How We Increased the Cannabis Website Traffic By 121% Over 8 Months with Strategic SEO & Link Building Strategies?

Growing organic traffic in the cannabis industry is akin to reaching the summit of Mount Everest. Everyone dares to dream, but only a few succeed. The Cannabis industry is full of challenges that will keep you testing at every phase:

• Restrict Compliances
• Heavy Competition
• Limited Advertising Opportunities

Most Cannabis brands struggle to get visibility on search engines. Cannabis isn’t like a normal health or SaaS niche, where people can read the blog and then make a purchase. If you want revenue for your business, you need to get a rank among the top for your commercial pages. 

But being visible on search engines isn’t the only task for cannabis businesses. The real challenge is to maintain the rankings to ensure higher organic traffic from search engines.

For the last 8 months, our team at Outreach Empress has been working with a cannabis brand to overcome these challenges. And in just 8 months, we grew their organic traffic by a whopping 121%—without spending a dollar on paid ads. 

Is It Possible in the Real World? Gaining 121% Traffic in 8 Months?

Well, the growth isn’t accidental. It is a byproduct of our strategy, planning, and execution. We carefully read all the pages, prioritize the top commercial pages, acquire high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources, and establish topical authority to achieve these results.

This case study breaks down the journey from underperforming traffic to thousands of monthly visitors, showing exactly how we’ve achieved this landmark without doing anything extraordinary. 

Goals & Challenges

From the very first call we had with our client, our goal was crystal clear:

• Increase monthly organic traffic.
• Better keyword rankings for high-converting commercial pages.
• Introducing New Keywords for commercial and educational pages.
• Building a strong backlink profile by acquiring links from authority sites.
• Establish a robust domain authority and establish a strong brand presence in the cannabis industry.
• Drive more engagement through organic search and generate revenue with SEO.

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Just like with great power comes great responsibility, these kinda goals come with difficult challenges.

• Cannabis is a restricted niche, limiting traditional outreach and ad opportunities.
• Many publishers and blogs avoid linking to cannabis sites to safeguard their AdSense revenue.
• The website has poor topical authority, affecting keyword relevancy and search intent alignment.
• Absence of high-quality backlinks makes it difficult for publishers to identify it as a reputable and genuine brand.
• Most commercial pages were ranking out of the top 20, making it more difficult to land customers to buy the products.
• Competitors were already investing heavily in their backlinks campaign, and we needed to outrank them with fewer backlinks and a smaller budget.

We never had the advantage of a higher budget like our competitors, but we’re very sure about one thing: Stick to the plan, and back up our strategy.

Our mission was to achieve long-term growth—without using any kinda black-hat tactics.

Audit & Initial Assessment

While our major focus was on link building, we started with a comprehensive audit of the website to understand what was holding it back. 

✅ Technical SEO Audit

• We identified the broken links impacting overall site health.
• We fix the mobile page optimization and resolve the slow loading speed.
• We updated all the pages with proper metadata, such as title tags and meta descriptions.
  Reassess the internal linking that was diluting page authority and reducing crawl depth efficiency.
  
  

✅ Content Audit

• We identified the thin and repetitive content on multiple commercial pages.
  
• There was a lack of educational content that could support the buyer journey and build topical authority.
  
• Content wasn’t aligned with search intent, especially for transactional keywords.
  
• Several blog posts had potential but were not structured or optimized for SEO.
  
  

✅ Backlink Profile Review

• The domain had a low number of referring domains, with minimal high-quality backlinks.
  
• Backlink distribution wasn’t up to the mark, and most of the backlinks were targeting the pages with no impact.
  
• The anchor text strategy was missing, and the site has used a high number of exact-match anchor texts.
  
  

✅ Competitor Analysis

• We identified keyword gaps and content opportunities where the client could quickly gain ground.
  
• Competitors had already built content hubs and SEO-friendly landing pages targeting the same keywords.

This deep audit gave us a clear roadmap: fix the foundation, strengthen content, and build meaningful links to drive authority and long-term growth.

Our SEO Strategy

Our SEO approach for this cannabis client was far from generic. We followed core SEO fundamentals, but the challenge of working in a restricted industry like cannabis demanded smarter, more creative strategies. We couldn’t rely on traditional advertising or large-scale content promotion, so we leaned on what we do best: building authority through strategic content and ethical link building — all supported by a strong technical foundation.

Here’s how we made it happen:

1. Keyword Research

We started with extensive keyword research—not just chasing high-volume terms but identifying relevant, buyer-intent keywords that aligned with both product pages and blog opportunities.

Instead of only focusing on generic terms like “THC gummies,” we explored long-tail variations such as “best THC gummies for beginners” or “how to use Delta 9 edibles.” We built keyword clusters around each product category to structure future content hubs.

We used tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Search Console to:

• Identify low-competition wins
  
• Track cannibalization issues
• Map keywords to specific pages for targeted optimization

2. On-Page Optimization

Once we had a mapped keyword strategy, we moved to on-page cleanup and enhancement.

• Product pages were optimized with better titles, keyword-rich descriptions, FAQs, and relevant internal links.
• Meta tags were rewritten to improve CTRs on key pages.
• Image alt text and headers were added to improve accessibility and crawlability.

We also introduced keyword-based internal linking between blogs and product pages, ensuring that authority passed through the funnel efficiently. This supported both rankings and user navigation.

3. Technical SEO Improvements

Although the site structure was solid, we identified a few technical bottlenecks:

• Slow-loading pages, especially on mobile
• Broken internal links and outdated redirects
• Missing structured data on commercial pages
  
  

We collaborated with the development team to:

• Compress image files
• Fix 404 errors and redirect loops
• Add schema markup for products and FAQs
• Improve the mobile layout for a smoother UX
  
  

This cleanup helped prepare the site for scalable growth and better indexing.

4. Content Development