Problems Our CBD SEO Services Solve

“I want to grow my e-commerce revenue, but can’t use paid ads”

Many CBD brands come to use because they want to increase their online sales, but can’t easily leverage paid ads due to the restrictions Meta and Google place on them. Doing this requires an SEO strategy that focuses on ranking for search terms that indicate someone wants to purchase CBD products.

“I don’t have time to do SEO for my brand”

Many of our CBD clients understand the value of SEO for their business and know the basics, but are too busy working on other parts of their business to give SEO the attention it needs to become a revenue-driving channel. Doing this requires an agency that can handle SEO end-to-end, rather than handing off deliverables and expecting you to do the rest.

“I’ve invested in SEO, but haven’t seen an increase in online sales”

Lots of CBD brands come to us having done SEO work on their site — whether internally, with freelancers, or with an agency — that increased their traffic, but didn’t significantly impact their revenue. Driving revenue with SEO requires a strategy that prioritizes ranking your transactional pages for lucrative keywords, rather than capturing any traffic you can get and hoping some of it converts.

“I hired an agency, but they didn’t do anything”

CBD brands come to us after spending thousands of dollars with agencies or freelancers in the past, but seeing no return on the work that was done. They need an SEO agency that drives revenue, reports on their results, and is responsive to questions and concerns — one that can restore their faith in SEO.

The most common CBD SEO mistakes we see

These are the SEO mistakes we avoid and the problems we overcome when working with our clients.

Problem 1: Writing too much blog content and doing nothing else

While blogging is a crucial part of any CBD SEO strategy, we come across a lot of CBD brands that have written lots of blog posts, but done little to no SEO on their product category (e.g. CBD gummies) or product (e.g. 50mg CBD gummies) pages.

Your transactional pages are the ones that will generate the most revenue if they rank, so they need to be prioritized and optimized. Blog content should serve to support these pages, but for many brands, it’s the only SEO they do.

The result? The brand gets a lot of traffic, but doesn’t make many sales.

The reason why many CBD brands overfocus on blog content is due to the way they contract SEO work. Deliverable-based pricing incentivizes SEO agencies and freelancer writers to sell blog posts to brands instead of doing comprehensive SEO.

Blog posts can be sold on a monthly basis for $200 or more each; comprehensive SEO involves optimizing key pages, maintaining these pages, updating old blog content, building links, and making small fixes as needed — in addition to creating new content.

But these small things and maintenance work aren’t easy to charge for on a by-deliverable basis, so many SEO agencies ignore them.

Because of this, many CBD brands end up with a website that gets a lot of blog traffic, but very little traffic to key revenue-generating pages.

Problem 2: Quantity at the expense of quality

SEO can take a while to work, so some brands try to expedite the process by publishing lots of pages very quickly. The most common form of this is publishing many blog posts, though we’ve seen it done with other types of pages, too.

This isn’t a problem — unless it’s done at the expense of quality. In that case, you’re met with two problems:

1. Short-term, the traffic you get won’t convert as well as it could. Plus, bad content could destroy trust with your potential customers forever. 
2. Long-term, your rankings, traffic, and conversions will erode. Over time, Google will learn that your content really isn’t that good – primarily through user signals (e.g. people don’t spend very long on your pages, and they frequently go back to Google to perform another search) – so they will reduce your rankings, oftentimes eventually taking your site to nothing. 

This is a real issue in the CBD space. We’ve seen dozens of companies with 200+ articles lose 75% of their traffic (typically tens of thousands of monthly sessions) because those articles were decent, but not good enough. 

Churn-and-burn isn’t a way to build a company, so it’s no way to build an SEO strategy, either. Hence, quality is crucial. 

Problem 3: Starting with keywords instead of customers

Many brands (and their agencies) base the keywords they target completely on what an SEO tool says about the search volume and levels of competition, rather than on what they know their customers are interested in. The result? They waste a lot of time and money ranking for keywords that produce mediocre revenue returns. 

Keyword tools should be used to confirm and validate the topics you find your customers care about, rather than to dictate what topics people care about.

