Cannabis SEO With Brady Madden

Brady Madden, an SEO professional specializing in the cannabis industry, discusses his journey into the space and the unique challenges of doing SEO in the cannabis niche. He highlights the importance of education and content creation in the industry, as well as the impact of Google updates like the Medic update.

Brady also shares insights on keyword research and strategy for cannabis businesses, emphasizing the need to focus on revenue-driving terms and conversion rate optimization. He advises involving an SEO from the beginning of website launches and stresses the importance of understanding the client's business goals and measuring success accordingly.

Takeaways

• Education and content creation are crucial in the cannabis industry, as there is a lack of information and misconceptions about cannabis products.
• Google updates like the Medic update have impacted the cannabis industry, leading to a shift towards more medical-based content and a focus on revenue-driving terms.
• Keyword research in the cannabis industry can be challenging due to restrictions on advertising certain terms, but conversations with clients and understanding their business goals can help fill in the gaps.
• When working with cannabis businesses, it is important to focus on conversion rate optimization and make it easy for customers to find and purchase products.
• Involving an SEO from the beginning of website launches is essential to ensure proper URL redirects, meta data, and schema implementation.
• Understanding the client's business goals and measuring success accordingly is key to a successful SEO campaign in the cannabis industry.

Chapters:
00:00
Introduction and Background
02:39
The Importance of Education and Content Creation
09:22
The Impact of Google Updates
16:42
Keyword Research and Revenue-Driving Terms
22:45
Conversion Rate Optimization and Focusing on Business Goals
30:18
Measuring Success and Understanding Client's Business

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Background
• 2:39 The Importance of Education and Content Creation
• 9:22 The Impact of Google Updates
• 16:42 Keyword Research and Revenue-Driving Terms
• 22:45 Conversion Rate Optimization and Focusing on Business Goals
• 30:18 Measuring Success and Understanding Client's Business

Transcript

Jeremy Rivera (00:02.966)

Welcome to the unscripted SEO podcast. I'm your host Jeremy Rivera and I'm joined here by Brady. But what's your last name again, Brady? Madden. See, if I were prepared, I would have totally known that. So there's no script, there's no agenda. We're just two SEOs having a conversation. So obviously, the first question is going to be something like, what would you say?

You do hear Brady. Right on. So I am a search engine optimization professional in the Cannabis Space. I like to call them SEO professionals nowadays. Primarily focused on the cannabis industry. And yeah, that's what I do. So is there a particular life aspect or what led you to specializing in cannabis? And as far as like, you know, there's different verticals and niches and they always

like you might like be a big outdoorsman. Like I worked with one agency and he was always fly fishing. And so he went to conferences and met people that way. So what's your introduction to the cannabis world? And let's talk about like what's different doing SEO in that niche. Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So I got into the space, I think primarily because of my interest in health and wellness.

my career started in the nutrition space, and like CPG selling nutritional supplements, vitamins, and, know, all things like that. I started in sales. moved into marketing that got me into digital marketing. from there, I just kind of started looking for products and things like that, that I was, you know, interested in, obviously nutrition being a big part of

discovered really, with through Simone, health issues of my own. have ulcerative colitis and struggled with some different gut and GI issues because of that. you know, found out through my own research, how much cannabis could benefit those sorts of things. And so I started becoming more interested in that space. I wound up working as a marketing director at a cannabis company, primarily in the CBD and hemp side of

Jeremy Rivera (02:10.894)
for about three years and that was really where I saw how I could take my SEO knowledge and background in that and really kind of combine it with something that I had a big interest in cannabis. And so just kind of married those two concepts and started this business in 2020 and I've been doing it ever since. So interesting. So it's almost like a passion, like health journey, like meeting another industry and moving it forward. Yeah, absolutely. I

There's a lot of things like B Corp companies not focusing just on the money and profit aspect, but hey, there's something positive that comes out of it that I've always enjoyed when I'm not just helping people sell waste oil heaters for mechanics shops, but doing something that might move the needle.

