Cannabis SEO Case Study

Challenges

The company’s strong foundation was not enough to avoid the heavy restrictions SEO created for them amidst a small, regulated industry. Their struggles with writing and strategy became clear through a few pain points in their experience. 

• Extreme Limitations on Cannabis SEO: Cannabis keywords were starkly removed for possible violations, compromised, or filtered by search engines, thus reducing their potential to become visible in search.
• Low Organic Growth: The website had a large and trusted brand portfolio of products. Regardless, nothing was able to work to build out new audiences for the inventory or rank on critical keywords.
• Competition Pressure: With the number of global seed banks and their top penetration and capital, it was thoroughly difficult for smaller or regional businesses to get started.

Solution

Ranking By SEO developed a focused Cannabis SEO strategy that maintained compliance with all platform rules while helping the brand compete on a wide scale. The solution was multi-faceted. It centered on improving content, compliance, and relevance.

• Full SEO Audit & Compliance Review: Identified algorithmic penalties, content gaps, and keyword opportunities while balancing full compliance with Google’s guidelines.
• On-Page SEO Optimization: All product and category descriptions were rewritten in naturally flowing language, utilizing semantic phraseology. The tone of the prose was changed from transactional to informational, which reduces penalties.
• Technical SEO Fixes: Improved page load speeds, mobile UX, and schema markup are enabled by improved site crawlability and correcting indexing bottlenecks.
• Creating Quality Cannabis: Niche Backlinking secures links through reputable cannabis forums, blogs, and directories without any spammy links or PBNs in order to preserve domain authority.
• Localized SEO: Content Developed targeted landing pages for UK and EU customers, long-tail specific to geographic region, to take control of local searches.

The Results

Over 3 months, 73.7K clicks, 3.87M impressions, 1.9% CTR, and an average position of 10.6 with clear upward trends in visibility.

• +120% increase in organic traffic- Organic traffic was up over +120% breathing new life into the website and allowing the business to attract higher amounts of qualified leads from compliant cannabis-related search results. 
• +60% average keyword position improvement- The business was able to improve its average keyword position by over +60%, finding over 25 high-converting keywords like “UK cannabis seed bank“ on Page 1 of Google.
• 28% drop in bounce rate- The engagement metrics also improved: overall bounce rate declined by 28% which indicates that users were getting a better experience and that the quality of the website content had improved. 
• 75% increase in organic sales- Most notably, organic sales were up over +75% as a result of better targeting and optimization of content.