BEST SEO FOR HEMP WEBSITES: AN ULTIMATE GUIDE

Once you have your foundation, and are starting to index your website, it’s essential to continue optimizing your content. 

specially if you notice certain pages on your site starting to rank, or going up in the ranks, you might want to focus on what is already working and keep improving those pages.

In this section you’ll get a broad overview of each of the On-page and off-page tasks you can perform to start ranking your hemp or cbd website.

One thing not covered below is that once you determine the top keyword you want to rank for, on a particular web page of your site, you will want to incorporate that keyword into each one of these elements.

Or if it’s a long-form piece of content you will want to identify your secondary keywords as well, so that you can sprinkle them throughout these elements.

But remember the most important thing when creating content is that it’s written for the reader, or not just for the search engines. You want your content to be very natural to read.

On-page Optimization

On-page optimization is the practice of improving the elements on a particular webpage of your site so that the search engines can better understand what your content is about and who it is relevant to based on their search queries.

So let’s get into each one of those elements that you can start optimizing to get that traffic increase you deserve.

Your Web Page Url

This is the actual web page address that gets indexed and therefore it’s vital to include your target keyword in your url.

For example: yourhempwebsite.com/target-keyword-goes-here

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Optimizing Your Hemp Websites Title Tags

Title tags are the headings and subtitles used throughout your content. It’s important to include your target keyword or supporting keywords within this content.

It’s great for your reader, as most people scan content to see if they want to read it. So it helps to spend a lot of time on quality headlines and subheadlines.

The way the search engines read your title tags are as follows:

<h1>

<h2>

<h3>

<h4>

<h5>

<h6>

Here is a list of important things to remember when it comes to your title tags:

• It’s important to actually use these in your content as it shows that hierarchy of keyword relevancy. So if you’re thinking whether to use this tags or not, don’t think twice, it really helps to use them.
• ONLY use one H1 tag – This helps to clearly define the main topic you are trying to rank for.
• Most pages only use H1 through H3 tags. That is perfectly fine if that is all you do. But don’t be afraid to go even deeper as it can make your content easier to consume with the h4 through h6 tags.

Optimizing Your Hemp Websites Meta Description

The meta description is basically the short snippet of text that is pulled from your page to tell the searcher what that page is about.

It’s important not to make your meta description longer than 160 characters as anything beyond that will be cut off from the search results page. (See image for reference)

Remember it’s important to put your target keyword in your meta description, and if you can fit a secondary or longtail keyword that’s even better.

Headings and Subheadings

The first thing to make sure you do is include your target keyword in the first 100 words of your page. This give it more importance, and tells the crawlers what the content is going to be about.

Table of Contents

This is typically something that is used in Pilar Content or long-form content. Adding a Table of Contents at the top of your post can really help the search engines quickly scan your content to serve the searches what they need.

Not only that, it allows your readers to easily navigate your content and go right to where they need to without having to scroll the entire page.

Having better navigation and the TOC will likely keep your reader on the page longer, which will reflect well for your SEO rankings.

You can manually create the TOC at the top of your post (using anchor text) or you can use a plugin which makes this a lot easier and quicker to do.

Keyword Topic Clustering

Topic Clustering is just as much a content marketing strategy as it is an SEO strategy. The premise of topic clustering is to create a hierarchy on your site so the search engines and visitors understand what content is more important than other pieces of content.

Building out your topic clusters is a clear way of telling the search engines what topics you are an authority on and what your website is all about.

Topic Clustering works for both product category and product sales pages as well as for blog content pages.

For example if you have a CBD product website you could structure your content cluster like this:

For your products clustering the first level topic would be CBD Products. Then your second level could link to products such as CBD Topicals, CBD Edibles, CBD Smokables etc… the third level for example if you branched off of CBD Edibles could be: CBD Gummies, CBD Baked Goods, CBD Drinks etc…

If you were to do a topic cluster for blog post content it could be something like: Level 1 would be Farming Hemp, second level would be: how to farm hemp for seeds, how to farm hemp for fiber, how to farm hemp for flower production.

And then you would create content the nests within those second level topics.

Internal Linking with Anchor Text

If you mention a topic that is related to the current post you are writing and you have another page on your site it’s a great idea to link to that page. 

Not only does this help with the user experience, but it tells the search bots how your content relates to each other. For example here is a link to our Hemp, Cannabis CBD SEO Services page where you will find our different SEO Monthly Packages.

Notice too how we used a relevant keyword to the main topic of this post within the anchor text? You should do that too.

Off-page Optimization

Link Building

Getting high quality links back to your site is foundational for any SEO strategy. Beware of low quality backlinks, or paying someone you don’t know, or trust to get you backlinks, as it can actually harm your search rankings.

Here’s a fantastic tool that can help you start getting backlinks to your site, from many popular and high domain authority websites, it’s called the Link Chest by SEO Buddy.

Local SEO for Hemp Websites

If you haven’t already created a Google My Business Listing or signed up for a dozen other Business Directory Listings you should start now.

This is not only a great way for people to find you, especially if you have a physical storefront, but even if you don’t you can get the link back to your site from their listing, which can start to boost your rankings, with those quality backlinks.

Using Social Media for Better SEO

Although it can be tedious posting on your social accounts everyday, there is great value in doing it.

Not only does it give you authority, and show that you have a presence in the hemp or cannabis industry, but it can build trust and reliability.

The other great thing about using social networks is that you can backlink to your site, and google sees that has a high quality backlink, since all the major social media websites have a high domain authority.

Conduct Technical SEO Audits on a Monthly Basis

This goes hand in hand with your SEO Analysis and can be done with several of the tools provided in the SEO Tools and Resources section.

Performing an SEO Audit will allow you to see any broken links, 404 pages, images being too large, as well as several other factors addressed on this page that you can fix to improve your search rankings and user experience.