A hemp manufacturer approached Greener SEO to help with their online marketing. Since hemp, CBD and Cannabis are in a restricted niche things like social media and paid advertising were not reliably available. The business was new so we became involved in the project from the ground up. Working with the web developer to make sure the site was built with search engine optimization in mind. SEO is the only reliable path for cannabis type businesses in the current online climate.

The challenges we faced were that we had a brand new website in a restricted space that lacked content, links, or anything else that would get the site listed in Google and other search engines.

The main objective of the SEO campaign initially was to drive qualified B2B traffic to the website for lead generation purposes. The project did also evolve in to generating B2C traffic for the site as we implemented e-commerce to the existing lead generation website.

At the end of this project, the client received 65 to 100 plus leads a month from organic traffic and generated $30,000 a month in B2C sales from a mixture of organic traffic and email marketing campaigns we conducted on the client’s behalf.

At its peak, this website ranked organically on:

Top 3- 208 Keywords

Top 10 – 434 Keywords

Background

Table Of Contents show

Client profile – A hemp manufacturing facility located in New Mexico.
Initial state of the client’s online presence – The client had just started building the business website.
Specific issues affecting their search rankings and visibility – This being a brand new website the client had 0 rankings.

Objectives

Increase organic search traffic
Improve keyword rankings for cannabis-related terms that focus on wholesaling cannabis products.
Target Market – The entire USA as well as some international markets. (Europe, Japan)
Generate Leads in the form of emails or phone calls.
Generate B2C sales and implement e-commerce on the site. (This became part of the project about 2 years in)

Challenges

Navigating strict regulations in the cannabis industry
Overcoming advertising restrictions on major platforms
Competing in a competitive saturated market against established websites.
Due to the restrictions in Social Media the primary focus of this campaign was to achieve as many relevant organic rankings as possible on wholesale terms.

Strategy and Implementation

Technical SEO

The technical SEO challenges were all met before we started optimization as we came onboard early enough to work with the development team to implement the following.

Site speed optimization
Mobile responsiveness
Improving site structure

On-Page Optimization

Keyword Research – As we do with all clients we worked with the client on an initial keyword list and then built a master list based on the keywords they provided as well as any keywords that their competition is ranking on that make sense for the business.
Content Creation – Once we identified the keywords that the client wants to gain more visibility on we came up with a list of main content pages as well as long term supporting content creation in the form of informational blogs.
Meta Data Optimization – We optimized title tags for all content pages created initially and ongoingly as more content was added to the site.
Navigation & Siloing – We organized the main navigation and sub navigation of the site to focus on the main landing pages as well as internally linking those main pages from pages that have supporting content. Sub navigation was done to silo like pages together.

Off-Page Optimization

Link building – Our link building on this project consisted of outreach to related sites. As well as joining some industry sites that had enough authority. We also did backlink profile research on competitors and reached out to high authority sites they had. From time to time Press Releases were done as well as purchasing some brand exposure in high end news sites.
Google Business Profile optimization – On this project we did very little on the GBP profile as they were in such a rural area and did not want walk-in business. We set up a basic GBP for them and that was all.
Reputation management – We monitored review sites including the GBP for any reviews that needed to be addressed.

Content Strategy

Content Strategy – We created informative content that we used on our blog to provide high quality information on cannabis subject that were centered around products the company manufactured or offered at wholesale. We also created seo optimized landing pages around our main keywords. Once the e-commerce came in to play we wrote optimized product descriptions and also optimized the meta data for all products.
Creation of linkable assets – We worked with the client to create a cbd dosage calculator which became one of our best linkable assets as well as actually ranking on the term “ cbd dosage calculator”

Results

The site generated between 4k to 6k monthly organic traffic which yielded 65 to 100+ leads a month.
We achieved top 3 rankings for 208 keywords and ranked on 434 keywords in the top 10 of Google.

Conclusion

60 percent of all web traffic came from Organic search.
The client’s majority of sales came from the SEO effort.
We acted as the company’s online marketing arm for the entire 4 years that is was open.
Unfortunately due to ownership the company closed in August of 2024.