The cannabis industry is bigger than ever, but there’s plenty more room for growth as states continue to change their laws. With every passing year, more customers can legally purchase cannabis products, creating bigger opportunities for manufacturers, dispensaries, cultivators, retailers and more.

If you have a cannabis-related business and website, you’re already ahead of the game. But with the field growing, you can’t rest on your laurels. Boosting traffic to your cannabis website is crucial in the increasingly competitive market.

In this blog, you’ll learn several ways to give your website and brand more visibility, paving the road to success in a fast-evolving industry.

Understanding the Cannabis Audience and Market

Before we dive into how to increase traffic to your cannabis website, let’s talk about the market itself. A few decades ago, the cannabis industry was virtually nonexistent. It wasn’t until 1996 that the first state legalized medical marijuana use. Then, in 2012, states throughout the United States began to approve recreational use.

The push to legalize cannabis use across the United States is ongoing. But as of 2023, safe recreational use is legal in 24 states. Meanwhile, an additional 14 states legalized medicinal use. The cannabis industry in the U.S. is already huge, with sales estimated to reach nearly $34 billion by the end of 2023! Projections show that figure will triple to $100 billion or more by the end of 2024.

When most people think of the cannabis industry, they predominantly focus on the cultivation and sale of recreational marijuana. But it’s much more vast than that.

Next to cultivation and dispensing, some of the biggest sectors of the industry include:

• Industrial Hemp Production (paper, ropes, textiles, etc.)
• Daily Wellness Products and CBD Cosmetics (oils, body creams, etc.)
• THC-Based Recreational Products (vapes, edibles, etc.)
• Medicinal Cannabis and Pharmaceuticals (prescription products to treat pain)

Cannabis-related businesses serve more than just recreational users. Your audience can include those interested in medicinal use, companies exploring manufacturing possibilities, cultivators and more. Knowing your audience is key regardless of the product or service you provide. Understanding your core audience and your company’s place in the larger market can help your site reach its full potential.

SEO Strategies for Growth in the Marijuana Industry

Ready to optimize your cannabis website? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to put your site in front of as many potential customers as possible. Solid SEO strategies can lead to long-term growth and success.

However, it’s not a “one-and-done” endeavor. Great SEO is a multifaceted approach but less complicated than you might think. Here are several tips from RankScience that can make all the difference for your website.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO. It’s an important step in optimizing any website. But for a cannabis website, it’s paramount. Despite the billions of dollars in revenue and impressive growth projections, the market is still comparatively small. Therefore, you need to know what terms people use to find sites like yours.

Performing keyword research is about understanding what words are most relevant to your site, verifying how many searches those words get and seeing the many variations people utilize when using popular search engines like Google. At RankScience, we use advanced tools to create the perfect keyword profile for every page on your site.

With that information, we can create content visitors care about while helping your site rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Keyword research can guide your content strategy, help you stay current on the language potential visitors use and give you more insight into your audience. As mentioned earlier, knowing your audience is key. In-depth keyword research sheds light on their search habits, needs, questions and more.

On-Page Optimization

On-page SEO optimization refers to everything you can do on your website to improve its rankings and overall visibility. That includes:

• Improving content
• Optimizing title tags
• Tweaking URLs
• Adding internal links
• Improve metadata descriptions
• Optimizing images

To increase traffic to your cannabis website, you must prioritize on-page optimization. The quality of your content matters, and improving every on-page element makes a difference to both search engines and visitors. Optimization can make your site more crawlable and easier to index, increasing the chances that it appears higher on SERPs.

Content Marketing Strategy

They say that content is king and greatly contributes to the success of companies on the Internet. That’s true even for cannabis websites. In fact, it may be more important in a burgeoning industry like this.

A well-thought-out content marketing strategy requires more than stuffing blog pages with high-ranking keywords. It’s also important to consider what your audience wants. At RankScience, we develop content strategies around a deep understanding of your potential visitors. We look at their personas, overall search intent, pain points, goals and more.

Those considerations allow us to craft content that attracts traffic while honoring your brand voice.

When developing your content strategy, focus on your audience and keep them engaged. The sky’s the limit with a cannabis website. There are still many people who don’t fully understand cannabis and the products manufactured from it. Use that to your advantage.