Starting with customers does a few things:

1. Helps you find keywords that you have a good hunch are being searched, even if SEO tools show low-to-no volume
2. Helps you find keywords that get search volume, but that most brands wouldn’t think to research
3. Helps you avoid keywords that your customers won’t be searching, even if the syntax of the keyword suggests otherwise

When you add these little things up, starting with your customers helps you target keywords that are easier to rank for, drive more traffic, and drive more revenue results for your CBD brand. You can uncover additional valuable ideas with an SEO tool, but it shouldn’t be where you start.

How we solve these problems: our approach to CBD SEO services

By avoiding the three big mistakes above, our CBD SEO services consistently drive effective outcomes for our clients. Here’s a look at how we avoid these mistakes:

Solution 1: Conversion-focused SEO strategy

The blog-content-dump strategy doesn’t work for CBD brands.

What does is a comprehensive SEO strategy that focuses on ranking your transactional pages for keywords with buying intent (the intent to buy a product), while ranking blog posts for informational queries that indicate someone is a potential customer, but isn’t ready to buy in the moment.

This way, you’ll be visible to your target customer at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Additionally, we structure our engagements so that we’re incentivized to drive results, not dump deliverables on you. You’ll pay a flat retainer every month, and for that cost, we perform the work required to drive results for your brand. It includes some ongoing tasks (e.g. blog content, link building), but you’re not paying for these tasks; you’re paying for the results they drive.

Using the right strategy and engagement model lets us turn SEO into a revenue-driving channel for your CBD brand, instead of one that drives a lot of “website traffic” but is just another line item on your budget.

Solution 2: High-quality, compliant, user-first content

Because low-quality SEO ultimately results in no traffic or revenue, every page we build or optimize for our clients is designed to provide a great user experience.

We define “great user experience” as providing the visitor with the information they’re looking for while delivering a visually appealing experience.

We build for users, then optimize for SEO. Not the other way around. Every page we publish is also edited for compliance to ensure you don’t have medical claims on your site.

And we don’t just use the word “content” to refer to blog posts, although we do produce a lot of them. Content means any page that we build or contribute to:

• Blog posts
• Category pages
• Product pages
• Landing pages
• Your home page

Long-term, CBD brands that approach SEO in a way that adds value to people are the ones that win big. We want you to win big, so this is how we approach content.

Solution 3: In-depth company and customer research

We don’t start our engagements with keywords: we start by diving deep into your company and understanding your target customer and the pain point(s) you solve for them.

We ask the obvious questions (e.g. what problem do you solve?), but we also ask questions that give us insight into why your customers buy (e.g. what is the “tipping point” that tends to make people go from undecided to wanting to purchase?).

This allows us to target the right keywords in the SEO strategy we build for your business, and to create effective content that drives sales once people land on these pages.

Because good SEO is marketing, not a checklist of tasks.

Our CBD SEO process

We build unique SEO strategies for each CBD company, but we use the same strategic framework. This five-step process allows us to drive revenue for our clients as quickly as possible.

1. Customer research & SEO strategy

Every engagement starts with deep research into who your best customer is and what their pain points are. This information allows us to build an SEO strategy that helps your best customers find you. It also informs the way we build shopping and content experiences.

2. Quick wins & initial page building and optimization

When it’s time to get to work, the first thing we focus on is quick wins: driving more traffic with the pages you already have. We test title tags to improve clickthrough rates on existing rankings in the search engine results pages, and we improve your site’s internal linking to achieve easy ranking gains. 

With tests running and small optimizations in place, we turn to the pages most important to your CBD brand: your product category and product pages. We optimize the pages you already have, and then we build additional category pages to rank for more keywords.

3. Blog content & link building

With the money pages optimized, we begin two ongoing initiatives:

• Writing blog content: We interview subject matter experts within your company to create useful, relevant articles that target queries that your potential customers are searching to drive top- and middle-of-funnel traffic, which can be converted into email signups. If you already have content, we’ll rework it before we create anything new. This will improve the overall quality of your site, and an updated article will drive results more quickly than a newly-published one. We publish four articles per month.
• Building backlinks: We use guests posts and PR to build links to your site from other sites, which increases the authority of your site and helps your transactional pages and blog posts to rank higher on Google. We build 3-4 high-quality links per month for our CBD clients. This may not seem like a lot, but relevant links move the needle a lot.

