Effective Link Building Tactics for CBD Websites: Cannabis Backlinks That Work

Written by

Dmytro Gorbenko

Dmytro Gorbenko

SEO Team Lead

Dmytro і а SEO Team Lead at Backlinkers. He has more than 5 years of experience in managing SEO teams. He shares practical advice and gives link-building ideas to improve your results.

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Reviewed by

Serhii Volokonskyi

Serhii Volokonskyi

Head of Link Building

Serhii has been working in search engine optimization and link building since 2015. His main professional interests are optimization and automation of routine processes for link builders, total quality control, and monitoring of backlinks.

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Updated on: November 22, 2023

20 min read

Introduction

Link building is a vital component of SEO for CBD and cannabis businesses. The more high-quality links you have, the higher your site will rank on search engine results pages for your target keywords.

This will help you attract more organic traffic, leads, and customers to your CBD or cannabis products and services. Building a strong backlink profile can be accomplished through strategic outreach, content marketing, and relationship building.

What Is Cannabis Link Building

Cannabis and CBD link building refers to the process of acquiring links from other websites. Traditionally, site owners link to sources containing high-quality information to add references to their articles. Linking to reliable third-party sources is also thought to improve the content by showing that it’s supported by facts and well-known opinions.

Relevance is a big part of assessing the quality of a link and passing value. Even in light of limited opportunities, you still need to get links from niche websites as any other links such as blog comments, directory submissions, or social media profiles may not count.

Who Needs CBD Link Building Services

If you hope to generate traffic from the search engine by having your pages rank for keywords or in local searches, you need high-quality backlinks to show that you can be trusted. We can think of a number of businesses where this will be important:

• CBD Store’s (E-Commerce): You need to drive highly targeted traffic for more online sales. CBD link building can help attract more customers, and you can build relationships with other CBD businesses, affiliates, and influencers in your niche.
• Affiliate marketers: As an affiliate, you need to establish yourself as an expert and a trusted source of information on CBD products. CBD link building can increase your authority, rankings, and strengthen your relationships with other CBD brands and influencers.
• Cannabis media websites:  Google trusts media websites more, depending on how well they meet their quality standards and user expectations. Links are like votes of confidence, and tell search engines and users that you’re a credible news source that has garnered industry trust.
• Medical websites: Google tries to surface content from highly trusted medical websites when users search for health-related topics. You need to obtain links from highly credible websites by creating expert-written content that attracts links naturally and contributing guest posts to authoritative websites.

Benefits of Cannabis Link Building Services for CBD Sites

Because of the stringent laws that prohibit advertising CBD goods such as supplements, food additives, and inhalants, CBD websites may not get a significant amount of exposure on the internet. As a result, CBD websites may have difficulties in reaching their intended audience via the use of internet advertisements.

The next best alternative is trying to rank higher on user-initiated search results. Building high quality links is a strong pillar of SEO, and done correctly, it can offer the following advantages:

1. Increased search visibility: One effective SEO strategy for improving search visibility is through cannabis services of building links. A link building campaign involves acquiring links from other websites back to your own website. When Google sees that other reputable websites are linking to your site, they interpret this as a signal that your website is trustworthy and valuable to users.
2. Brand awareness: In the highly competitive market of CBD products, it’s essential to establish a strong brand presence to stand out from the competition. The way to boost brand awareness is through link building services. By getting links from authoritative and influential websites, you can increase your brand recognition and credibility.
3. Improved domain authority: There is a correlation between having a high DA/DR score and better rankings. That said, domain authority is not an official Google ranking metric, but a quality score derived by Ahrefs.
4. Increased website traffic (organic and referral): Links increase the number of keywords ranking among the top results and also bring visitors directly from other websites that link to you.
5. Increased sales: You can increase sales as the number of visitors from organic and referral traffic grows. Not all visitors are equally likely to convert. You have to understand who is visiting your site, where they are from, and how long they stay by collecting user analytics.

Identifying High-Quality Cannabis Websites

A website should meet a list of criteria to ensure that it’s of high-quality for the purposes of acquiring CBD backlinks:

• Authority (DR/DA, Domain Age):  To assess the authority and trustworthiness of a website, it’s necessary that it has a domain authority or domain rating score of 30+ and a domain age of at least two years.
• Backlinks (Number of RD): Quality websites have a diverse and natural backlink profile with links from different types of websites (e.g., blogs, news sites, social media platforms, EDU sites, etc.). The ratio of backlinks to referring domains should not be too high, as this can signal that most links are coming from a few domains.
• Topical Relevance: Topical relevance is the relevance that the content on an entire website has to a particular topic or keyword. It’s important if search engines can see that the referring page has some topical relevance to the linked page.
• Reputation (Brand Awareness): Getting a link from a site that is associated with practices, connected with scam, can harm your website’s reputation because such sites will tarnish your image as a legitimate business and can attract malicious traffic that doesn’t have any chance of converting.
• Content quality: Referring domains should have people-first content, meaning that it’s readable, free from grammatical errors, and attempts to provide useful information to searchers.
• User experience: Users are more likely to trust and respect websites that provide a smooth and enjoyable UX. They are also more likely to click on links that lead to other trustworthy and relevant websites.