Absolutely. Absolutely. think for me too, it's also the interest of the content that we're creating. know, it's like when I go to create content briefs or content for a client or even just like looking through a client website, it's always interesting to me to really like dive into the content and see, you know, what they're talking about, how they're educating their customers, what they're focused on. You know, and when I really got started out, that was how I just continue to increase my depth of knowledge in cannabis is just creating SEO content.

around the subject, around the plan, around the industry and those sorts of things. yeah, so it's kinda, it's it's that and it's also just being able to just go deep on one thing, you know, being able to have like an interest in that and going deep on that one thing that you're interested in. Yeah, I mean, I'm like a jack of all trades. Like when it comes to SEO and industries, like, like I said, waste oil heaters, dog poop scooper sites, waste oil management

the asphalt repair, but also some fun stuff too. But it sounds like being able to have a topic that is so rich would really lend itself to exploring that content side of things, especially when there's such a patchwork of different piece of information and laws when it comes to cannabis industry in general. how do

Jeremy Rivera (04:36.234)
that content side as far as like education? Do you see it as a challenge or as an opportunity? That's a question. I would say that it's changed over the years. When I first started, I was on the hemp CBD side of things and one of the biggest things we were creating content on is just the difference between hemp and marijuana. A lot of people don't understand that cannabis is the plant and then there's a hemp variation and a marijuana variation.

for a while was really just distinguishing those two things and then helping create content around that. But I think over the years with search engine algorithms updating and things like that, some of the educational content around what cannabis is, what it does, and more importantly, the effects. So when you start to get into the either medical benefits or effects or things like that, a lot of those type of things we could rank for previously, whereas now a lot of that type of stuff is going to

either government websites or it's going to, you know, Cleveland clinics, web MDs and those like more medical based websites, which is fine. I get where Google is going with that. But at the same time, those type of medical sites also don't have a lot of education in cannabis. So I think that it should be going more to these cannabis websites because they do have that information. But, you know, to kind of stick on the point that we're talking about. So I think that it shifted away from some of the education

I certainly think that education is still very important. It's a huge part of this industry. It's, it's a plant and a product that a lot of people don't have a lot of information about. And so I think that it's good, but I think that it's more talking with the brand and working with the brand and really getting into like, okay, what part of cannabis education do you want to speak on? Are you vape focused? Are you plant focused? Are you, you know, growing education focused? Are you consumption focused? All sorts of things.

And then there's also the laws. The laws are very tricky because they change so frequently, you know, and it's like as an SEO, it's like we don't necessarily, we like to create evergreen content a lot of times. And so if you're creating something that's just constantly having to be updated, that can be frustrating, but it can also be a good opportunity to really be able to educate people on where a certain state or where even a certain municipalities laws are and how all those sorts of things can change. So a lot of nuances around those sorts of things.

Jeremy Rivera (07:04.34)
What are some of the challenges or restrictions that Google has made? I think it's interesting because I think I saw the other side of that. Was that the medic update that made a big shift with the cannabis industry? Because I was working with Dr. Axe before that and I watched them skyrocket up and have all of this alternative health and

awareness and medical articles that were written 10 times easily better because they, at our direction, know, they hired Gantt trained writers, like it was an actual newspaper organization in Nashville that let a bunch of people go and he hired them. And so they're writing, you know, really serious quality stuff, always making sure to cite multiple scientific studies, trying to phrase things carefully and Healthline is like,

your liver is good. If your liver is bad, then it's bad. Like, seriously, I've done a subcontract with HCA, and I had to get a drug test and go to their campus to be able to edit like 10 sentences on their site. So like the red tape to be able to like, move the needle on some of that health, truly health conscious stuff published by what is now the trusted sites.

It was so locked down that the quality was super low. And so, you know, Google had to come in and put his thumb on the scale because their content was garbage. And so they had to proxy in some other signal. So it's interesting to me. hadn't thought, I didn't know at the time that that also impacted the cannabis industry. Can you explain a little bit about what you saw?

