Combatting the competitive nature of Cannabis SEO

Content Marketing
1

Hey everyone - I’m in need of direction as we decide our SEO strategy for our cannabis business.

As many of you are aware cannabis SEO is extremely competitive, largely due to the fact that we aren’t able to advertise through many traditional means such as Facebook or Google.

Our current SEO company is recommending the following strategy: Use foundational backlinks, 40 backlinks per month per keyword, with a difficulty score between 30-50. He’s recommending 10 keywords, so a total of 400 foundational backlinks per month.

Some issues I’m seeing with this strategy:

  • The strong majority of keywords related to our business are well above 50
  • The keywords under 50 are generally a lot more specific, which potentially represent an issue, such as Delta-8 THC getting phased out in a year, does this mean we’re spending 6-12 months ranking for words that become obsolete? -The keywords within range, based on the over 200 we’ve looked at, don’t give me confidence that they will grow as important terms.

I’d really appreciate any insights into benchmarks we should be looking at in regards to amount of keywords or backlinks in such a competitive area. Is this even the right approach?

All responses are appreciated.

2

Additionally, 40 backlinks per month per keyword seems like a specific number.

Is there a reason for this specific amount, and how realistic is it to achieve this for competitive keywords?

3

My current SEO company suggested a foundational backlink strategy of 40 links per month, per keyword with a difficulty score of 30-50.

However, most relevant keywords for our cannabis business seem to be much tougher to rank for.