Search engines like Google use UX as a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches, placing greater importance on websites that are mobile-friendly and with a healthy set of core vitals.

Website Types That Can Improve Your Rankings

Get links from specialized in CBD and other authoritative websites to boost your website. Links from these categories may boost your CBD website’s performance:

• CBD Blogs and Influencers

You can increase your visibility and establish credibility within the industry, which can lead to higher search engine rankings and increased website traffic.

• Cannabis Media Websites

Sites such as High Times and Leafly provide news, entertainment, education, and a community for cannabis consumers and professionals.

• News Websites

They cover many topics in their quest to provide commentary and analysis on current events.

•  Medical Media

Sites like WebMD, Medical News Today, and Medline Plus provide health and wellness information to the public.

•  Lifestyle Blogs

They share and promote daily life experiences and perspectives from an individual or a group of like-minded people.

• Cannabis Dispensaries That Sell CBD Products

They are often local businesses that sell CBD products and may have a blog section where they cover various topics related to cannabis culture.

Tools for Finding and Selecting Cannabis Websites for Link Building

Google doesn’t disclose how they determine the quality of websites (how they assign PageRank). Similarly, they don’t publicly avail performance metrics for each domain such as the number of keywords the website is ranking for, its backlink profile, or search traffic. That makes it necessary to use third-party tools that crawl the web and collect their own metrics.

You’ll need these tools to assess the quality of referring domains before outreach websites. They will come in handy when discovering backlink opportunities from your competitor’s link profiles and unraveling their backlink strategies.

Some examples of tools for finding and selecting cannabis websites for link building are:

• Google Search operators – Google Search operators for finding domains include manual operators like “site:”, and parsing operators like “inurl:”. They allow you to search for pages within a specific domain or with a specific keyword in the URL. For instance, by using the “inurl,” search operator, you can find pages that are linked to using a specified anchor text.

• Ahrefs – Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that provides features like Site Explorer and Content Explorer for website analysis and research. With Site Explorer, users can analyze the backlink profile of any website, including the number of referring domains, organic search traffic, and top pages. Content Explorer allows users to search for popular content topics in a particular niche or industryand analyze their socialshares, backlinks, and estimated traffic. 
• BuzzSumo – You find the most popular content ideas and sites on any topic or niche, making it possible to identify influential websites and authors that create engaging content related to cannabis.

• SEMrush – SEMrush provides various metrics and reports that can help you estimate the traffic of any website. You can use the Domain Overview report to see the estimated monthly organic and paid traffic, as well as the number of keywords and backlinks for any domain.

• SimilarWeb – The traffic estimation tool provides various metrics and reports that can help you estimate the traffic of any website. You can similarly see top referring domains.

Effective Cannabis Link Building Strategies

The most effective link building strategies are often the ones that incorporate creativity, as well as a focus on building high-quality, relevant links that add value to your website. These strategies are also efficient and budget friendly for the cannabis business.

You don’t need to spend a fortune or waste time on spammy tactics. Just follow some proven methods that work for the cannabis niche:

Cannabis Blogger and Media Outreach

Blogger and media outreach involves identifying relevant contacts, creating targeted pitches, building relationships, providing high-quality content, and following up. Compared to guest blogging, it gives you more control over how you receive a link.

Your links may appear contextually in the article or in the author’s profile. This lets you promote other pages on your website instead of having all guest post links redirect to your homepage, making it difficult to spread link juice to other internal sites.

You have to pitch your ideas to the site owners, negotiate the terms and fees, and create content that meets their standards and guidelines. That’s why you might need some professional help from us.

We can handle aspects of outreach link building for you, from finding suitable sites to writing engaging articles that link back to your site naturally.

Guest posting

Guest posting is when you write an article placed on CBD websites that accept free submissions, or other news websites, medical media, and lifestyle blogs that are not about cannabis but have your target audience.

In exchange for your article, many sites credit you by providing a link back to your site in the author bio. Most of the links are dofollow and can pass valuable link juice to your domain.

