What Is Cannabis SEO Strategy?
Updated December 2024
In a world without traditional advertising or media channels, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the surest digital marketing tactics to help your brand stand out. Not only is SEO a vital strategy for cannabis businesses to draw qualified leads into the sales funnel, but it’s also a tool that in many ways grew up alongside the burgeoning legal cannabis industry. And cannabis SEO services are evolving as both the internet and the industry grow month to month and year to year.
Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to use cannabis SEO to amplify content marketing, create echo strategies across cannabis marketing and PR campaigns, raise brand awareness and educate B2B and B2C audiences about your brand’s unique points of distinction.
What Is Cannabis SEO Strategy?
Search engine optimization may sound complicated, but mastering it really comes down to a few essentials. Effective SEO marketing uses key components that work together to improve a website’s visibility, drive traffic and enhance user experience, including:
- Keyword Research: The foundation of SEO is identifying the right keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. Using relevant, high-traffic keywords in your content ensures your brand appears in front of the right people.
- On-Page Optimization: Utilize your keyword list to augment various on-page elements like meta titles, descriptions, headers and internal links.
- Quality Content: Keyword research is nothing without quality content. Creating valuable, informative and engaging content that answers the questions or needs of your audience is crucial. High-quality content also encourages other sites to link to yours, boosting your domain authority.
- Backlink Building: Earning high-quality backlinks from familiar, credible sites like local and national media outlets, cannabis trade publications and alt weeklies is one of the most effective ways to boost your SEO rankings. Backlinks signal to search engines that your site is trustworthy and reputable.
- User Experience (UX): Providing a seamless user experience, including easy navigation, clear calls to action and responsive website design not only improves engagement but also contributes to better rankings.
- Local SEO: For businesses with a physical presence, optimizing for local search is vital. This includes setting up Google My Business, segmenting audiences by geolocation, earning local citations, and collecting social proof to improve visibility, since nearly half of Google searches are made with local intent.
What’s the Difference Between Technical SEO and On-Page SEO?
Search engines factor in many variables in their regular web crawls, and the way your brand’s website is built and the content you publish both play important roles in search rankings.
On-Page SEO: The content and HTML elements of your website must be relevant and understandable to search engines. This includes using targeted keywords, creating engaging meta tags, optimizing titles and subheadings, and improving internal linking to enhance visibility and UX.
Technical SEO: A technically sound website ensures search engines can crawl and index your content easily. This includes having a mobile-friendly design, fast loading speeds, proper URL structures, and using sitemaps.
Why SEO Matters for Cannabis Brands and Psychedelics Businesses
When it comes to SEO, cannabis companies face many obstacles. One is that, unlike other content niches like travel, food & beverage, fashion or cat memes, cannabis is legal in some places but not others.
Because of federal prohibition, advertising restrictions on traditional channels like broadcast television, radio and billboards have also transferred to many of the privately held platforms that shape our digital experience.
Instagram and Facebook, for example, are notorious for censoring content that portrays consumption or appears to advertise consumable products. Google Ads regularly rejects paid content related to legal cannabis regardless of whether it’s fully in compliance with state regulations.
Yet cannabis and psychedelics brands can’t afford to stay offline in an era when, according to Pew Research, 31% of Americans self-report that they are “almost constantly” online. That’s where SEO comes in.
What Do Search Engine Algorithms Prioritize?
When somebody utilizes a search engine such as Google, Bing, Baidu or Yahoo, among others, the platform takes the word or phrase the person entered (e.g. “cannabis marketing”) and crawls an index of billions of sites, pages and pieces of content to help answer this quest for information. In the interest of satisfying its customers and building loyalty, the search engine only wants to deliver the best, most relevant, trustworthy and authoritative content possible.
That’s why it’s not enough just to include a target keyword in a piece of content. That content also needs to demonstrate its quality to search engines in other ways. What search engine algorithms favor has changed a lot over the years.
Not too long ago, clever web developers and marketers could conceal repeat mentions of a target keyword over and over, whether visibly or hidden in their web designs—a practice called “keyword stuffing.”
Search engines now downrank pages that use black hat SEO tactics like these. Instead, they favor other tactics that are more appealing to the human readers that search engines are ostensibly targeting. For example, search engine algorithms often rank pages higher that feature:
Valuable, Engaging Content
- Rich Media: Pages that include videos, images and infographics are often favored because they engage users and provide different formats to consume content.
