engines are focused on intentions, you need to be careful with how you use the keywords you shortlist. For example, suppose you’re focusing on keywords relating to people buying marijuana. In that case, you might not know if they’re searching for that to buy marijuana, grow marijuana, or start their own marijuana dispensary.
Thankfully, it’s quite simple to figure out keyword intent because the search engines will reveal the answer. All you have to do is search for the keyword and see what kind of articles the search engine displays on its first page. These will be the intentions of the keyword.
Researching Similar Terms
Once you know what your keywords will be, and you’ve ensured they’ll have the right intentions when you use them, it’s worth making sure you go the extra mile to make your content good. One way to prepare for that is by searching for keywords related to the keywords you’re using.
You may find ones that you’d not thought of and ones that might have a higher search volume than yours. Search volume means the number of people that search for that keyword. It’s harder to rank for high-volume keywords, but low-volume keywords are less relevant.
The best way to figure out alternative search terms is to scroll to the bottom of Google’s first page and look at what comes up in the list of suggested searches. You can then open these in new tabs to keep track of the intent and note the ones you think are suitable. If you want to further this process, you can look at the related searches for the original related searches. But it depends on how perfectionist you are and how much time you have.
Consider Tools To Help You
The final point to consider is whether you want to automate keyword research or do it manually. If you have plenty of time and you’re on a low budget, then it’s best to do it yourself. But if you don’t have much time and your budget is more flexible, you might like to use tools to help you.
Alternatively, you can find free tools, but these tend to be quite limited. It depends on how extensive you’d like your research to be. If you just want to know what the keywords are and what their search volume is, there are free extensions you can add to your browser. These will display relevant keywords every time you type in a search query. If you choose to use a tool, it should be based on user feedback so that you know you’ll get a good experience when you use it.
Understanding the Best CBD Keywords
CBD keywords are particularly relevant for this guide, and we’ll devote this section to them. More and more businesses are using CBD keywords because it’s now legal to produce, sell, and use marijuana in an ever-growing list of locations. This is important because keywords can be targeted based on locations, such as cities, towns, or states.
But location is just one way of targeting CBD keywords. You can also choose from a variety of specific options. Examples include focusing cannabis seeds, CBD oil, capsules, gummies, and much more. The keywords you pick will depend on what your dispensary will sell, and you might like to use keywords covering multiple products.
Examples of CBD Keywords
We’ve already mentioned you can use tools to find keywords and that search volume is one of the most important metrics. But there are also other patterns you’ll notice when you’re looking at keyword search volume. One of these is how coherent the keywords are. Keywords with a high search volume will typically make good sense from a grammatical perspective.
Examples of high-ranking cannabis keywords include:
- Cannabis oil
- Cannabis seeds
- CBD oil
- Hemp oil
- Marijuana dispensary
These make sense when you put them in a sentence or use them in subheadings or use them in sentences. That’s one of the reasons they have such high search volumes. They are the keywords that people would type in naturally, without even meaning to use them.
On the other hand, cannabis keywords with a low search volume don’t make as much sense. Here are some examples:
- Cannabis indica
- Hydroponics marijuana
- Cannabis sativa
These would be difficult to use in a sentence and would make any content you write unpleasant for others to read. Some websites use keywords like these anyway because the owners feel that their websites will rank as highly as possible as long as they include enough keywords. But this is not the case. If you use excessive keywords that don’t make good grammatical sense, your website will repel users, and Google might give it a penalty.
Analyzing CBD Keywords
To help you figure out the best CBD keywords to use, you can review the first page of search results relating to a specific keyword. This will reveal which websites are currently the most effective according to the search engines.
You can then compare that list to a first page review conducted on another keyword. Repeating this for all the keywords you intend to use is a wise choice because it can guide you on how best to use those keywords. It also shows you the search intent for the keywords you intend to use and which ones have different intentions. You can use that information to be strategic when it comes to your keyword use.
Keyword Difficulty
Another component to consider with CBD keywords is keyword difficulty. This is a number that you’ll be given when you use some keyword research tools. It’s best to keep it under ten if you can, and that way, you’ll be able to rank with your chosen keywords more easily.
To take advantage of the keyword difficulty when comparing your website to your competitors, you should calculate an average difficulty from all of the keywords they’re using. This is something you can do manually, but it would be very time-consuming, and you might end up leaving out keywords without intending to. But when you have the average keyword difficulty, you’ll have an important piece of information. You’ll know that you can use keywords beneath that average difficulty and still rank well with them over time, so long as you use them appropriately and don’t stuff them into your content.
Using Keywords To Plan Content
Once you’ve done a lot of your keyword research, you can begin to figure out how you can use them in your content. This is another area of keyword research, but it’s only worth doing once you’ve followed all of the advice we’ve given before this point.
If you know the keywords you’re going to use, you may also have long-tail keywords among them. These are often good for use as headings or questions. But without knowing the questions that people are asking, you can’t know whether those long-tail keywords will be worth using.