Consider your business, what types of people you’re trying to attract and how your company serves them. Then, craft keyword-rich content and metadata to boost your visibility while bringing them into your domain.

If you’re struggling to brainstorm ideas or product content that leaves an impact, check out ContentEdge. ContentEdge is an AI-powered content generation tool that can help you produce high-ranking content in seconds!

Competitor Analysis

You can’t expect to beat out the competition if you’re in the dark about what they’re doing. Competitive analysis is the process of checking out the competitive landscape. It’s about seeing which websites are outranking your site on SERPs, examining what they’re doing differently and developing strategies to beat them.

With RankScience’s Content Insights Tool, you can unveil tons of information about your biggest rivals. See what sites rank higher than you, study their strategies, identify their weaknesses and more. Use that information to benchmark your current SEO and let your competition guide you in the right direction for your strategies.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is another important element of SEO. Linking to other pages on your website does many things.

For one, it reduces bounce rates and keeps visitors on your site longer. Furthermore, it can help search engines index and understand all the pages on your site. Good internal linking practices can also help spread authority throughout your site, making it look trustworthy and valuable in the eyes of search engines.

With a cannabis website, there are many ways to improve internal linking. Consider creating informative pillar pages that link out to topic cluster content. You can also link to products you sell, services you provide, blogs that answer frequently asked questions and more.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from one page to another. You gain a backlink whenever another website links to yours via anchor text. Why are they important?

Think of a backlink as a vote of confidence from another website. It tells search engines that your content is top-notch and your site is becoming an authority for a particular topic. The more backlinks you get, the higher your rankings and the more traffic you’ll gain.

There are countless ways to get backlinks. You can collaborate with other sites to create guest blogs, ask partners to give you a shoutout on their website, leverage influencer marketing, etc.

But one of the best ways to get backlinks is to create high-quality content! Crafting highly informative articles, engaging blog posts and impressive infographics that other content creators want to use can help you gain backlinks organically

Technical Improvements

Finally, optimize the technical aspects of your site. A site that performs well is easier to crawl and index. Site performance is also an important factor in search rankings. No one wants to visit a site that takes forever to load, so smooth sites typically rank higher.

Technical SEO can include:

• Optimizing your site for mobile browsing
• Boosting load speeds
• Including an XML sitemap
• Providing structured schema data
• Improving site security
• Removing duplicate content
• Removing dead links
• Optimizing site architecture

Different Types of Traffic

In digital marketing, “traffic” is more of an umbrella term to describe all visitors. However, there are many different types of traffic you can get. Each is valuable, but understanding how they differ will help you develop strategies to maximize impact and ROI.

Organic

Organic traffic is the most valuable, and it’s what you target when employing SEO strategies. Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your site via search engines.

It’s valuable because visitors who find your site with a search engine are already interested in what you offer. This type of traffic can also lead to long-term growth and success.

Paid

Paid traffic refers to visitors who arrive at your website after clicking on an ad they see on another website, social media, etc. Many companies also do pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that put their site on the top of SERPs for more visibility.

Paid traffic provides fast results, and a great campaign can quickly improve brand awareness and site visibility.

Direct

Visitors contribute to your direct traffic statistics when they directly type your site’s URL into their browser. You can improve direct traffic by making your URL memorable, including it on all digital and paper advertising, encouraging visitors to bookmark your site, etc.

Social

Social traffic comes from those who engage with your posts on social media. Social media is another indispensable tool in modern digital marketing, so having a great presence on popular platforms can greatly increase overall traffic to your cannabis website.

Supercharge Your SEO with RankScience

There’s no better time than now to optimize your cannabis website. The industry is rapidly growing, and the competitive landscape will continue to evolve in the coming years. Optimizing your site to get more traffic now can get you one step ahead of the competition.

When you want to develop winning strategies, turn to RankScience. At RankScience, we custom-build optimization strategies to deliver real results. We combine a holistic approach with data science to send your site into the stratosphere. With powerful AI tools and data-driven approaches at the helm, RankScience has what it takes to help your site gain more visibility than ever.

Reach out today to see what RankScience can do for your cannabis website and get the traffic your business needs to grow!