How We Improved Category Page Rankings for a Cannabis Brand

In the past few years, the cannabis industry in the United States has dramatically evolved into the digital space, so much so that its online presence stands at its peak! This has encouraged most cannabis businesses to work towards creating a well-structured, user-friendly website, helping users navigate their products conveniently.

Cannabis category pages played a significant role in this context. These are usually listed on a website’s main menu and guide users to the product pages they are searching for.

In SEO terms, category pages help search engines crawl a website in a more structured and organized manner, enhancing website optimization at its core. However, to fulfill their purpose, category pages need to rank first. How can that be made possible? This case study has all the answers.

Challenges Faced

Challenges Faced

Recently, one of our cannabis clients, who had just launched their website, approached us with a pickle! A few of its product pages garnered all the user traffic for product search terms as well as the respective category niches.

How did that affect their SEO outcomes?

When most users searched the category terms, the brand’s product pages appeared in the SERP results, and on clicking them, users were only informed about a single product when they were actually seeking to explore a list of products in the category instead. 

Not astonishingly, the bounce rates suffered a massive increase, and there was no scope for driving traffic to product pages that were not organically ranking. Increasing the brand’s category page rankings was the only solution.  

On thorough analysis, we concluded that category pages were not ranking for any of the category keyword search terms, and the most prominent reasons for this were:  

  • Low number of category-specific keywords 
  • Limited interlinking between category and product pages
  • Lack of descriptive visuals and product content 
  • No quality backlink profile 
  • Technical issues that compromised page visibility  

The Strategy

Strategy

After identifying the shortcomings, we developed a detailed strategy to increase the category page rankings of the cannabis website at hand! Here’s what we planned: 

Comprehensive SEO Audit

We conducted a detailed SEO audit of all the category pages. We analyzed the content, meta tags, URL, keyword integration, media elements, product display, and backlink profiles for specific niches and noted the required changes and improvements. 

Keyword Research & Optimization 

First things first! We researched all the keyword terms that ranked for specific category niches. Keeping the optimal keyword density in mind, we ensured their correct placement on category pages. We focused on optimizing the page title, meta description, and headings. 

Content Optimization

Our next target was content improvement. We had the best content team working for us to understand the brand’s voice and curate category pages that promoted the niche products appropriately. 

Our primary focus was product enlistment. We used media elements such as 360-degree images, detailed product descriptions, and frequently asked questions (FAQs) to answer all customers' questions. 

Technical SEO Fixes

We also encountered numerous technical issues that compromised the rankings of category pages. Some were as basic as the pages not being updated in the sitemap, not being indexed on search engines, or being deliberately blocked in the robots.txt file. 

Others were complicated and required long-term attention, such as low page speed, large media files that increased reload time, unoptimized code, and duplicate content that confused the crawling bots.

We suggested a few instant solutions to deal with these, such as adding canonical URLs wherever duplicate content was found, adding clickable breadcrumbs on product pages, and adding paginations on category pages that displayed many products. 

Link Building

Lastly, 90% of our work involved building a stable, quality cannabis backlinks for each category page. We identified and approached several third-party cannabis vlogging and review websites that could display our links through relevant guest blogs, press releases, and bookmark submissions. Setting a goal to achieve just 5 relevant backlinks daily worked wonders for us!  

Results

Results

We executed our strategy point-by-point for 3 months, and here are the results we achieved on the website’s top 10 category pages. 

  • Boosted traffic by 150% 
  • Increased category niche keyword rankings by 80%
  • Increased average user session duration by 50%  
  • Secured 500+ quality backlinks overall
  • Enhanced click-through rate (CTR) by 30%
  • Reduced bounce rates by 25% 

Why This Strategy Worked?

Our client’s cannabis websites had around 6 main category pages and over 20 sub-category pages, ranking extremely low on search engines like Google. When we took over, we identified several reasons for it and brainstormed to build a strategy that could increase their rankings. 

Since the site had just launched, we had to review every aspect of the category pages, from their content and media to technical issues such as indexing. We also had to improve the structure of these pages from scratch to make them more engaging and competent among contemporaries. 

After traveling a long road where no shortcuts were available, we finally achieved significant results in terms of category page rankings and clicks on search engines. 

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