The demand for CBD products has ballooned over the years, with more consumers turning to these for their health benefits sans marijuana’s mind-altering consequences and the side effects of other medications. A poll conducted by Gallup in 2019 showed that 14% of U.S. adults are utilizing CBD products. Filling in this demand is a growing number of CBD-related B2B and B2C companies that are beginning to crowd the market. In 2018, the U.S. cannabis market reached $1.9 billion and is expected to hit $20 billion by 2024. Given the expanding number of businesses and products in this niche, companies must craft a robust cannabis marketing strategy that will position them as an industry leader in front of their target audience.

What Are Backlinks?

If you’re trying to grow your online reach organically, getting backlinks from authoritative and related websites is a must. Backlinks refer to the links leading to one of your webpages. They can either originate from another page of your domain (internal links) or other websites (external links). Often, these links are included in a word or phrase—called the anchor text—in online content.

Why Are Backlinks Important to Your CBD Company Website?

Cannabis marketing has been challenging, even in areas that have legalized CBD, due to conflicting laws and online advertising restrictions. CBD companies cannot advertise on search engine giant Google and leading social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. 

Despite these restrictions, the CBD market continues to grow. Multiple companies have started in the past years, and the market is beginning to flood with a broad range of products, including edibles, oils, hemp extracts, topical creams, and pet remedies.

In an industry that’s increasingly becoming competitive, and with paid ads often limited within CBD-related websites, you need to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that more prospective clients can find your company. An effective SEO strategy can help your business show up on the top page of search results when CBD buyers and potential customers are searching for products and information.

There are multiple ways to optimize for search engines, and one of them is by building backlinks from trusted sites that are related to your niche. Receiving more quality backlinks from other websites boosts your organic ranking and helps your pages or posts get discovered and crawled by search engine bots. Equally important, links from these authoritative sources help direct traffic to your company website. 

How to Get Quality Backlinks for a Cannabis Website

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Getting quality backlinks for your company website involves building both your external and internal links. Below are some strategies you must prioritize to expand your search engine ranking and organic reach.

Publish Helpful Articles Regularly

There’s still much confusion and controversy around the health benefits and side effects of CBD. This situation creates a massive opportunity for you to educate web visitors and prospective clients regarding your products and processes, and address reservations they may have.

Craft articles that tackle the questions people often ask about cannabis products. To help you generate ideas, ask your team what inquiries they often receive from customers. During keyword research, see what queries people usually type in search engines. Go to relevant industry websites and scan the comments section, or visit question-and-answer sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers.

To encourage people to link to your site or share your article, make your piece informative, in-depth, and unique. Provide new input, featuring recently published studies or statistics, so your content stays fresh. Check the articles your competitors have published, and create a better version.

Quote reliable sources and consider interviewing experts to lend credibility to your article and, by extension, your website and products as well. Another benefit of conducting such interviews is that no other site will have the same content. Writers who wish to quote the experts you interviewed will have to link to your site.

Create Content in Different Formats

Not all your web visitors will be inclined to read articles or digest long-form content. One way to help these readers while also increasing your backlinks is by including infographics or publishing your content in video format.

Choose articles for which you can create an infographic. Embed your logo or company name on the image before inserting it in your blog post and sharing it to your email list and social media channels. By doing this, anyone who wants to share your infographic or insert this in their article will be linking back to your blog post.

Consider publishing a video version of your content and hosting it on your company page so that people will be linking back to your site. Alternatively, you can upload it on video-hosting websites like YouTube and include a link to your blog article in the description.

Do Guest Posting

Another way to increase your external links is by publishing articles on industry-related websites. While other sites are focused on advertising, others do accept guest posts such as CBD Myth, New Cannabis Ventures, Hemp Frontiers, and CBD Testers

If you are doing local SEO, check out industry-related websites on your target states or countries and ask about guest posting opportunities. 

Have Your Company Added to Web Directories

When customers are looking up a product or company near them, there’s a good chance they will be using web directories. Have your company listed in these directories, especially those specific to your target location. Some examples of CBD-specific lists are Marijuana Business Daily, CBD Directory UK, Hemp CBD Directory, and Cannabinoid Choice

Participate in CBD Forums

Aside from search engines and question-and-answer sites, your potential customers are likely turning to niche forums to get more information. Join the discussions, provide useful information, and if you have written an in-depth article on the topic, link to that as well. By helping forum participants find the data they need, you are increasing engagements with your prospective clients and helping position your company as an industry leader.

Build Your Internal Links

Aside from getting external links, make sure you build your internal links as well. Each time you create new content, insert links to your web pages or past articles, infographics, or videos. Promoting internal links not only improves your SEO ranking, but it also directs traffic to other materials within your site, thereby reducing your bounce rate.

 

If you’re looking for a cannabis marketing company to help increase your website’s traffic and boost your sales, turn to Medicated Marketing. Our SEO solutions aim to put your company in front of the right audience through engaging content and high-quality backlinks. Medicated Marketing also offers Reputation Management, ensuring your company gets more reviews, thus boosting trust for your brand. Find out more about our cannabis marketing solutions by filling out our online form.