Understanding Cannabis SEO

Turning traffic into dollars can be easy. In fact, it’s possibly harder to push traffic to your online pages than it is to turn those eyes into dollars.

In order to make sales, you need attention from potential customers. How do you get that attention online? It starts with SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which applies to any industry, including cannabis. Read on to learn more about SEO, why it’s important, and how to use it when marketing your cannabis business.

SEO consists of a series of optimization techniques, disciplines, and strategies that are implemented on the pages of a website or blog to improve its search engine rankings.

It is one of the digital marketing tools used for a company or business to gain visibility, which also applies to the cannabis market.

SEO seeks to optimize sites and blogs through techniques to improve the web positioning of the pages. When used correctly, it can help you rank higher in search engines like Google.

Therefore, the main objective of SEO is to increase the volume of organic traffic and ensure more visibility for web pages.

Although SEO and SEM may seem to refer to similar actions, given the similarity of their acronyms, they refer to completely different methods.

SEO: Organic positioning. These are actions you can take inside or outside your website to optimize its positioning in search engines in an organic way. That is, without paying. This item is fundamental for cannabis businesses.

SEM: Paid Search Engine Optimization. SEM -Search Engine Marketing- refers to those strategies that include the use of paid advertisements. In the cannabis world, that can be a bit complicated due to the restrictions that currently exist in the different platforms when it comes to advertising cannabis.

Implementing an SEO strategy is one of the best ways to increase your brand’s visibility organically. Having valuable content is fundamental because it makes people want to enter your pages and browse or learn. This is an integral part of attracting potential customers.

When using cannabis SEO strategically, it is almost certain that you will attract users who click on your content to find solutions to their problems, educate themselves, or answer a particular question.

Once again, valuable content appears higher in search engine rankings. Consequently, the more visits you receive, the more people will know you and the more likely you are to close a sale, which brings us to the next advantage.

By generating connections and people remembering you from, you guessed it—valuable content—a customer is more likely to think of you as the first choice for their cannabis purchases.

As potential customers know your brand, thanks to answering their questions in your articles or stating interesting facts, they will surely trust your business and think of you as their first choice when buying their next weed product.

If you achieve organic growth through SEO focused on cannabis marketing, you will most likely achieve higher positionings in search engines and the minds of your niche market.

SEO allows you to get better positioning and improve the organic positioning of your content. In this area, a solid concept is EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), an acronym used to represent the three fundamental elements of quality content.

Suppose users learn and educate themselves through your valuable content. In that case, you will not only be closing sales, but you will also be eliminating prejudice in the cannabis community and helping to improve the overall market.

The psychology of search revolves around the user, their needs, how they search for answers, the results they expect when searching for something, etc.

Navigational Search

This type of search—also known as shortcut search—happens when the user already knows what site they would like to visit but may not remember the full URL or maybe lazy to type it in.

Informational Search

As the name implies, informational search is when the user searches for information through blogs, news, relevant information, or explanatory articles.

Unlike navigational search, the user does not know exactly where they will go to find the content they are looking for. Organic visibility is essential to attract users to the pages of a business and start their strategy to become customers, as it allows the customer to enter the page and potentially stay on it.

In this type of search, the user tends to use organic results to find the solution to their question or need, and good positioning of the blog or site is an advantage.

Transactional Search

In this type of search, the user wants to execute a transaction, such as buying a product directly or finding a store.

If you have a virtual dispensary or your own brand of cannabis products, this type of search is essential, as potential customers may search for products such as Blue Dream vape cartridges.

If your product organically comes up in the first spaces, it is more likely to create a sale. This search is extremely valuable, especially for e-commerce.

Local searches are searches with a geographic component within a given region. For example, when the user searches for dispensaries in the Boston area.

This is where local SEO comes into play, optimizing information about your physical stores. One option to strengthen local SEO is to optimize your Google My Business profile for the location of your dispensary.

Google My Business is a free tool for owners to manage the location and details of their cannabis dispensaries on Google maps.