So you have or are building a CBD brand, and it seems like you have all the pieces in order. If you’re like most CBD brands, you want to ensure that your products and website are visible to as many potential customers as possible.

After all, the more people who know about your brand, the more likely you are to get sales, and one of the best ways to increase your online visibility is to invest in SEO. SEO for CBD businesses is essential for driving traffic to your website and increasing online visibility.

Optimizing Your CBD eCommerce Website for SEO

You probably heard about SEO and how it does wonders, but never heard about how to actually improve it. For many e-commerce professionals, the abundance of technical information that results from searching “How to improve SEO?” is overwhelming.

Fortunately, the team at Optimum7 is seasoned in the field of Search Engine Optimization. In this article, we empower CBD business owners to take action immediately.

In fact, you can learn how to dominate your competition by promoting and marketing your product in another resource entitled “How to Market CBD and Hemp Products.” However, while you’re here, let’s start at the beginning:

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on Google, Bing, and other engines.

High Search Engine Rankings, mean more traffic will come from those searches. This means higher conversion rates because potential customers are finding what they need right away.

Importance of SEO for CBD Brands

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital for a CBD Business since it is your safest and highest ROI option.

Paid advertising and social media can surely increase visits to your CBD website but search engines are where the majority of online traffic comes from.

Google doesn’t allow you to advertise CBD on Google Ads(sadly), SEO is an excellent approach to getting steady organic traffic to your website.

SEO is a great way to get traffic, ok we know that, but it’s also one of the only methods that will pay off long-term without needing additional investment.

Here is an example for you to better understand.

If your SEO strategy is successful, it can bring organic visitors to your CBD website for years, resulting in a constant flow of revenue and greater brand awareness.

Getting some help from an SEO Agency (Like us!) and an article that costs $200 could yield a $3,000+ return on investment (and in some cases, much more). People are searching precise CBD keywords, and you’re supplying them with the exact information they’re looking for.

Also, SEO traffic is also extremely targeted. So knowing who and what you are targeting from the start will help you see results faster.

How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google and Bing employ crawlers to crawl the web, visiting one site after another and gathering information on those sites before indexing them.

Consider this index like a vast library from which a librarian knows the location of every single book and gives you the book you are searching for in no time. Just like this Google indexes pages so it knows where is that page with that information and can fetch it easily once requested.

Using hundreds of ranking factors and signals, algorithms examine the content of these sites in the index to decide the order in which they should show in search results for a given query.

You can’t just pay the search engines to get higher organic rankings, so that means you have an opportunity for showing your CBD Products without paying a fortune to Paid Ads. All you need is a good CBD SEO Strategy to kick it off.

Best practices of SEO for CBD

Now, as we have a clearer picture of what SEO is and isn’t, let’s go over what do we do to improve the visibility of our CBD Business.

Content is King, Unique Content is God

In order to get the most out of your CBD SEO efforts, you need content. It doesn’t matter if it’s blog posts or landing pages. All that really matters for search engine rankings are high-quality, factual and unique content created by experts. Generic and fluff information almost never ranks on Google.

You can be an authority in your field by creating content that people trusts and reads. This helps build authority with the brand and google starts seeing you as a “CBD Company with nice content”. A higher authority score means easier for you to rank for the targeted keyword.

Keep your CBD website focused on the topic of Cannabidiol, and don’t branch out too much.

If you start branching out too much, Google will have a harder time figuring out what exactly you’re an authority figure on at the domain level.

Search Intent is Important for Higher Rankings

What Google values most is that users should be able to access and obtain information that is relevant and accurate to their search intent.

The content on your CBD website should satisfy the search intent of those who are searching for it, so you have to make sure what kind of information is provided in each post or page.

If you’re targeting the keywords “CBD oil and pain,” it’s important to understand the search intent of the user. In this case, they likely want to read about how CBD may help with pain relief.

This is informational search intent. To satisfy this searcher, your content needs to be informative about the benefits of CBD for Pain relief and provide more value than the current top-ranking competition.

You can do this by optimizing your content for SEO and mentioning “CBD pain” keywords in your content while keeping it informative, factual, and readable. This will help you rank higher in search results and reach more people searching for this keyword and eventually bring you more organic traffic.

Website Speed Should be Fast

Since Google is updating its algorithm periodically, now website speed is one of the most important elements of a website.

Google believes a faster website means a better customer experience, which is true.

It takes 3.4 seconds for the user to decide if he/she trusts your website. And if your website fails to load fast enough, it will surely get skipped.

Website speed has always been a factor in the Google algorithm, but it’s become increasingly important as mobile usage has surged.

In fact, research shows that 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to improve your website’s speed. Some standard courses of action include deleting unnecessary plugins (on WordPress), optimizing images for file size and type, and minifying code as much as possible.

You must also try using Google PageSpeed Insights to get a detailed report on how your pages are currently performing.

By taking these steps, you can help ensure that your website loads quickly and ranks highly in search results.

Target Less-Competitive Related Keywords

If you’ve started a new website and are hoping to rank for competitive keywords such as “CBD Gummies”, you’ll likely be disappointed.

It’s simply not possible for a new website to rank for such highly competitive keywords.

The reason is that search engine optimization (SEO) is a long-term game. It takes months, or even years, to build up the authority and trust required to rank for competitive keywords.

So if you’re just starting out, your best bet is to focus on creating your keyword universe around less competitive keywords that are related to the actual high-competitive keyword you want to rank for. These may not have the same search volume as more competitive keywords, but they’ll be much easier to rank for.

And as your website grows and develops over time, you can gradually start targeting more competitive keywords.

For example, we can see how competitive the keyword “CBD Gummies” is. Ranking for this is impossible for low authority websites, and even for high authority ones, it’ll cost a fortune. You need a lot of good backlinks, perfect content, etc.

But on the other hand, ranking for the keyword “CBD gummy worms” is a lot easier tha