One of the greatest things about modern e-commerce is that it has effectively made the world smaller. You don’t need special knowledge or connections to become a retailer; you can enter just about any industry immediately simply by ordering finished products from an online supplier and putting your label on those products. The ready availability of overseas suppliers has made the CBD and vaping industries particularly attractive to entrepreneurs because the profit potential in those industries is enormous. 

In some cases, though, serial online entrepreneurs may enter several industries simultaneously – and occasionally, they may enter certain industries without researching them fully. If you know how to sell products online, after all, it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling. You simply build an offer and drive paid traffic to that offer using an advertising network like Google AdWords. If the offer converts, you scale the business from there.

If you’re in the CBD industry or the vaping industry, though, you can’t simply put your CBD vape gear online and drive traffic to the offer because the biggest advertising networks – Google and Facebook – do not accept ads from companies in the CBD or vaping industries.

So, here you are with a bunch of CBD or vaping products on your hands, and you have no way to sell them. This article is here to help. If you can’t drive paid traffic to an offer, you need to generate Organic Traffic. SEO is the primary marketing strategy for any company in the CBD or vaping industries, and this article will provide some simple and incredibly Actionable Seo Tips that you can use to start generating traffic immediately.

Get the Best Possible Start With a Fast Web Host

People expect the web to be fast. A significant number of web users will abandon a website that fails to load in under two seconds, and given the fact that a short loading time is an important part of a good overall user experience, Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. 

Out of all the factors that can affect your website’s ranking, page speed is one of the factors over which you have the least power. You can tweak your website for slightly faster loading times, but there is no way to compensate for a slow web host that takes several seconds to deliver the first byte to the user. Give your brand the best possible start by selecting the fastest web host and hosting plan that you can afford.

Choose an SEO-Friendly E-Commerce Platform

Some web hosting companies have their own proprietary solutions that you can use to get a web store online quickly. You should be wary of proprietary e-commerce platforms, though, for two reasons. The first is that it can be difficult to migrate away from a proprietary platform if you decide later that you’d like to use something different. 

The second reason is that proprietary e-commerce platforms are often so simplistic that they don’t let you modify important aspects of your site such as meta tags for individual pages, alt text for images and other key on-page SEO factors. Choose an e-commerce platform that’s SEO friendly and allows for easy migration from one platform or web host to another.

Write Your Own Product Descriptions

One of the biggest mistakes that new website owners make is assuming that customers will simply start pouring in the moment their sites open for business. That mistake often manifests itself in a tendency to copy and paste product descriptions from manufacturers or other merchants in the same industry rather than writing original product descriptions. That’s a terrible mistake because Google runs on text, and you can’t expect your product pages to receive organic traffic if those pages contain exactly the same text as other pages that Google already has in its index. If you want your product pages to have any chance of generating organic traffic, you have to take the time to write original text for those pages.

If you’re not sure what to write for a product page, think about the most common questions that prospective customers are likely to have about that product.

• What does this product do? 
• What makes this product special or unique? What differentiates it from other products in the same price range?
• Who should buy this product? 
• Are there any customers who should avoid buying this product?

Target Non-Product Search Terms With Your Blog

Even if you’re relatively new to running an e-commerce business, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the importance of having a blog. You’ve probably noticed that practically every successful e-commerce website has a blog section. You may not fully understand, however, the true purpose that a blog serves for SEO. 

When you sit down to write your first blog post, you’ll probably be tempted to write something that relates directly to the products that you sell. If you’re in the vaping industry, for example, you might want to write a blog post about the best vape tanks. That’s an opportunity, after all, to link internally to products in your store and potentially generate some sales. The problem, though, is that a search phrase like “best vape tanks” has obvious commercial intent. For that reason, most of your competitors already have content targeting that search phrase. It’s highly unlikely that your article will rank well on Google until your website is more established. 

The true purpose of having a blog is that it’s a platform that allows you to post content targeting non-commercial search terms. When you sit down to write blog posts for your website, think of post topics that answer questions or solve common problems with the products you sell. 

• An article listing the best vape tanks is commercial in nature and probably will not generate organic traffic until your website begins ranking for more competitive keyword phrases.
• An article explaining how to fix a leaking vape tank has a non-commercial topic. It’ll be much more likely to rank well on Google because fewer of your competitors will have content targeting that topic.