Why Link Building and SEO Are Crucial for Cannabis Businesses (And How To)

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Increasing organic traffic is vital for companies working in and with the cannabis industry. Since Google and other search engines don’t allow most cannabis and cannabis-related businesses to invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive paid search traffic to their websites, organic traffic is absolutely essential. Link building is an effective way to improve search engine rankings for your website, allowing your website to get more organic search traffic.

What is link building?

Simply put, link building is a search engine optimization (SEO) tactic used to increase the number of links from other websites to your website. These inbound links are called backlinks, and when your website gets a lot of backlinks from highly authoritative sites, search engines assume you need to post good content. Why would a reputable site link to your site if your content isn’t great?

Think about it like this. Good websites have good neighbors.

As a result, backlinks to your website from other authoritative websites are like a vote of confidence for search engines. When search engine algorithms consider what results to show on search engine results pages (SERPs), websites and webpages with lots of authoritative backlinks are ranked higher than those with few or no authoritative backlinks — or those with lots of backlinks from sites with poor reputations. Higher search engine rankings usually lead to more organic traffic.

Good backlinks vs. bad backlinks

When it comes to link building and SEO, there are two main types of links – good backlinks and bad backlinks. Good backlinks come from highly authoritative websites with strong, positive reputations. These sites regularly publish great content and show no spam behavior as far as search engine algorithms are concerned. These are the inbound links that you want to bring to your site to improve your site’s reputation and search engine rankings, resulting in increased organic traffic.

On the other hand, bad backlinks come from sites with bad reputations. They post thin content or post infrequently. They may even take part in spamming activities or have a large number of bad backlinks leading to their website. There are many reasons why a search engine considers a website to be inferior. If you want to get backlinks to your website, you don’t have to get a lot of backlinks from bad reputation websites.

There was a time when a metric called Domain Authority was used by search engine algorithms to determine a website’s reputation. While SEO experts agree that domain authority is no longer used in search algorithms to rank the results of search engine queries, you can use it to get an idea of ​​the reputation of websites pointing to yours link (as well as from your own reputation).

Generally, you want backlinks from sites with a Domain Authority rating of 50 or higher. That doesn’t mean that a link from a site with a 40 Domain Authority will hurt your search rankings and organic traffic, but you do want more backlinks from higher authority sites and pages than from lower authority sites. Remember that only big websites like Amazon have really high authority – 90 or higher.

Here are some free tools you can use to analyze domain authority for your site and others, as well as existing backlinks to your site:

This is how you get valuable backlinks to your website

Getting authoritative backlinks to your website takes time. First, you need to publish a lot of authoritative content on your own website. If you don’t already have a blog on your site where you publish at least one authoritative post a week, start now. Each new quality blog post creates another entry point for search engines to find your site and for other sites to link to your site.

Next, promote your content on social media and in your email marketing campaigns to increase the likelihood that people will see and share it on their own social channels, link to it from their own websites or blogs, and so on.

Finally, invest some time and effort into building backlinks using one or more of the popular strategies SEO professionals use:

1. Write guest posts for authoritative websites and blogs

Writing comprehensive, useful, and expert content for other websites that have an excellent reputation is a great way to increase authoritative backlinks to your website. This process involves finding sites that publish the type of content you can provide, and then scanning each site to see if they publish content from guest authors. Many sites have a page that describes the type of content they accept from guest posts (if they do), along with submission guidelines. If not, contact them and ask. The worst that can happen is they say no.

2. Do link building outreach

SEO professionals use a variety of outreach tactics to find link building opportunities. For example, you could create linkable content such as reports or infographics and reach journalists or online authors writing on authoritative websites about a relevant topic to draw their attention to your great content. Paste the link to your content on your website and they could link to it in an upcoming article. Online writers are always looking for things to write about!

Another popular technique used by SEO professionals is using an SEO tool like ahrefs or SEMrush to find broken links on an authoritative website. Start by finding broken links that could be updated with a link to content on your site (if you haven’t already published relevant content, do so before reaching out), and then suggest that they update the broken link (which is a bad user experience and is bad for SEO) with your link.

3. Become an authoritative expert source

Journalists and online writers are always looking for expert sources to provide quotes and answer questions about articles they are working on. This is a great opportunity to establish yourself and your brand as an expert while gaining an authoritative backlink to your website. There are a number of tools you can use to find relevant requests from journalists and online authors searching for sources. Three that are free to join and keep an eye out for opportunities are:

Key takeaways on link building and SEO for cannabis businesses

Link building is very effective for building backlinks to your website and increasing organic traffic, which is vital for cannabis and cannabis-related businesses today. However, you should focus on getting inbound links from reputable sites with good reputations. Start by creating and promoting amazing content. Over time, backlinks, your search engine rankings, and organic traffic to your website will increase.