Yeah, yeah, that's actually, it's interesting that you bring that up because at that time when the medic update happened, I had been with the hemp company that I was with probably about six, eight months somewhere in there. I had taken their biggest site from about 35 K a month to about 85 K a month. And then it had just crossed over a hundred K a month in total revenue for the site. And then the medic update hit and then we lost about 50 % of that just overnight.

Jeremy Rivera (09:22.55)
And these are terms like, how does CBD work? What is it? How to take it? Those sorts of things, you everything you were just saying. And so we lost that for a good period of time. And so we really had to dig into the site itself and dig into some of the learnings. You know, there's a ton of SEOs out there that shared a lot of great content around, you know, EAT. That was kind of like EAT came out of a lot of ads, really a new thing.

back in that time, but it took us a good like six months or so to really kind of turn it around. But even with turning it around, we never really saw like a full full recovery to where we were at, just given all that. So yeah, that was a pretty big thing that I think kind of kicked off the whole, know, medic update with everything going to more of them, like a medical based content versus, you know, even holistic content and things like that that you had mentioned.

Doing well just on its own and then now it's like we needed all these other kind of things to back it up So yeah, that was a big thing that I think hurt a lot of holistic websites so I think what I'd like what I'm curious about is kind of the trade -offs because obviously like if you can't You know generate as much like help topical content there

one other thing that obviously has been happening a lot more since medic is actual like physical locations and more states open to dispensaries and physical stores. So was the shift in strategy to try to go, you know, location focused or, or more focused on, like, heavy conversion terms of actual, trying to get

capture purchase intent or transactional intent, just doubling down and trying to pay more to try to build more links, I'm guessing would be the path that is then forged for the cannabis space. Is that accurate or? Yeah, I think a little bit of all the above, but it also depends really on the type of

Jeremy Rivera (11:35.134)
If you're talking like a CBD company that's selling nationwide, then there was adjustments we had to make there. But then if you're talking like a dispensary, then yeah, absolutely. Focusing on those local terms, focusing more on revenue driving terms and educational stuff or brands looking at top products and why people think these are top products and those sorts of things I think was really kind of the move to real. And honestly, I think it was a good move. It's like if you're a local dispensary,

Do you want to rank nationwide? Sure, it can be a good thing. It can help you attract links to the website and those sorts of things. But ultimately, you want foot traffic. You want people coming into your store. You want people purchasing. And so, yeah, I think that was a big focus and really kind of driving into more of those revenue -based terms that people are looking for like a product or a product type. And on the first end of that, we were dealing with iframe websites. So it was actually, it's like that content was doubly important because

a lot of these iframes weren't even able to be read by search engines. And so it's like creating that content around product categories, brands or product types and those sorts of things I think was just as important because you needed those pages because search engines couldn't see those iframe pages anyways. So it's almost like opening up technical SEO issues to find those wins that kind of evaporated.

out of the changes of what you could do in the content arena. Did you see a similar impact with the helpful content updates when it came to the cannabis space? Or since Medic already kind of pushed that button a bit, that there wasn't as much impact that you might have noticed, or as far as getting a slap for unhelpful content, if you're not trying to make it then to content.

you're much less likely to get hit with that particular aspect. Yeah, I honestly didn't really notice a ton of change with the Helpful Content Update from the cannabis industry perspective. And maybe that could just be because all the websites that I'm focusing on are, you know, focusing on creating like AI spam content at scale. That could certainly be a piece of it.

Jeremy Rivera (13:53.742)
but, but yeah, I think that for the most part, as long as the sites weren't creating content that was saying like cannabis will do this or it will do that or it, you know, it's, it's shown to cure cancer, like, you know, putting those types of words in like the cures or the, proven to do this or proven to do that. you know, it was, the sites were totally fine for the most part. yeah. So obviously, so in Google ads.

you can't advertise for certain terms and phrases. So when you're doing keyword research, you get a lot of blank rows as far as volume goes. What's the impact of that in terms of strategy overall, or do you just kind of, do you have another system to fill that in, or is it, you know, just kind of stick your finger in the wind and like directionally?