Additionally, while not an ongoing effort, we’ll build additional money pages and optimize existing ones where opportunities exist.

We also offer CBD content writing as a standalone service for brands that don’t need the full package. To learn more, visit our CBD content writing services page.

4. Conversion-focused reporting

We don’t report every piece of data available to us, because you probably only care about organic revenue, email signups, and organic traffic.

We create monthly reports with this information, but you’ll also get a custom Looker Studio dashboard with live data that you can refer to any time to check the progress of the campaign.

5. Repeat

We’ll continue to develop and update pages while building links to help your traffic grow exponentially.

Additionally, we’ll do the following every quarter to keep things running smoothly:

• Build a new keyword strategy for the next three months
• Run title-tag and featured snippet tests

Like investing, SEO is about staying in the game for as long as possible; we help you maximize returns and minimize losses over time. 

CBD SEO Case Studies

Learn how we’ve applied our SEO process to generate revenue for our CBD clients.

FAQs About Our CBD SEO Services

Here’s what you need to know about working with us. 

What metrics do you report on?

We report on – and hold ourselves accountable to generating – revenue and organic traffic. Depending on your business, we may also report on email signups and additional metrics that we mutually agree are valuable indicators of growth. 

How long does it take to see an ROI?

Our clients typically see break-even (i.e. we’re making you as much money as you’re paying us) in 2-3 months and a 3-4x ROI in 6-8 months.

If your brand has significant amounts of existing SEO traction, it make just take us one month to achieve break-even. Likewise, new brands with very little SEO traction may need to wait longer than 2-3 months to see a positive ROI.

Do you require a long-term contract?

No. We work on a retainer with a monthly rolling contract. However, we strongly encourage you to work with us for at least 6 months in order to begin seeing a significant business impact from our efforts.

How soon do you get to work?

We send onboarding materials over to you as soon as you sign our contract and pay our first invoice.

We aim to start shipping high-impact work for your business no later than 8 days after you sign our contract and pay our first invoice. 

Do you understand industry compliance?

Yes. Our agency operates specifically in the cannabis space (and in ancillary industries), so we’re familiar with the FDA restrictions that apply to advertising these types of products. We use thorough editing checklists to ensure that every page we put on your site complies with these rules.

How can I be sure that the content you write for my site is high-quality?

In addition to the obvious (editing), we use four tactics to ensure our output is high-quality. 

First, during onboarding, you’ll fill out a content style guide so we have an in-depth understanding of your brand voice, tone, values, and more. This style guide will be continuously updated based on your feedback. 

Second, we interview you or one of your employees for every blog post we write so that we’re able to include accurate, interesting, and on-brand insights, rather than copying the articles that are already ranking.

Third, each piece of content is written by someone with existing CBD, cannabis, or natural wellness expertise. 

Fourth, we offer you the amount of latitude you wish in terms of content reviewing. Most of our clients don’t feel the need to review each piece of content we create, but you may review and provide feedback on each article before it goes live – if you want. We use your feedback to update our style guides and inform the way we conduct our interviews to ensure continuous improvement.

Do you use AI to write content?

No. We use AI (ChatGPT) for data analysis, brainstorming, and other similar tasks, but we do not use AI to write copy or content for your brand.

What do I have to do?

We ask for two things from our clients on an ongoing basis: attendance at a monthly reporting and strategy meeting (~30 minutes) and the provision of a subject-matter-expert (you or an employee) on a monthly basis that we can interview to develop content.

What level of customer support do you offer to me and my business?

You will have access to our team five days a week by email and by a personal Slack channel that we will set up for you. 

We respond to all communication in one business day at a maximum, barring team members being out of town and away from their devices (we will notify you in advance).

Our founder, Wells, is typically reachable seven days a week. However, he can only guarantee a response Monday through Friday.