The Importance of Organic Traffic and SEO for Cannabis Businesses (And How to Get It)

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about taking steps to help your website’s pages rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) when people enter relevant search queries into search engines. You can learn all about onsite SEO, onpage SEO, and offsite SEO in our cannabis business SEO guide, but there’s another piece of the puzzle to consider—organic vs. paid traffic.

Simply put, there are two types of traffic you can bring to your website – organic and paid. As the name suggests, paid traffic is any traffic that comes to your website as a result of a pay-per-click ad. On the other hand, organic traffic comes to your site after you conduct a search on a search engine — no ad required.

Considering that PPC advertising on Google and other search engines is still a huge challenge (if not impossible) for companies working in and with the cannabis industry, organic traffic is critical to brand building and growth of a business. It’s also something very few cannabis brands are currently investing in, meaning companies that prioritize content and organic traffic in their marketing budgets have a huge opportunity right now.

Top 5 ways to increase organic traffic to your website

Below are five of the most effective tactics you can use to increase organic traffic to your website:

1. Start a blog on your website

The number one thing you should do to increase organic traffic to your website is to start a blog. Note that the blog needs to be on the same domain as your website, not on a subdomain or a separate domain, to get SEO value for your website and more organic traffic.

Blog posts that are well-written and relevant to your audience create new entry points for people to find your site through search engines. Think of it this way: If your website is 20 pages long, Google and other search engines have 20 ways to find you. Now imagine you publish a quality blog post every day for a year. After 12 months, there are 385 ways for Google to find your website.

2. Post high-quality content and often

As mentioned in #1 above, the blog posts (and webpages) you write should be of high quality in order to get SEO value from them and increase organic traffic to your website. Search engines reward well-written, comprehensive content with higher search rankings, so quality is very important.

In addition, you should regularly publish new content on your blog. I recommend at least once a week, but twice a week is better. To maximize organic traffic, publish 16 high-quality blog posts per month. This is very important as Google usually ranks newer content higher than older content in the SERPs.

3. Create content using SEO best practices

Every website and blog post you write should be written with SEO best practices in mind. However, if you’re trying to optimize organic traffic, you should be writing for your audience, not search engines. Think of the types of questions your audience members would type into search engines, and then answer those questions as thoroughly as possible in new blog posts.

Also, format your content according to SEO best practices. Use short paragraphs, H2 and H3 headings, internal links to other pages on your site, alt text in images, and strategically placed keywords (e.g. in the H1 heading of the title, in at least two H2 headings, in the first 100 words, of course in the entire main content, in the image file names and alt text as well as in the meta title and in the description).

4. Promote your content

You need to promote your content to generate interest and drive traffic to it. Whenever you publish a new blog post, you should at least share it on all of your company’s social media channels and promote it in an email marketing campaign. For B2B brands, LinkedIn is a must, and for B2C brands, Facebook and Instagram are essential. However, the more you can spread your content, the better.

When you share your content through social media and email marketing, more people will see it. They could click to visit your site to read the entire blog post or webpage, and they could even share the link with their own audience. As a result, even more people will see and share it, which will boost organic traffic to your website in the long run.

5. Publish content on other websites

In order to increase brand awareness and organic traffic to your website, you need to be visible online. Identify someone in your organization that you would like to establish as a thought leader and reach out to other websites, blogs, and podcasts to ask about opportunities for that person to contribute content and/or guest appearances.

This serves two purposes. First, it expands your brand’s online presence and introduces your business to a wider audience. Second, more inbound links are created to your site, and search engines use backlinks as an indicator of how search results are ranked. The assumption is that websites that get a lot of backlinks from authoritative sites need to post quality content or nobody would link to them.

Remember that search engines need to be able to “see” the backlinks that lead to your website. Therefore, inbound links should not contain the “no follow” HTML tag, otherwise you will not get any SEO value from them.

Key insights on organic traffic and SEO for cannabis businesses

Building organic traffic to your cannabis business website is a long-term strategy. It takes time, lots of great content, and lots of shares, but if you stick with it for a year, I promise you’ll start to see a measurable difference in your organic traffic.

The best thing about organic traffic is that it is far more sustainable than paid traffic. So if you invest the time and money into creating and sharing content today, it will pay off for years to come.