this seems like these are the right terms and phrases. And since you know there's that core element of those ones you can't hit or advertise to, what's the impact of that kind of blind spot? Yeah, I think that's a good question. And I think the first note is that there is some terms you certainly can do the paid search against for cannabis companies. It's just a little bit more tricky and there's a lot of other.

kind of roundabout ways that you need to go about in order to be able to get it to work. But ultimately at the end of the day, I think that it's taking what you can get from there. Cause there is a little bit of data that'll come through from that sort of thing. But I think it's really just talking with the retailer and really kind of having that conversation and sometimes, you know, just getting out of the tools for a minute and just having those conversations of just like, Hey, what are your best sellers? Where is your focus? you

you know, are you a flower focus or do you have a vape focus for this month or where are those sorts of things? And then really creating some content, the supportive revenue focused content that we had kind of mentioned earlier around those sorts of things. And then also really just making sure that a lot of these sites are on native menus. Even though we've begun to move away from iframes and a lot of dispensaries have moved away from iframes, there's a lot of them now that are still not, haven't made that move yet.

Jeremy Rivera (16:12.898)
and so I've seen some big shifts in dispensaries that have, like for instance, Bud's goods, just, helped them recently convert over just a couple of months back, from an iframe menu to a native e -commerce menu. And then now they've gotten pages like their vape, category page is just absolutely taken off and brought in thousands of additional visits for them. just because they can fulfill that intent when somebody's looking for vape near me or, you know, a certain specific type of vape or a certain brand or something like that, because.

those pages exist on their website now. And so sometimes it's really just like making the shift in the menu and having that menu that's visible to search engines. And then if you can create some content around those or focusing on the clusters that we know is gonna be really important to driving revenue and those sorts of things, I think that that's really where the focus needs to be right now. I think it's easy to get carried away in SEO with traffic and with high search volumes.

when ultimately at the end of the day, we're doing all this stuff in order to drive revenue. So if we can focus to things like pre -rolls, vapes, flower, and things like that, that we know are the best sellers and making sure that those are visible, making sure that we've got, you know, guides and other things like that, that maybe are helpful, but ultimately they're funneling people into those shop pages is where we want to get them. So it almost seems like sharpening their skills as far as like conversion rate optimization,

following game theory of how the eye traps. If you've got a call to action, you want two buttons. One is your most serious one. It's a darker color on the left. And then the one you're like, you'd be OK if they did that too, is a lighter color. And it's on the right, because we rate from left to right, and our brain prioritizes those signals. So kind of figuring out all those.

Konami codes of the human brain to get them to click seems like something that would be useful in an industry that's more transaction based. Definitely. thinking about those and just making it easy. Making it easy to get to those pages, those important pages, showing up for those searches. A lot of cannabis purchases and shopping right now is price based.

Jeremy Rivera (18:34.328)
price -based or even like THC per price -based. Although I'm really kind of hoping that we move away from that. Had some good discussions with some other cannabis operators recently around those sorts of things. Cause you know, it's like you look at alcohol for instance, and in the alcohol space, you don't go in and say, all right, what proof is this alcohol? And then buy it based off of that. You know, it's like you buy it based off of the type or the type of drink you're trying to make or something like that. think a lot of consumers right now are purchasing based off of

purely THC content and specials pages and deals pages and things like that are going to be important because there's a lot of value based shopping that's going on right now. Yeah. But I think, yeah, you know, just getting back to conversion rate optimization, think just making those pages easy, making them visible. The more mature a market gets, the more specific people can understand of like, want this product type, this strain, sorts of searches and things like that are really important too,

Yeah, to your point, making it easy, making it obvious of what you need them to do and how they can get to their shopping page. So what's your approach with clients when you're talking to them or just you have like a full agency, so you're like taking people on. How do you talk about the potential outcome of like their SEO campaign?

and setting expectations of those outcomes and potential impacts. Do you take a forecasting type approach where you're using data to create a pool and say, hey, here's the potential market you could tap into? Or is it more along the lines of, these are the types of things that we can do and have seen results. Here's what it would look like with a 10 % increase or a 20 % increase in your bottom

Like in those conversations, like how do you frame the success or the return on investment that your clients can expect from SEA? Yeah, that's a good question. I think the first thing is really just understanding where they're at. It's like if they're a, let's say like they're a multi -state operator, so we call those MSOs and they've got 20 locations across multiple different states.

