Before we start, we want to shout out Brandon Bobart and his team at Pisgah Peaks Ventures, whom we worked with to achieve these results.
Most SEO agencies tell THC and hemp brands that SEO takes 6-12 months to start working.
Whether it be the compounding nature of SEO or the regulated nature of this category, there’s always an excuse as to why SEO can’t start showing improvements right now.
This case study invalidates these excuses, but more importantly, it shows just how powerful good SEO can be for new THC brands looking to open up new acquisition channels.
When our client, a THC drink marketplace, initiated an engagement with us in September 2025, they had a broad product lineup and were perfectly positioned to build in the fast-growing hemp beverage.
But they had very little visibility in organic search, and very little customer acquisition, period. While their competitors ranked and brought in consistent sales using SEO, they were basically invisible.
They needed to begin acquiring customers – but they didn’t have months to begin seeing movement.
And that’s why they hired us for a 3-month SEO sprint. As a result of the sprint, in four months, they went from receiving just 5 clicks per day (95% of which was branded traffic) to nearly 80 clicks per day.
In this THC SEO case study, we’re going to show you how.
Our THC SEO Strategy
If you’re in the hemp beverage industry, you know how competitive it is. The market is absolutely crammed with brands.
The same applies to the search results.
Dozens (if not hundreds) of brands and huge publishings are competing for terms like “thc drinks,” making it incredibly tough for new brands – like our client – to rank.
We weren’t going to see success on a reasonable timescale trying to rank for this main keyword.
But chasing long-tail informational keywords by writing dozens of blog posts wouldn’t be a good strategy either.
These keywords don’t convert because the people searching them aren’t looking to buy anything.
So to get results for our client, we would need to be more creative.
We started by thinking about their ideal customer profile (ICP) first. Only then would we even begin to consider keywords or content.
Our client, a THC drink marketplace, sells online and ships nationwide. This means their ICP is anyone looking to buy THC drinks.
But we drilled down further to identify three primary “ICP moments” – moments at which our client would benefit from being in front of their ICP:
- People looking to buy THC drinks online
- People looking to buy THC drinks near them
- People looking to compare popular THC drink brands
These are the three main moments when people would actually buy from our client; if we could use SEO to get in front of them, our client would begin making money from organic search.
Starting with the customers (and not with the keywords) also allowed us to avoid targeting the same keywords that every other brand targets – a flat-out necessity for fast SEO progress in a competitive vertical like hemp beverages.
Based on this insight, the strategy for our SEO sprint would comprise three key components:
- Keyword research
- Content development (category pages, location pages, and blog posts)
- Link building
Technical SEO is normally the first step in this process. But given our client’s website was small and very new, they didn’t need more than a few minutes of technical SEO work.
Our SEO approach always follows the same underlying principles, but we fully customize the scope to our clients because every brand and website is in a different situation and has different goals.
Templated deliverable packages don’t drive results – especially not in a competitive vertical on a short timeline.
1. Keyword Research
You’ll recall that we were targeting three main “ICP moments” for our client:
- People looking to buy THC drinks online
- People looking to buy THC drinks near them
- People looking to compare popular THC drink brands
With this in mind, what we’d need to do to finish our strategy would be:
- Determine which keywords people were searching at each of these moments
- Determine which page types would rank for these keywords most effectively
Here’s what we came up with from our research:
| Buying Moment | Keyword Structure & Examples | Page Type |
| Buying online | [category name] -thc drinks-thc energy drinks-thc drinks for sleep-thc drinks for anxiety | Product category page |
| Buying near them | thc drinks [city] -thc drinks atlanta-thc drinks phoenix-thc drinks henderson | Location page |
| Comparing brands | [brand] vs. [brand] -brez vs hiyo [brand] alternatives -brez alternatives-hiyo alternatives | Blog post |
Once we knew the types of keywords we’d need to target and the best page types to rank for them, all we had to do was plug these keyword structures into Ahrefs (an SEO tool) to come up with complete lists of ideas and prioritize the best opportunities first.
Then, we could move right into building the pages for the keywords we identified.
2. Category Pages
Since our client was primarily selling, our first priority were the keywords indicating an intent to buy online.
These would be their main category keywords, like “THC drinks” and “THC drinks for sleep” – keywords literally describing the categories they sold.
But you’ll remember that “THC drinks” is a very competitive keyword.
That’s why we targeted nearly two dozen different category keywords.
By building a specific page for each, we could provide a better user experience than websites trying to rank for every term with one primary “THC drinks” page.
As a result, we could rank by beating the competitors on relevance even if they had more authority.
Our client sells a variety of THC drinks, including sodas, mocktails, and even energy drinks, all with varying strengths, cannabinoid blends, and use cases.
