If you’re trying to make a go of it with an e-commerce website that sells CBD online – or maybe you’ve even created your own CBD brand with the help of a white-label hemp processor – you’ve probably already learned the biggest lesson of the CBD industry the hard way. You’ve entered an insanely competitive industry – and driving traffic to a CBD website is incredibly hard. The worst part is that you can’t just jump on Google AdWords or Facebook and buy yourself out of the rut because CBD advertising isn’t allowed on those platforms. In fact, virtually no one outside the hemp industry wants your advertising money.
When you have a CBD website that generates no traffic, there’s no easy way to fix it. The only solution is to get back to the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and evaluate your website with a critical eye. These are the reasons why your CBD website gets no traffic.
Your Product Selection Looks the Same as Everyone Else’s
When you begin to critique your CBD website, the first thing that you should do is evaluate how your site looks compared to the competition. In particular, you need to look at your product selection. Can you immediately identify something that makes your website stand out or look different compared to your competitors’ sites, or do you basically carry the same products from the same distributors? Differentiation and branding are vitally important in any e-commerce niche, and those things are particularly crucial when the level of competition is as high as it is in the CBD industry.
Differentiating your product selection doesn’t just mean that your website will stop looking the same as your competitors’ sites; it also means that you won’t be competing with the same websites for the exact same sets of keywords anymore. So, how do you do it?
- Don’t buy all of your products from just one CBD distributor. Put some time into unearthing unusual and interesting hemp and CBD products that your competitors aren’t carrying. If you have your own CBD brand – and your products are indistinguishable from competitors’ products – you should seriously consider an overhaul of your packaging.
- Take your own product photos instead of using stock photos from your distributor. Do something different; find a fun location or stage the products in a unique way. Taking your own product photos won’t just help your CBD website stand out from competitors’ sites. It’ll also give your website a chance to appear on Google Images, which is extremely unlikely to happen if you’re using the same stock photos as everyone else.
- Present your products in a different way. Every CBD website, for example, organizes CBD oils according to their brands and milligram strengths. Can you think of a different organizational structure or a new way to way to layout the information on your individual product pages?
- If you don’t have the ability to add new items to your product selection, consider selling your existing products in a way your competitors aren’t by creating your own product bundles. How about a “World CBD Oil Tour” bundle containing CBD oils from several different brands?
Your Website Has No Original Content
Until something fundamentally changes about the way in which the information on the Internet is organized, Google will continue to function primarily on text. Whether a person searches by typing or by speaking, Google will suggest results with text that appears to satisfy the user’s query. If your website has very little text – or the text that your website does have is copied from other sources – you’re not going to receive organic traffic. Here’s how to fix that.
- If you copied your site’s product descriptions from your distributor’s website or from a competitors’ site, the chance that your product pages will ever receive organic search engine traffic is very close to zero because Google already has that text in its index. You need to take the time to write your own product descriptions and to make those descriptions as informative and helpful as they can possibly be.
- Don’t forget the importance of having a blog and updating it regularly. While you’ll primarily attempt to capture traffic for commercial search terms with your product pages, your blog is different in that your blog posts will usually target informational keywords. The more keywords your content targets, the better your chance of generating organic traffic becomes.
When you write content for your site’s blog and product pages, remember to avoid the one critical mistake that new CBD sellers often make: Legal regulations almost always forbid CBD sellers from claiming that their products have medical benefits. It takes a delicate hand to write CBD content without claiming that CBD oil alleviates or cures any medical condition. A good CBD SEO service can really help in this area.
Your Products Are Too Expensive
If you haven’t already figured it out by now, optimizing your CBD website for Google ultimately comes down to content. If Google’s ranking algorithm believes that your website will satisfy a user’s search, you’ll have a chance to appear in the results for that search.
You might not have considered, however, that literally, everything on your website is content – and that includes your prices. E-commerce websites organize information in a fairly standard way, and Google’s ranking algorithm can pull relevant information from a page – including prices – and display that information on search results pages. Have you ever compared your prices to what your competitors are charging? If your prices aren’t fair, it’s possible that your site is appearing in the results for some searches, but people aren’t clicking through because they’re turned off by the high prices.
While the CBD industry can still be extremely profitable in 2022 and beyond, the fact is that it’s no longer really possible to charge the kinds of prices that CBD sellers charged in 2017 and 2018 unless there’s some feature that makes your products truly unique. In the past, CBD sellers could almost charge whatever they wanted because there wasn’t enough hemp available to satisfy the demand for CBD oil. So many farmers have begun to grow hemp over the past few years, though, that there’s actually a bit of an oversupply of hemp biomass at this point. CBD prices decreased drastically in 2020 and 2021, and your website will never take off unless your prices are competitive.