- Informative Tables & Charts: Using tables, charts and graphs helps simplify complex information, making it easier for users to digest.
- Bulleted and Numbered Lists: These structures break up blocks of text, making it easier to scan and increasing readability, which is beneficial for both users and search engines.
Content Relevance & Depth
- In-Depth Coverage: Search engines also favor pages that comprehensively cover a topic, answering users' queries in a detailed, authoritative manner.
- Freshness: Regularly updated content is viewed as more relevant, especially for industries or topics where information changes frequently.
Mobile-Friendliness
Device usage is evolving as fast as cannabis and psychedelics regulation. These days, 63% of searches in the United States are now made on mobile devices rather than desktop or laptop computers. In keeping with that shift, search engines prioritize websites that are optimized for mobile viewing, using responsive design and easy-to-navigate layouts for smaller screens.
Page Loading Speed
Faster-loading pages rank higher because users expect a seamless experience. Slow-loading pages increase bounce rates, which negatively affects rankings.
Internal & External Linking
- Internal Links: Proper use of internal linking helps users navigate your site easily and signals to search engines the hierarchy and importance of content. Linking between blogs, service pages, product pages and other webpage types on one domain helps search engines “see” how well the site is organized and how robust its offerings are.
- External Links: Linking to credible, authoritative sources can boost your page's credibility and relevance in the eyes of search engines. It’s all part of increasing your brand’s expertise, authority and trust (aka the EAT quotient in marketing speak).
A Brief History of Search Engines, Cannabis and Psychedelics
To understand why SEO currently holds oversized value, and how search engines have evolved over time, you need to rewind back to the mid-1990s. For anyone interested in cannabis, psychedelics, digital marketing or all three, 1996 was a watershed moment.
That was the year Rent hit Broadway, celebrating the bohemian credentials of—among other things—hallucinogens and cannabis, Pee-Wee Herman, German wine, struggling artists, and the ACT UP campaign during the HIV / AIDS epidemic.
That same year LSD pioneer Timothy Leary, after spending his final years fascinated by cybernetics and the rise of internet technology, documented the last months of his life on a prototypical blog.
Also in 1996, California voters passed the Compassionate Use Act legalizing medical cannabis after years of work by queer activists and their allies. And a new generation of search engines launched for the first time, including Dogpile, HotBot and Ask Jeeves.
Those search engines were designed to solve a major problem with the rapidly expanding world wide web—finding websites. Back in the digital dark ages of dial-up internet before Netscape, Alta Vista, Lycos and other early search engines, internet users relied on web directories like Archie and Gopher and external linking practices called “web rings” that would help connect people. There were even hard-copy books dedicated to listing various websites, like a phone directory.
Cannabis and the Early Internet
Many people found content through online newsgroups like Usenet that made up most of the early internet. Those newsgroups themselves evolved out of the ARPANET system that laid the foundation for nearly all the internet infrastructure at the time—and through which Stanford University students conducted the first e-commerce transaction, which was actually a weed deal.
Much like we have forgotten that wooden sailing ships were once the space shuttles of their day—the absolute height of technological advancement—it’s easy to forget how revolutionary search engines were when they first debuted.
Since 1996, the legal cannabis industry has expanded to the majority of the United States, while several cities and states such as Oregon and Colorado have legalized psilocybin—the catalyst ingredient in magic mushrooms. The internet has also changed in ways that make it almost unrecognizable from the mid-1990s, given the rise of social media, Web 2.0, apps and mobile advertising, and the rise of artificial intelligence as both a content creation tool and a future revival for the current online search paradigm.
The once disparate cannabis and tech industries have collided in myriad ways, including search engine optimization. These days, cannabis and psychedelics companies have more ways to generate buzz than hoping for a mention in a hit Broadway musical. Now, one way they ramp up their position in the zeitgeist is through SEO—a crucial pursuit for brands trying to reach target audiences through a new generation of search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing.
Why SEO Keyword Research Is An Art and a Science for Cannabis Brands
But search engine optimization is as much an art as a science for cannabis companies, which haven’t always been greeted with open arms by top tech companies. There simply isn’t as much historical search data on cannabis—and especially legal psychedelics—over the same period of time as on, say, celebrity gossip or auto industry advancements.
