The following CBD company SEO Case Study outlines the exact process and strategies we executed to help increase their revenue by $15,231,409.

On April 1st, 2019, Nicholas Rubright and Neil Emmett from cbdMD reached out to me to begin an SEO campaign to make cbdMD the dominant force in organic search traffic online. They were crushing it with influencer marketing and across social media. However, arguably their biggest market is online, and their competitors were dwarfing them by thousands of search traffic. For transparency, we were 1 of 5 seo marketers on this project. However, we did contribute about 33% of the work. We achieved some big mentions on curetoday.com and psychcentral.com, which receives 1.8 million visitors a month.

In case you have any doubt about our working partnership with cbdMD to improve CBD product sales, then check out the screenshot below where we accepted their offer on Upwork:

The Digital Strategy for the CBD Case Study

Connecting with Nicholas and Neil allowed us to develop a strategy. Based on what we learned from them, their team needed help with link building, arguably the most important SEO factor. Our team executed an SEO link building campaign to increase their organic traffic from Google by 65% after three months of work. 

Links are blue highlighted text within the article. This is a link. The more links your CBD website has from other authoritative, relevant websites, the more traffic your CBD website will receive from Google Search. The more traffic your website receives, the more revenue your business will receive. However, it is not the number of links your website has but the links’ quality that matters the most.

Every SEO link building services development we execute for a client follows the same process. Our process is outlined in detail in our article, “How To Build Links For SEO.”

To no surprise, we followed the same CBD services marketing strategy steps when setting up and executing cbdMD’s label link building services.

Domain Hosted Email Address:

Firstly, we created a company domain hosted email that looked like this david.freudenberg@cbdmd.com. Doing so allowed us to use a more personal approach to outreach and receive a much higher response rate. 

Project Tracker:

Every client we work with on search engine optimisation is handmade their project tracker in Google Sheets. The project tracker gives you live updates on everything that has, is, and will happen for the link building campaign.

Next, we attempted to obtain access to Google Analytics and Search Console to examine quick wins in the impressions and clicks where we may be able to exploit some good linkable assets. Unfortunately, cbdMD being a publicly-traded company, did not allow us access. Despite we trudged on to a 65% increase in organic traffic!

Review the Anchor Text:

Reviewing the anchor text lets us make sure it is diluted and not spammy. Prioritizing phrase match and branded anchor text over exact match anchors.

Content Audit:

We reviewed cbdMD’s content to find something suitable that we can leverage for links. The best linkable assets can be bridged to neighbouring niches with a large following, and the content is solely educational. At the time, cbdMD had a treasure trove of content educating its audience on diseases and disorders that benefit from CBD. We planned to recreate the pages into the most in-depth guides on the disease/disorder and how to remedy them. Then pitch these guides to websites with resource pages on the disabled, child, parent, elderly, health, and niche specific disease/disorder websites.

This is what the development looked like in the project tracker:

Links Audit:

We ran a thorough link audit of cbdMD’s CBD business existing links. This includes:

• Checking the quality of the links and eliminating spammy unnatural ones if Google has taken a manual action penalty.
• Anchor text ratio is at a good ratio and not stuffed with spammy unnatural keywords.
• Check the site traffic of the links, backlinks to the links and relevancy of the links.

5 Link Building Strategies: Every link building campaign begins with five-link building strategies that we feel apply to the website and niche. For cbdMD’s seo strategy, we chose Guest Posts, Resource Pages, Roundups, and Broken Links. 

Once we have the essentials out of the way, we move into prospecting for relevant link targets and outreach.

Prospecting and Outreach for CBD SEO Link Building Marketing

Now it’s time to learn how to build powerful links that drive targeted purchasing referral traffic, organic rankings and increase digital brand awareness when marketing CBD products. Gaining links is very difficult for most, and for myself, it is a bit of an art form.

Google Search Operators:

Firstly, we chose specific CBD keywords from specific landing pages on cbdMD. Then, we plugged these into our CBD Google Search Operators and began the prospecting. Once we had 200 relevant CBD targets based on our CBD industry criteria, we recorded all relevant contact information and then moved on to the next step.

Outreach To Opportunities Using Personalized Emails:

Secondly, we created personalized CBD industry outreach email templates that can be personalized at scale during the CBD campaign.

Follow Up:

Followup is one of the most important pieces of the process that is often overlooked by many. We use Buzzstream to schedule CBD followup emails, both personalized and non-personalized, to earn a CBD link via a value exchange. All sent CBD emails, opened emails, and replied emails were tracked using Buzzstream.

Check out the first sequence that we used for some CBD guest posting. We had a 50% reply rate on the first email and a 92% open rate:

Revenue and Organic Search Traffic Results for the SEO Case Study

We earned 123 live or agreed on links which contributed to a 65% increase in organic traffic and $15,231,409 of new revenue from the beginning of 2018 to the end of 2019. The case studies view results speak for themselves when marketing CBD products. Since we can bring exponential results to an extremely competitive niche such as CBD, in that case, nothing is stopping us from helping you get results for our next CBD seo case study.