So, we built out ~20 category pages for keywords like:
– THC soda
– THC root beer
– THC mocktails
– THC drinks for energy
– THC drinks for sleep
– THC drinks for anxiety
– 5mg THC drinks
– 10mg THC drinks
(And more).
These pages included a short description giving an overview of the product category, the products, and then a long description with frequently asked questions going more in depth on the category.
We internally linked all of the categories to improve Google’s ability to crawl the pages, then submitted them for indexing through Google Search Console.
This step is important, as Google tends to be slow to index pages from newer sites or those with low authority.
3. Location Pages
The next thing we did was focus on keywords that indicated people were looking for THC drinks near them.
Our goal in ranking for these keywords was to convince people to shop online with our client instead of going to a store.
The best keywords here were city-level terms like “thc drinks atlanta” or “thc drinks las vegas.”
People tend to search for things by city (if they’re not just typing “near me”), and Google tends to understand local intent at the city level.
In other words, if you live in Atlanta and you type in “thc drinks near me,” pages targeting “thc drinks atlanta” will be the ones to surface.
State-level keywords mattered, too, for authority and internal linking.
To get in front of people searching for THC drinks at both the state and city levels, we built a page for every state our client shipped to (about 40 pages total), then built a page for the most populous cities in key states (about 60 pages total).
At the state level, we answered questions around legality and discussed our client’s products more broadly.
At the city level, we focused more on how our products fit into the lifestyle and pastimes of each area, and pitched buying online as a better alternative to the in-store options available close by.
To avoid scaling low-quality and duplicate content, we discussed specific features and attributes of every city on each page, and included specific retail locations in the “where to buy” section we added to each city page.
As with the category pages, we internally linked the location pages:
- State pages linked to other states in the region
- City pages linked to other cities in the state
- State pages linked to their city pages
We also built a “THC drinks near me” page and added it to the footer of our client’s website to ensure all of the locations were fairly high in their site’s structure (another key to getting indexed).
Our client had no physical retail location, but our content strategy made that irrelevant: they were able to penetrate local markets and receive orders from customers across the US.
4. Blog Content
The final type of keywords we focused on were keywords indicating that people were comparing THC drink brands or looking for a better alternative to a brand:
- BRAND vs. BRAND
- BRAND Alternatives
At this stage, people haven’t made up their mind about who to buy from.
This presented us the perfect opportunity to write blog posts introducing our client to potential customers.
We published a handful of blog posts targeting the highest-volume brand comparison and alternatives keywords.
Since our client is a THC drink marketplace, we focused on their variety as one of their key differentiators. They also ship single cans – most brands don’t – so we discussed that, too.
Most brands write endless numbers of blog posts about informational topics that don’t convert.
While this strategy is a viable way to build topical authority (which can help you rank for more valuable keywords), it requires a lot of time and money to begin paying off.
Our client needed results quickly, so we skipped straight to the bottom of the funnel with our blogging strategy and targeted keywords that people search for when they’re ready to buy THC drinks at the present moment.
5. Link Building
Once we developed content for all of our client’s key ICP moments, we executed the final component of our sprint: link building.
Links from other websites serve as votes of confidence that Google uses to determine which brands and entities are the most authoritative – and thus deserving of visibility.
All this to say, links are extremely important. When we started, our client had essentially zero valuable links and very little website authority.
Given it was a 3-month SEO sprint on a low-medium budget, we knew we wouldn’t be able to build enough links to increase our client’s domain authority significantly, but that if we focused on high-quality placements, we could still make a positive impact.
We built four backlinks to our client’s website, which included two main types of link:
- Link insertions: The addition of a link into a relevant page on another website that’s receiving traffic.
- Parasite SEO placements: Brand placements in relevant listicles (e.g. best THC drinks)
To land the links, we conducted outreach, then paid prospects to link to our client.
Paying for authority may seem backward, but it’s by far the most effective way to build links.
Most forms of non-paid link bartering touted by the SEO industry (e.g. link exchanges, skyscraper content, link bait) are difficult to execute properly on a short timescale and inconsistent on a longer timescale.
These placements helped put our client on the map, making it easier for their pages to be indexed by Google and compete for keywords.
Our SEO Results
In a 3-month SEO sprint, we built out this brand’s entire content foundation and built fundamental backlinks.
This took them from receiving just 5 clicks per day at the beginning of our engagement to receiving nearly 80 per day about four months later:
This includes more than a dozen #1 rankings for national and local THC drink buying and comparison keywords.
This represents a transformation from near invisibility to having a stable and growing customer acquisition channel.
And that’s exactly why properly executed SEO is so valuable for THC brands.
If you have a cannabis or hemp brand and want results like this, click here to book a call with our team.