Jeremy Rivera (20:57.676)
I'll take a different approach with something like that than if they're like a mom and pop shop that's just got a single location operating in a single area. So I think that that's a key thing to understand. I think what's also key to understand is where they're at with their menu. Are they still on the iFrame right now or have they made the shift over to more of a native menu? Or is that maybe something that like I'm going to be kind of working with them to work with their web design company to help them do?

And so depending where all those stages are at, you know, can kind of depend on the results. But I definitely want to always just, you know, give them some sort of like a forecasted result of just like, hey, here's where you're at now, you know, in terms of rankings and, you know, here's where you're lacking, here's where you're doing well. And then, you know, using tools like a SEO arcade, I think is a great tool to be able to forecast things or some other forecast models and things like that that we have.

that we can really just pull keyword data to say, the current websites that are ranking in the top three for these particular terms are bringing in this much traffic. And then if we were to take the website's existing conversion rate and then multiply that conversion rate by the traffic that they're getting, it could look like this. And so we're always trying to do as best as we can, but I always try to give them the caveat that there's, as I kind of mentioned earlier,

it's still price centric. So it's like, even if we can get them the ranking and even if we can get them in, then they've got somebody else in the area that's undercutting the market, that could still play a role in it. And so we're always kind of looking at all these different factors and, you know, even having conversations down to like, what's your pricing? Like, are you priced much higher than everybody else in the market? And if you are, we're gonna need to put some content on these pages to explain to people why you're priced higher, like

why is your product a couple of hours more? What's the value there? And so it's really kind of digging in and just having those conversations with the potential client beforehand to really understand where they're at and what they're doing. And then taking that and then using the tools that we have available to us to kind of give them some ideas as far as like where we could take them to. Yeah, it's kind of like the conversation with the realtor of like, so like why would they choose you? like,

Jeremy Rivera (23:14.026)
I'm Jimmy Kimmel. I sell real estate in this area. That's my unique selling proposition. My face. Obviously they believe that based off the number of billboards out there with realtors of everything I touch turns to sold. Having that conversation of like, what is your unique selling proposition? Kind of sounds a lot like SEOs need to be more grounded.

in some business fundamentals versus learning how to sell magic beans. You know, there was a wild west period where like, I need a website cause then I'm going to succeed. you know, you just, you just make a website and then just people come in and they give you money and like, well, no, actually like if, if your website doesn't have a phone number because you, for your florist shop,

you're not going to get more business because they literally cannot call you. No matter how much they want to get peonies for their wife, they cannot find out if you have peonies if you don't want a phone number because it's going to harsher vibe in your store, which obviously this is from a first person account. I'm really annoyed. Fantastic local florist. They have fantastic flowers, but they refuse to get a phone because they don't want

ringing all the time in the shop. So they're missing out on all of the business of people who would want to call, put in an order, but they won't take phone calls. They won't list a phone number on Yelp, nada, nowhere. It's crazy. So sometimes you can't fix core business decisions as an SEO, but maybe being grounded more in those business fundamentals, we as consultants,

can view ourselves as more part of their business than just a method to get them search traffic. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I had that conversation with a group that I was with talking to the other day because they were just like, one of the things is they were like, don't you want to talk about keywords or this or that? And it was just like, we had been talking for 30, 45 minutes and I hadn't really asked them about keywords because it's

