How We Doubled Cannabis E-commerce Traffic After Google's November Core Update Hit?

Google core updates are like a reset button for search rankings, reshuffling the deck to ensure the best content rises to the top. It sure sounds altruistic for users, but brand websites are often the ones that bear their maximum brunt!

Throughout such updates, they struggle to maintain their site’s rankings but to no avail. One of our cannabis e-commerce clients landed in a similar situation after the recent November 2024 core update was rolled out between November 11th and December 5th.

Hardly after a week, our client approached us with rapidly declining site traffic and rankings. Here’s a case study on how we turned the tables around within a few weeks, doubling the site’s traffic and increasing its rankings by 20 points.

The Problem

November 2024 update impacted the rankings of several brands, but those in the cannabis industry were hit the hardest. This happened because Google had already prohibited their ads due to safety and legal concerns, and the entire onus of their rankings lied on organic traffic.

When the update rolled out, our client’s website experienced a significant drop in organic traffic, from 3.8k to 950 in just a few weeks. After investigating the issue firsthand, we realized the main reasons were a lack of regular content updates, poor content quality, and technical problems such as high page loading time.

We decided to start on the project as soon as possible since the upcoming Christmas and New Year holidays were the peak time for cannabis sales, and losing an opportunity like that would be evident if the site didn’t achieve top ranking in the SERP results.

Identifying the Issues

Identifying the Issues

Although we had an overview of the issues that shot the site’s traffic down, an in-depth understanding helped us better plan and execute our strategy. Here are the steps we took to analyze the tiniest details of what was wrong with the website! 

  • Conducted a technical SEO audit to analyze the core web vital and crawl errors. 
  • Analyzed content quality, emphasizing word count, keyword placement, keyword density, content structure, and link insertions. 
  • Evaluated backlink quality and referral traffic volume
  • Assessed website content's E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) factors.

From our findings, we drew multiple conclusions. The site had multiple thin, poorly structured, and unoptimized content pieces that needed our immediate attention. Moreover, similar pages targeted the same content, leading to harmful SEO practices like keyword cannibalization and duplication.

Several technical issues, such as extremely low page speed, lack of mobile optimization, outdated sitemaps, broken links, and improperly formatted URLs, were also identified. The backlinks did not bring back enough referral traffic, primarily because they were not generated on authoritative, credible cannabis websites.

The Strategy

We devised a comprehensive SEO strategy to fix all our identified issues and produce concrete results within weeks. Here are a few highlights of what we had in mind! 

Technical SEO Fixes

We collaborated with the in-house technical team to communicate the technical SEO issues we found with their possible solutions. For instance, we suggested reducing the size of media elements and optimizing the backend code to increase page speed. Also, we made a list of 404 errors that needed fixing and formatted several URLs to include breadcrumbs for clarity. A few images on the site were missing alt tags, which were added at our request. 

Content Optimization

Next, we addressed the elephant in the room: the website’s content. We asked the best content curators to lengthen the thin content pieces we had identified and improve their structuring by adding clear subheadings, shortening long paragraphs, and including bullet points, charts, and tables to enhance readability. Additionally, we identified all the duplicate content and initiated their immediate deletion from the website. 

High-Quality Backlinks

Producing high quality cannabis backlinks has always been our strength; we used it well this time. Since the referral traffic was minimal, we initiated a project to build new backlinks using guest posts, press releases, and niche edit placements. Most importantly, we identified authoritative and credible cannabis websites with good SERP rankings to place our backlinks. 

User Experience Enhancements 

Our suggestions on design changes greatly improved mobile responsiveness and eased navigation. Google often uses a “people-first” strategy to rank websites, so enhancing user experience was a key aspect of our SEO strategy. We also improved the visual appeal of our CTAs, hoping they would drive conversions. 

Targeted Keyword Strategy

Our most substantial focus was on keyword optimization and interlinking. We revised the keyword list according to recent search volume metrics and ensured their optimal placement in the meta tags, headings, anchor texts, and content body. We also worked on balancing long-tail and short-tail keywords to rank for generic and specific search terms. 

Results

Our four weeks of intense work delivered promising results, although we still had a long way to go before recovering the site's previous traffic and ranking. Here are the highlights!

  • Organic Traffic: The site’s organic traffic increased by 2x, reaching 15,000 monthly visits.
  • Referral Traffic: Our backlink strategy worked wonders, boosting referral traffic by 40%, which accounted for 12% of the site's total traffic. 
  • Conversion Rates: The business impact was huge as the conversion rates improved by 15%.
  • Keyword Rankings: Top 5 targeted long-tail keywords ranked on the first page of SERP responses. Ten significant short-tail keywords experienced a 30% increase in rankings. 
  • Website Rankings: The website’s overall rankings improved by 20 points, leading it to land on Google’s first age of SERP responses for most targeted keywords. 
  • Domain Authority: Our content and backlink revision based on Google’s E-A-T strategy increased the domain authority by 10 points.
  • CTRs: Click-through rates doubled to 4.8%
  • Bounce Rates: Enhanced user experience and engagement reduced bounce rates by 23%

Key Takeaways

Ranking after the November 2024 Google core update was a significant bounce back for our client’s website, especially given the competitive and strictly regulated cannabis industry it belonged to. Notably, all our results were organic, as Google has largely prohibited paid advertising for cannabis products.

Our strategy worked because it was detailed and comprehensive, encompassing the tiniest improvements that caught our attention. Most importantly, since the traffic increase translated to high conversion rates, the client was positive about business growth and investment in our SEO strategies.

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