SEO for THC & CBD brands isn’t about hacks or shortcuts.
It’s about executing the fundamentals consistently, and aligning your site with what Google actually wants to rank, especially in a regulated category.
When this brand reached out to us in March 2024, they had everything going for them except one thing: organic visibility.
Despite great products and a loyal audience, they weren’t ranking for the high-intent searches that convert buyers already looking to purchase.
Competitors were dominating the SERPs for keywords like THC gummies and CBD candy, while their site sat buried on the second, third page, or tenth page.
At the time, they were averaging just 4,730 monthly clicks from organic search, with organic revenue hovering around $19,000.
They knew they were leaving money on the table. They just didn’t know how to fix it. So they hired us to take over.
And in just 12 months, we helped them grow their monthly traffic by 534% and nearly double their revenue.
Here’s how we did it.
Our SEO Framework
Every campaign we run follows the same proven framework:
- Technical SEO
- Keyword Research
- On-Page Optimization
- Content Creation
- Link Building
Skip any step and the whole strategy falls apart.
You can have the best backlinks in the world, but if your on-page SEO is weak, your pages won’t rank.
And you can write hundreds of blog posts, but if they aren’t targeting the right keywords, they’ll never generate traffic.
So we started with the foundation.
1. Technical SEO
The first step of any campaign is to run a technical SEO audit.
A technically sound website allows Google to crawl and index pages efficiently, which leads to better rankings across the board.
Here’s what we uncovered and fixed:
I. Paginated Pages Indexing
The brand had paginated product category pages that were getting indexed by Google.
These low-value pages (e.g., ?page=2, ?page=3) weren’t useful, and they diluted the overall site quality in the eyes of Google.
We added canonical tags pointing back to the root category page, which effectively deindexed the paginated pages while preserving crawl paths.
II. Broken Internal Links
We found 14 internal links that pointed to dead pages.
These were all updated to either point to live, relevant content or redirected using 301s.
III. Broken Backlinks
The site had 59 broken backlinks, valuable links from other domains pointing to now-deleted URLs.
We redirected each of these to the most relevant live page to preserve and pass along their authority.
With the technical foundation in place, we moved on to keyword research.
2. Keyword Research
We split our keyword research into three buckets:
- Keywords for product pages
- Keywords for product category pages
- Keywords for blog content
I. Keywords for Product Pages
To identify keywords for individual product pages, we reverse-engineered what was already working in the niche.
For example, if the brand had a product page for “CBD candy,” we Googled that keyword, found the top-ranking product pages, and plugged those URLs into Ahrefs.
From there, we pulled out high-volume, mid-to-low competition keywords that were clearly converting searchers.
We then assigned one primary keyword and a few supporting secondary keywords to each product page.
II. Keywords for Product Category Pages
The brand wanted to rank for “THC Gummies.”
But when we Googled the term, Google predominantly ranked product category pages, not product pages.
So instead of trying to force a product page to rank for that term, we created an entirely new product category page tailored specifically to THC Gummies.
This aligned with Google’s search intent and gave us a better chance of cracking the first page.
III. Keywords for Blog Content
We wanted to support our product and product category pages with top-tier informational content.
So we took each of our main transactional keywords (like “CBD candy” and “THC gummies”) and dropped them into Ahrefs.
From there, we filtered for:
- Question-based keywords (e.g. “how do thc gummies make you feel?”)
- Comparison keywords (e.g. “cbd vs thc gummies”)
- Best-intent keywords (e.g. “best thc gummies”)
We now had the keyword roadmap.
It was time to optimize our product and product category pages, and create content.
3. On-Page Optimization
With our keywords selected, we began optimizing each product and product category page.
For each product page, we added the primary keyword to the meta title, meta description, H1 tag, and URL slug.
But we didn’t stop at metadata.
We also analyzed the content structure of top-ranking product pages and built content to match, explaining product benefits, usage, ingredients, and other details that customers would be looking for.
We followed the same process for the new THC Gummies product category page.
Its meta title, meta description, H1 tag, and URL slug were fully optimized for the term “THC gummies,” and we added supporting content below the product grid that modeled the content of the top-ranking THC Gummies product category pages.
Internal links were also carefully placed to connect related products and drive authority where it mattered most.
4. Content Creation
We set a goal of publishing five blog posts per month, each targeting one of the informational keywords identified during our research.
Every piece of content was created with one goal: to be the best result on the internet for that keyword.
Whether it was a 1,000-word explainer or a 3,000-word buying guide, we focused on depth, clarity, and value.
We made sure each blog post was fully optimized — keyword in the title, URL, and H2s — and we wove internal links throughout the content to point users (and Google) toward relevant products and category pages.
Over time, these blog posts began driving traffic directly, while also helping our core product pages rise in the rankings.
5. Link Building
From the start, we knew link building would be a key factor in getting results.
We launched a sustained outreach campaign, securing links from high-quality websites in the cannabis, wellness, and health spaces.
Each site we targeted had a domain rating of at least 30 and received over 1,000 organic visits per month.
We built 15 backlinks per month, pointing a majority of them toward the product and category pages we were trying to rank, with the remainder going to blog content.
Three months into the campaign, rankings began to climb, and traffic followed.
Our Results
Over a 12-month period, we took this brand from obscurity to visibility:
They saw a 534% increase in organic traffic, growing from 4,730 to 30,001 monthly clicks.
A 96% increase in monthly organic revenue, jumping from $19,773.98 to $38,815.19.
And first-page rankings for high-converting search terms like THC gummies, THC gummies online, THC gummies for sale, and CBD sleep tincture.
This brand now has a reliable, compounding channel of organic traffic and sales, and is well-positioned as an authority in the THC & CBD space.
When you show up on Page 1 of Google, your customers trust you before they ever click your product.
That’s the power of great SEO.