That’s where you can do additional research. Certain online tools will provide you with a list of questions people are searching for based on a keyword you input. You can use a shorter keyword for this and test whether any of the questions match the long-tail keywords you have. If they do, you can plant them strategically inside your content.
If you find matching questions, you can test their search volume using another keyword research tool and pick out the ones people are looking for most frequently. Once you have a dozen of these, you’ll be able to use them to create a content structure that allows you to use CBD keywords in engaging ways.
Cannabis SEO Tips
You’ll now be aware of the importance of keyword research in the marketing of your canna-business, but keywords are only one part of the puzzle. It’s important to know how they fit into the overall SEO strategy and what that means when you begin applying your strategy.
That way, you can decide where your keywords fit into your marketing strategy and how to use the keywords from your research appropriately.
Analyze Organic Traffic
Assuming you already have a website, it will probably receive some visitors every month, even if you’re not doing much to market it. Before you upgrade your strategy using all your keyword research, it’s essential to know the position you’re in now.
Examples of what you should look at include the number of unique users visiting your website, the best pages your site has, and what keywords are being used to find your website.
Once you know what pages users are visiting, you can assess what they have in common and keep that in mind when implementing your new keyword-driven strategy.
Do Proper Research
We’ve already given you plenty of information on how to do keyword research, covering elements like keyword difficulty, search volume, and user intent. There’s no need to go through that again, as you can just scroll up if you need a reminder.
But what’s important is emphasizing the importance of doing that research and doing it correctly. We’ve given you enough information to do that in this guide, but whether you follow it is up to you.
If you don’t, you might waste a lot of time and money on a new marketing strategy that won’t get results.
Keep Mobiles In Mind
Most users on the Internet will navigate to your website via mobile, no matter how good or bad it is when it comes to keywords. If it’s not displaying correctly for mobile users, they’ll lose patience and visit a competitor website.
To avoid that, you need to test your website to ensure it displays correctly on mobiles. Most web designers and web design programs will optimize your website for mobiles, but you have to check this is being done correctly. Otherwise, your website may not even appear on search results pages.
The best way to optimize your site is to think about what a mobile user would do if they found your site and wanted to buy something or read something quickly. If they struggle, then you’ll need to change your website.
Optimize For Social Media
Social media is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to reach your audience, but if your content isn’t being shared there, or you aren’t posting there, you won’t gain any traction. You can post on social media regularly, which is worthwhile, but you’ll also want to ensure your content is good enough to become popular on social media.
Popularity on social media also encourages search engines to mark your website as trustworthy, which will show it to more people and improve its ranking on search results pages. You’ll also get more interest in what you’re selling, as more people will see the content in more places.
Optimize The Speed Of Your Site
When your site displays to your audience, it’s important that it loads as quickly as possible. This can differ on mobiles compared to desktops, so it’s crucial that you check the speed on both. A site that loads fast will be a site that more people stay and read, so it’s important for you to optimize it.
A web page’s average time to load on mobiles is 22 seconds, but most people expect a page to display within 3 seconds. More than half of visitors leave a website if it doesn’t display within 3 seconds, so that’s the goal you need to aim for with your canna-business website.
You can increase it by reducing image size and ensuring the code of the website is written correctly. You may need to hire a programmer or web designer to help you with this.
Use Blogs To Market Your Site
A great way to market your canna-business and ensure it displays higher in search rankings is to publish engaging and informative content on it regularly. This content should contain your chosen keywords planted strategically throughout each piece. To ensure your keywords aren’t stuffed, reread the content after you’ve written it to see if it sounds natural.
If a well-written blog post comes up on the first page of search results on a search engine, that will attract more people to your website. This will then increase the levels of authority, trust, and relevance of your site, bringing more visitors and keeping them there for longer.Â
Consider Videos
Alongside your written content, videos can also help with SEO optimization. Pages that have videos embedded in will encourage visitors to remain there for longer. This is known as the dwell time. Websites with a higher dwell time tend to rank higher than those without it.
But even when you’re dealing with videos, keywords can factor into them as well. You can make videos that are scripted and ensure the transcript is published alongside the video. That helps people read along and also associates your preferred keywords with the video.
Videos are pattern interrupts for people, meaning it stops them from scrolling for a while. If the quality is good, it plays automatically, and it has keyword-optimized titles and descriptions, then you’ll be likely to get more people sticking around on your site.
Deal With The Technical Side
You can drill down into the data and code to take your SEO optimization and keyword placement to the next level. Ways of doing this include XML sitemap creation, schema markup, and attaching analytical tools to your site that break down the data into segments you can examine.
These are complicated to implement and require someone with specialized knowledge, but they are worth doing if you have the money and time to outsource those tasks.
Conclusion
You now know everything you need to know about CBD keywords, and we hope that you’ve got the confidence to start doing keyword research and applying the results to your marketing efforts.
If, at first, you don’t succeed, it’s important that you keep testing and tweaking what you’re doing. Eventually, you’ll discover a winning combination that will last for a reasonable period before you need to test and tweak again.
SEO optimization and keyword research take time to yield fruit, even if you do everything right. What’s important is to be consistent with it, and eventually, you will make progress.