CBD SEO: The Facts About SEO and CBD

Are you facing a steep uphill battle of regulation, payment processing, and compliance? 

Do you find social media and search engine advertising bans unfair?

Is traditional advertising limited and driving minimal results at best?

 Then CBD SEO is the best and one of the only revenue generators for your CBD company with our Ecommerce SEO Agency. Search Engine Optimization, short for SEO, is a completely unregulated sales channel for CBD companies with the highest return on investment out of all channels. Choose the best CBD SEO Services. This ecommerce CBD SEO case study proves it.

The 2018 farm bill legalized CBD, which contains 0.3% or less THC derived from marijuana. Since marijuana is a schedule 1 drug federally illegal in the United States of America and across the world in many countries. Major advertising companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, TikTok, and Snapchat and many traditional advertising companies ban or strictly prohibit the paid advertising of CBD.

Since Cannabidiol is derived from the cannabis plant which marijuana is derived from and legally has to contain less than 0.3% THC derived from marijuana, these companies ban or restrict paid advertising of Cannabidiol. Allowing cannabidiol products on their platforms opens them up to legal liability if there were to be products sold that contain illegal levels of marijuana THC or, worse, drug trafficking disguised as selling cannabidiol products.

These companies are not interested in dedicating resources to consistently and regularly testing all CBD products sold on their platforms. Instead, these companies ban or severely restrict the paid advertising of CBD products on their platforms.

Now the question is…

“How Can I Promote My CBD Business?”

SEO on Search is the only advertising and marketing channel that is not banned or restricted and delivers the highest ROI for CBD companies. Check out this CBD SEO Case Study that proves it.

SEO traffic makes up 53% of all website traffic on the internet, 94% of clicks go to the SEO search results, and only 6% go to the paid search results. For those not familiar with SEO, it is a process of generating revenue and traffic from the SEO search results on search engines like Google and Bing. 

SEO Search Results

Paid Search Results

On the other hand, the only way to generate revenue and traffic from the SEO Search results on Google is to earn revenue and traffic using a process called SEO on Google. Even if you stop investing in SEO marketing on Google, the revenue and traffic you generated from your previous investment continues for your CBD business. This is why SEO marketing on Google has the highest return on investment out of all advertising and marketing channels for cannabis companies.

The only downside to SEO marketing on Google is that it takes time. On average, it takes six months for established CBD businesses and cannabis websites to begin seeing a return on investment from SEO and 12 months to receive fantastic SEO results. For brand new CBD business and cannabis websites, you could expect a minimum of 12 months of SEO investment to begin seeing a return on investment from SEO marketing.

What is the Purpose of SEO?

Think of investing in SEO like compound interest and dollar cost averaging your SEO investment over time. Initially, you may put money into SEO while receiving minimal returns. Still, as you consistently invest in SEO, you see exponential revenue increases from SEO that double every month over time. Here is a visual representation of what you could expect from search engine optimization (SEO) –

How SEO Content Marketing Increases Your CBD Sales

In the SEO search results, your ideal customers are now actively searching to buy CBD products. The power of Google search marketing using SEO is that your CBD ecommerce brand can digitally create content that shows up first on Google when your ideal customers search on Google to buy CBD products. Creating landing page content for your CBD products that shows up first using ecommerce SEO in Google search directly drives conversions and revenue for your CBD brand.

Unlike social media, where your ideal customers are not searching to buy CBD products, they use social media to entertain, learn about new ideas, and connect with others. Social media is a great channel to bring awareness to the power of CBD for those who are not aware of CBD and the benefits it provides. Unfortunately, paid ads and organic social media marketing are banned or severely restricted on all major social media platforms. 

How Does SEO Help Your Business Over Time?

There is a massive amount of distrust of CBD within the marketplace due to the lack of education on what CBD is and the benefits CBD provides. According to a recent CBD survey in the United States of America:

• 26% of Americans believe CBD is the same as marijuana.
• 22% do not trust the product or manufacturer.
• 8% worry it will make them high.

When Americans and people, in general, seek information to learn and understand CBD, they turn to search engines like Google to find the answers to their questions. This is a part of their customer journey on Google Search, where your ideal customer asks Google questions about CBD, and your brand’s content could show up first with the answers.

Over time the more your business content shows up first for educational searches about CBD on Google, the more known, trustworthy, and liked your brand becomes. In turn, your company converts these potential customers who were previously skeptical of CBD and increases your revenue and market share within the industry.

When your business content shows up providing these answers, you could capture the traffic on an email list and continue marketing and educating the consumer. Over time, your company will build up a big list of loyal email subscribers who know, trust, and like your company. Over time when your business promotes product launches, new products, and offers, your email subscribers will purchase from your business—resulting in revenue increases and market share growth from brand loyalty. 

What About Switchables?

According to a recent survey in 2021 by The CBD Insider, only 27% of current CBD consumers always use the same CBD brand. That means 73% of consumers who occasionally, often, or always use other CBD brands are switchable. Here are the reasons why these consumers switch CBD brands:

• 43.4% wanted something different.
• 39.9% switched for a better value.
• 35.1% switched based on word-of-mouth recommendation
• 29.2% switched because their preferred brand is not always available.
• Lastly, 4.6% switched for a reason not listed.

Capturing the attention of the 73% of consumers who switch brands online using Google search is a tremendous opportunity for you to capture market share. Over time expect the percentage of consumers that switch CBD brands to go down, so capitalize on this opportunity before it is no longer obtainable.

Hiring a CBD SEO Agency for hemp store instead of doing SEO yourself saves you time and money while delivering a more efficient return on investment. Building an in-house CBD local SEO team is expensive and time-consuming.

This is what it takes to hire and manage an in-house SEO services ecommerce team:

• SEO Director [$80,000 a year]

• SEO Data Scientist [$102,149 a year] 

• SEO Content Strategists [$88,190 a year] 

• SEO Marketing Strategists [$61,362 a year] 

• SEO Back End Developer [$69,430 a year] 

• SEO Digital Public Relations Manager [$58,605 a year] 

• SEO Digital Data Researchers [$54,433 a year] 

• SEO Digital Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist [$75,000 a year] 

• SEO Digital UI/UX Designer [$110,315 a year] 

• SEO Digital Copywriter and Content Writer Page Producer [$54,184 a year] 

• Technical SEO Lead [$67,070 a year]

• On-Page SEO Lead [$61,857 a year]

Totaling $882,595 a year to make payroll for an in-house SEO team, not including payroll taxes, SEO technology, SEO tools, and the thousands of hours to train the team effectively. Instead of going through the expensive and time-consuming challenge of building and training an in-house SEO team. 

You could invest in SEO marketing services from an SEO marketing agency for $42,000 a year to get faster, more efficient results. SEO and local SEO is time-consuming and expensive to hire, train, and manage an in-house SEO team because of the many roles and the complexity of efficiently executing SEO at scale. 

To determine what works and does not work in SEO and local SEO, you have to test every ranking factor using single variable scientific testing. Over 1,200 known ranking factors on Google need to be scientifically single variable tested consistently over time as Google creates algorithm changes. 

Even once you know what to optimize in SEO search, designing efficient SEO systems and processes to execute what works for SEO at scale is an uphill climb. Since SEO involves so many moving pieces and different industries to execute effectively. From digital public relations to technical web development and conversion optimization, many moving parts make scaling SEO effectively challenging and expensive.