CBD SEO AGENCY

October 20, 2023

How we get from 18K to 80K monthly CBD visitors (July-Feb 2020)

This is short story how we get our client to TOP 1 on high volume keywords really fast, optimized more than 100+ products with the featured snippet, and finally get 80 000 organic visits per month.

BACK TO JULY 2019

After we've done 0,5M traffic on depressionalliance affiliate CBD project - we've done around 30% sales to cbdamericanshaman though an affiliate network. That's how we were referred to one of the TOP CBD brands in US. They've been worked already with seo agency, but in CBD they have no experience.

We've seen really huge brand, and product structure but all of those was only products with no reviews, markup etc. So we set a strategy where we optimizing current products with reviews, starts in snippet, doing sitelinks and knowledge boxes.

There was around 18 000 visits monthly, so we decided to go locally + low difficulty keywords, structure json markup + optimization. As long as product markup - we haven't seen any seo agencies in CBD who is doing this kind of markup in 2019.

So we started our SEO Strategy...

SEO STRATEGY

There was the lack of content + keywords, as average CBD page content were around 300 words we decided to write additional 1000-1500 words per page.
Product markup with featured snippets - including stars, reviews, price, availability and pictures
We've chosen local keywords where competition lvl is almost "0" - for example "cbd ohio" - you can check cbd store locator page
Developing the best structure of local blogs, using less competition and higher volume keywords only. As we worked as seo agency for another cbd brand we had already huge database of blog keywords with low difficulty.
Technical optimization, UX A\B testing, performance, markup, around 30 points in our checklist
Knowledge Box optimization a.k.a Position "0" in Google Search Results
Link Building - after we've done competition analysis to check what they're doing - we decided to start from 120~ monthly backlinks, including Crowd Posts, Quora, Reddit Links, Niche forums, Guest Posts, and PR distribution.

RESULTS CHRONOLOGY

JUL, 2019 - 18 000 users monthly

- There was already perfectly product structure, so we just decided get more JSON markup for these pages
- We also checked the content regarding seo, added more words to pages (averagely 1000-1500 words per page)
- Setting up the proper SILO structure of blogs for each keyword intent
- Started backlink building - 120 links per month - Guest Posts, Crowd Posts, Foums, and few niche PBN's.

OCT, 2020 - 35 000 visitors per month + store locator page setup

- Markup is already getting results - 50% higher conversion rate than it was in July (5% >10%)
- Doing proper internal hyperlinking inside the content, based on our SILO structure
- UX\UI audit, A\B testing for buttons, blocks, design changes
- Keep doing backlinks
- Optimizing Meta tags with "Call to action" words
- CBD "STORE LOCATOR" page development where you can find offline shop in any state. There was around 50+ local pages per state, city where we get the most part of traffic later
- Implementing programming & coding, all technical assignments - Markup, performance, redirects, robots, and more (around 30 points in the checklist).

DEC, 2019 - 70 000 visitors per month + Google Core Update

- Store locator pages giving us +40 000 monthly traffic
- Markup is working well, all technical things are set up and website speed parameters is 99\100
- Google rolls out new Core update, doing deeper analysis who has growth \ who dropped in the market, finding the reasons
- Afterupdate checklist implementing - authorship, external backlinks, rel=sponsored, more spaces between the content blocks and some UX\UI fixes, cleaning backlink profile

FEB, 2020 - Google Afterupdate restoration and Email funnel

- Already having around 30% of keywords in top 10
- For all pages we have in top 10 we're setting new markup with Q\A, TOC and getting them into Google Knowledge box a.k.a Position "0"
- 100% restored traffic back, as long as almost 70% of websites who is working with agencies kept losing traffic
- Setting up email funnel to get the users back and back to our website (retargeting + 2-3 emails per week) - google loves returning visitors.