After all, most cannabis sellers in the legacy market weren’t exactly advertising their products and services on sites like www.drugdeal.com or www.buypotfromlarry.net. It’s only fairly recently that legal state markets and decreasing stigma and decriminalization efforts have enabled more people to feel secure satisfying their curiosity about cannabis with web searches like “best books about cannabis,” “the history of 420,” or “cannabis dispensary near me.”
How to Rank for Cannabis SEO and Dispensary SEO Keywords
That means that when you use a tool like SEMRush, Moz or Google Analytics to check in on SEO metrics such as your competitive gap analysis or organic search rankings, or to find new keywords to incorporate into your web copy, it takes a little more intuition to interpret the results.
It’s not surprising that there are more people searching for “where to camp near San Francisco” than “where to camp near Dahlonega, Georgia” when you’re trying to decide what a valuable blog topic might be for an outdoor publication.
It’s also not surprising that competition for broad keywords like “vape pen” or “pot butter recipe” will be more competitive—and thus harder to rank for—than long-tail or more focused keywords like “the best dispensary in Tulsa” or “hand trimming marijuana.” After all, there are many more websites with immense domain authority trying to rank for a term like “vape pen” than “rosin vape concentrates in Colorado.”
Retail operations like cannabis dispensaries with a B2C focus have additional incentives to amp up their web presence and SEO rankings compared to B2B or less public-facing operations. Cannabis cultivators, extraction technology manufacturers and some ancillary service providers, for example, can also drum up business through networking events, thought leadership, cannabis PR and other tactics beyond website content strategy than retailers who are more focused on reaching customers through strategic partnerships or loyalty programs.
Cannabis SEO professionals do have to practice a little more creativity, however, when it comes to choosing between pertinent keywords with similar search volumes and degrees of competition when the SEO data available is spotty. A term like “grow tent” might have a search volume of 27,000, but you have to remember that plenty of crops other than cannabis are grown outdoors in tents, crowding out your niche audience.
Or take a term like “gorilla tent,” which may have a search volume of 1,600 but requires competing with large e-commerce sites that will be very difficult to unseat from the top 10 SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) on Google. Identifying the most keywords with the truest potential takes more than just raw data.
That’s why it’s invaluable to be fluent in cannabis or psychedelics as well as digital marketing. When you have deep expertise in both, it’s easier to perform your own kind of gap analysis on the data offered up by SEO platforms.
Savvy SEO experience also helps you see through the numbers and make choices informed equally by your gut and the latest information available. After all, SEO tools know what people are searching for based on decades of data collection, boots-on-the-ground conversations at conferences, trade shows and expos, as well as finessing their algorithms. But it’s really you—and your trusted marketing partners—who know better than anyone what your ideal audience is hoping to find.
Ready to revamp your SEO strategy for the next phase of cannabis and psychedelics growth? Reach out today—we love to talk shop.
Meghan O'Dea has honed her skills as a writer and content strategist for over a decade. She cut her teeth writing film and music reviews and a weekly opinion column on the 20-something experience. Early success in personal essay led Meghan to earn a Master's degree in Creative Nonfiction at UT Chattanooga, during which she attended the international MFA program at City University in Hong Kong as a visiting scholar. She has served as a digital editor for Fortune Magazine and Lonely Planet and earned bylines in The Washington Post, Playboy, Bitch magazine, Yoga Journal and Subaru Drive Magazine, amongst others. Meghan began writing cannabis stories for Willamette Week, Nylon and Different Leaf while working in the travel and outdoor media industries in Portland, Oregon. In addition to covering the intersection of travel, hospitality and cannabis, Meghan's work as a travel journalist took her from Los Cabos to Yellowstone, from San Francisco to Jamaica. She has also taught composition and travel writing at the college level and guest lectured on topics such as literary citizenship, urban history and professional development at conferences and universities throughout the United States as well as Madrid, Spain.
Three media outlets I check every single day: The Cut, New York Magazine, The Washington Post
Super inspired by: Women like Isabella Bird, Uschi Obermaier and my maternal grandmother, who dared to travel the world even in eras when global adventures went against the grain.
My monthly #GrasslandsGives donation: PEN America’s Prison Writing Program
When I’m off the clock (in five words): Books. Long walks. Architecture. Mixtapes.