A quick-cheat to find guest posting opportunities in the cannabis niche is to use following the Google search parameter:  “submit a guest post” + your keyword:”

For instance, by searching for “submit a guest post cannabis website,” we stumbled upon sites like

• High Herstory
• Cannabis News Australia
• Cannabis & Tech Today
• Investinweed.com
• Quick Med Cards
• And more.

Link Insertions

Link insertions or niche edits are basically a method of getting your links added to existing articles that are relevant to your niche. This way, you don’t have to write new content or wait for it to rank. You can benefit from the authority and traffic of the existing content right away.

If you don’t have enough time or the skills to do it yourself, you can sign up for our link insertion services. We’ll find relevant and authoritative websites that already have articles related to the cannabis niche and steer the negotiations to have links inserted into them. We can do it at a reasonable price and with a fast turnaround.

Skyscraper Technique

The skyscraper link building technique is premised on the fact that other websites will want to link to the most authoritative, up-to-date, and exhaustive content for a given topic. You’ll simply need to create better or longer content than your competitors.

The process entails finding a popular article that already has many backlinks, as this shows that the topic receives a lot of links. You then create a more comprehensive, up-to-date, expert-written, and relevant version of it.

Finally, you promote the content by reaching out to the sites linking to the less-exhaustive content and recommending your links. It’s also necessary to promote your new content to other similar articles to take advantage of new linking opportunities.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building revolves around finding broken links on other external domains and offering your own relevant content as a replacement. It is an effective way to build high-quality backlinks because it provides value to both the website owner and the content creator.

By suggesting a replacement for the broken link, you’re helping the website owner improve their site’s user experience, while also gaining a valuable backlink to your own content.

To get started with broken link building, you’ll need to identify relevant websites in your industry and use tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to find broken links on those sites.

Measuring the Success of Your Cannabis Link Building Efforts

Link building is not a one-time SEO strategy that you implement and forget. It demands constant monitoring and evaluation to measure the success of your efforts and identify areas for improvement. By measuring the success of your cannabis link building efforts, you can:

• Know what works: You can track which strategies generate the most links. But go a step further by assessing which of the links generate the most traffic, conversions, and engagement for your website.
• Find hidden strategies: You can also discover new opportunities and tactics for quality link building that you may have overlooked or ignored.
• Control the quality of links: Monitoring metrics helps maintain link profile quality. Track referring page domain and page authority, anchor text, number of unique domains, thematic relevancy, and link position.

Metrics for Measuring the Success of Link Building Efforts

How can you tell if the backlinks you have garnered have contributed to your site’s success? Well, there are some SEO metrics that help you to gauge if you’re benefiting from backlinks:

• Domain Rating/Domain Authority: The domain authority score should improve with some of the links you get, and you can obtain a better boost by getting links from high DA/DR websites.
• URL rating/Page Authority: Scored from 0 to 100, the value should likewise increase to predict how well a specific page will rank in search results.
• Organic Traffic: After search engines crawl and index backlinks, they should pass link juice to the linked pages, and give them better rankings on search results. This doesn’t happen automatically if the content is of low quality and if the page has other problems.
• Referral Traffic: The amount of referral traffic should subsequently increase, and you can track the amount using analytical tools like Google Analytics.
• Conversions: If you’re receiving highly targeted and relevant traffic, the number of sales or sign-ups must consequently improve, and failure to do so may indicate that you’re not generating the right traffic.

By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can measure the success of your link building efforts and make adjustments if necessary to improve the effectiveness of your cannabis link building strategy.

Conclusion

If you’re running a cannabis website, you need external links to get search engines to trust your brand. Some strategies that you can use include guest posting, outreach link building, niche edits, and building better content.

As you undertake link building, it’s important to measure success metrics such as conversion rate, unique referring domains, and organic ranking. Similarly, it’s better to implement strict quality controls to ensure that you’re building relevant links that will not risk manual actions and penalties from Google.

Implementing the techniques requires time, expertise, and sacrifice. It may be better to work with CBD link building services, so you can focus on other aspects of your business, like producing quality products.

How Can Backlinkers help you to improve your CBD Link Building Strategy

Are you tired of not finding your pages ranking among the top results, even if they are clear, engaging, and helpful?

Backlinkers can improve your CBD link building strategy by identifying high-quality websites, building relationships with website owners, creating shareable content, building backlinks, and monitoring your backlinks.

By utilizing their expertise and resources, you can acquire high-quality backlinks, improve your SEO efforts, and drive more traffic to your CBD website.