Organic Growth - High ROI on Cannabis SEO Campaigns
Do you run a Marijuana/Cannabis Website and need help with your Cannabis SEO Campaigns? This case study is for you!
When Cannabis was legalized in Canada a whole new market opened up for investors. Cannabis stocks went through the roof and owners of the Cannabis/Marijuana/Cannabis Oil companies started making serious profits.
However, as always when something catches the wind like this, competition becomes fierce and in the CBD/Cannabis market advertisement opportunities are limited.
As a company in the cannabis industry you are not allowed to advertise through adwords (Google), Facebook and similar channels. You can place banners on “pot smoker” forums like Grass City or advertise through smaller advertising networks but the ROI from these advertising channels are often not top notch.
So, basically you’re left with doing inbound marketing through search engine optimization.
The great news is that the legal Cannabis market is still on the rise and despite the competition it is still quite easy to rank well for cannabis related products and keywords when your SEO is done correctly.
The best time to invest in your cannabis seo campaign is now!
Background - Our First French Canadian Client
This was not the first time we worked with a cannabis site, but what makes this website unique is that it is a French Canadian site. They have automatic translations to other languages as well, but the main (original) content is in French.
We can in some instances create non-english content but as most of our SEO services are offered in English we asked the client what they thought about us using english language content for off-page guest posts and to build relevancy on-site. They were ok with this, and the SEO campaign turned out well despite the language differences.
Cannabis SEO - The Site Audit
We always start with a full SEO audit to see what's going on with the site and to get the feel for the market (if it’s new to us) or how to best strategize the SEO campaign.
This site wasn’t getting a lot of traffic, so we feared that it had been penalized but it turned out it just wasn’t ranking for high traffic keywords.
We also found that the links pointing to their money pages were a bit over-optimized having 1 exact match at 30% and another at 22%.
This wasn’t a big deal, but still something we needed to keep in the back of our minds.
They were also focusing on a relatively small market, the French Canadian cannabis market. However, they do also ship to other countries.
Cannabis Keyword Research
Quick Wins – Finding “High Value Goldmines”
Like you can see from our other case studies we always look for quick wins when doing keyword research for our new clients.
Quick wins are easy targets, sitting ducks. Keywords that the site is ranking for, just not at the top. Typically, we find quick win opportunities within keywords ranking in position #4 - 50. We know that if we start by targeting these, we can normally get some quick traffic wins for our clients!
It is always nice to see some quick improvements, both for us and for our clients. Especially, since SEO takes time. Patience is key.
For this specific site, we found fewer quick win opportunities than we normally do. This is ok as it is a relatively local focused site and they didn’t rank for many keywords. While traffic is good in this niche when targeting the right keywords, it is still way lower than in many other niches. However, search intent is higher and therefore conversion rates are also higher than other niches.
Looking at the traffic numbers, we found 46 keyword terms with traffic between 20 – 1000 searches a month.
Competitive Gap
Initially, together with the website audit, we did a competition- and content gap analysis. We found 32 terms which their competition was targeting. These had monthly search volumes in the range of 25 – 1650.
We also found some keywords they could rank for, if they made some smaller changes to their product portfolio. These keywords could potentially bring in nearly 30.000 additional visitors, should they choose to take action on our advice.
Hey, that’s a complimentary six-figure-business-consultant tip right there! 🙂
Some of the 32 keywords we found were popular brand (competitor) names. Think “Our Product VS Competitor” comparison content. Some keywords were long tails they hadn’t targeted yet and some were for products they sell but hadn’t optimized pages for yet.
We showed them all of these!
The Cannabis SEO Campaign
Unlike most of our clients, this company had actually started doing a bit of search engine optimization before they reached out to us.
First, they had done some blogger outreach themselves and created some links pointing to their site. Second, they came to us in may 2019 (1) and signed up for our managed SEO service (which was by invitation only) but for some reason they left after three months.
Then, they came back in december (2) and right after that, they got a nice bump.
There is a good reason why three months is our recommended minimum term. Search engine optimization takes time. Simple as that.
When they came back, we started where we had left off and under the promise that they would stay on for enough time to really see solid results. They held their promise, and here you can see the ranking results from January to August 2020.
Results From The Cannabis SEO Campaign?
We took the website from around 350 monthly visitors to 6930 monthly targeted visitors.
Around 2% of their visitors turn into clients and the average life-time value per customer is 220 CAD.
This means that we took their monthly revenue (from the website alone, exclusive wholesale and physical shops) from CAD 1540 to CAD 30492 in less than a year!
That’s a 1980% revenue boost thanks to our cannabis SEO service.
Cannabis SEO Takeaway
The main takeaway from this is that consistency is key.
As you can see from the charts above, their SEO dropped off when they stopped taking consistent action and quit their managed SEO campaign with us.
By using our SEO strategy, you can uncover big wins for consistent results.
No matter what type of business you are, we probably have a solution for you.
In addition, it’s important to not focus on tons of traffic – focus on the right, targeted, traffic.
Got a website and need more traffic, more leads and more revenue? We can help!
Great results, Martin. As you know we received similar results for our dispensary. Feel free to use it as a case study too.
Good idea. Will see if can maybe add to this blog post in the future.
awesome!
Thanks!