Jeremy Rivera (25:37.91)
I don't always necessarily care. It's like, yeah, I know at some point that the rubber has to meet the road and I need to put some keywords on the page. I'm gonna do some keyword research and those sorts of things. But ultimately, I just wanna see where they're at as a business because like, wanna know what matters to them and to their business and like what they're judging as success. Because what they're judging as success is what we need to judge as success. know, like we can't just say, hey,

increased your traffic or we increase your clicks or we increase this or that. And it's like, well, if we're looking at a campaign as success and they're not looking at it as a success, then it's like there's a disconnect there. so it's, you know, keeping that focus on what is it that's going to benefit them the most, you know? And it's just like you using that to really drive strategy, I think is the most important thing over everything. That's true. I mean, there are blunders, like we've worked together

a couple of your accounts and like one sticks out as far as like, okay, there's launching a new website with a no follow and no index, but there's also launching your new website as a single page application and you don't actually have any hyperlinks. So it seems like there are some spots where it's like businesses can make boneheaded moves

and hurt themselves in terms of SEO, in terms of visibility, aside from no indexing their site, what are your biggest blunders that you've seen that maybe you've been able to reverse or maybe not? Yeah, good question. I think the one you had just alluded to is, well, that comes down to a custom site. So I would say don't launch a custom website.

There rarely is there ever an instance or a case where I've seen that a company needs to launch a custom website. mean, think sticking, like take it easy and just like, I guess not take it easy is probably not the way to say it, but just like make it simple, keep it simple is more what I would say. just, you know, if you're going to launch a new website, understand that there's a lot of things that are going to need to change and you're going to want to involve an SEO throughout the entire process.

Jeremy Rivera (27:59.234)
You know, they might not have a lot that they can do, but you at least need to have them with their eyes on things to say, okay, our URL is going to change. Do we have a plan for redirecting these URLs? Those are probably the biggest really kind of blunders that I've seen in like a new website going live or just a common error, know, especially with cannabis operators. A lot of cannabis operators don't have, you know, SEO experience for one, but just marketing experience in general. You know, it's like their focus a lot of times

on business or it's on cultivation or something like that. And so I've seen some websites launched that are going from just an iFrame site to a native e -commerce site. And it looks the exact same except for it has a new menu on it. But ultimately it's still a brand new website. It's a new theme, it's a new whatever. So it's like, even though on the front end it basically looks the same except for it has a menu attached to it.

it's still a new site. So that means that meta descriptions have changed, your meta titles have changed, your schema data likely isn't on there. And so I think that there's just a lot that goes into all those sorts of things. And so I think if anything, the blunder is really just not involving an SEO until post launch. You want to let that SEO know as soon as you know you're launching a new website, let them know if it's six months out, fine, it's six months out. They probably don't have, you know, lot of a lot to do at that point, but

at least involve them in conversations and make sure that they can help you kind of guide you through that process to make sure that whatever is existing and in place is gonna get pushed through to the new platform. Makes sense. So wrapping up what's like one top level action item, one thing that a person who is out of business or is an SEO based off of where you're at, what do you think?

is like the highest value thing that they should be working on next. As an SEO, right? As an SEO. I think as the SEO, I think it's really focusing on the business, like talking to the business owner, talk to them about what they're seeing, how they judge success, what they're looking for, like say, hey, if we work together for six months and six months from now, your campaign's a success, what would have had to have happened in order for this to be a success?

Jeremy Rivera (30:18.026)
Is it just revenue? Do you also want to talk about like, is there a cause that you're involved in and you want to rank for those things? Is there, you know, something else that you want to push? Is there products you want to focus on? So I think it's really just getting into that business owner and don't, don't let them off the hook with just like a simple, like, yeah, we want to sell more. yeah, we want to do this. It's like, okay, well tell me more about that. You know, like get, get deeper into those things and re ask them, you know, if you might've, you might've asked them at the kickoff.

but reiterate it to them at your first reporting meeting or reiterate it to them in an email and continue to do that to see if they continue to give you the same answer because a lot of times they'll start to give you different answers or they'll maybe give you a different version of it and you'll hear something different that makes you go, I see, okay, so you're also looking for this and then tweak your strategy based on what those things are. Absolutely. Thanks so much for your time. Wonderful to talk to you. Where can people find you online or your agency?

Yeah, thanks so much. Appreciate you having me. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's probably the best. Just Brady Madden and my agency is Evergreen Digital. Look us up on LinkedIn. That's where we're at. EvergreenSEOServices .com is the website. Awesome. Great talking to you. See you. Thanks so much.