Problems Our Content Writing Services Solve for Cannabis Brands

Our cannabis content writing services solve several key problems for our clients:

“I have a strong SEO foundation. Now I need a partner who can produce high-quality content”

Many of our clients come to us with a strong SEO foundation in place, but they realize that producing high-quality blog content on a consistent basis is necessary to achieve high-rankings for lucrative, competitive search terms that drive foot traffic or online revenue. 

They either have in-house expertise or have hired an agency to build and optimize their core pages and Google Business Profiles, but they need a partner that can publish content that:

• Ranks well for target keywords
• Boosts overall site authority
• Drives traffic and email signups
• Offers a good reading experience
• Is on-brand and unique

We solve this challenge by providing a content writing service that requires less than 2 hours of your time each month while outputting content that’s consistently the highest-quality out there for the topics our clients care about.

“I already have a lot of blog posts, but they aren’t ranking or driving business results”

Lots of our clients come to us with a site full of blog posts – 50, 100, 200 posts, even – that aren’t ranking for their target keywords.

This is typically due to a breakdown in the content production process that causes the final product not to be comprehensive or high-quality enough to drive results. All of the content on your site must meet a certain standard of quality in order to rank – 100 subpar blog posts won’t drive you any more results than 1 subpar blog post.

Often, these posts will have been written as a part of a larger SEO initiative, but treated as an afterthought and therefore not had the required effort put into them. 

In addition to using a robust process to produce each piece of content, we solve this dead-weight content problem by thoroughly updating all of your current content before producing new pieces. 

This lifts the median quality of your website (all of the low-quality content will be gone) while allowing them to get some value from the content they’ve invested in previously. 

“I don’t have time to write content for my website”

Many of our clients realize they need to invest in blogging, either as part of their SEO strategy or as a way to fuel their content marketing engine, but they simply don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to hire and manage a freelancer or write the content themselves. 

They need an agency that can handle the process end-the-end and still produce content that’s as good as what could be written by an in-house team member. 

“I need content that fuels my entire online marketing engine”

Apart from the SEO benefits, a major reason cannabis companies invest in blog content is that it has the ability to power their entire content marketing engine: blog posts can be repurposed into emails and social media posts, and they can be shared in-store with customers looking for in-depth information. 

But there’s a caveat: in order for this to work, the blog content has to be comprehensive and engaging, not just a bunch of text thrown onto a page to try and rank for search queries. 

This is especially important in the cannabis space, where anecdotal evidence is more valuable because there’s less official guidance: your content must convey human experience, not empty statements.

Our solution to this challenge is a thorough production process that ensures the content we produce for you is not only high-performing from an SEO standpoint, but is on-brand and contains unique, first-hand insight.

“I hired a writer or agency to write content, but it wasn’t very good”

Some of our clients come to us having hired writers or agencies to write content for them and not being satisfied by the quality of the work or the results it brought. 

This problem typically arises when contractors neglect to gain a deep understanding of your business or customer, and instead write content by copying what everyone else is writing online.

We solve this problem by conducting in-depth company customer research at the beginning of our content writing engagements, and then interviewing a subject matter expert for every article we produce for your company. This ensures your content is on-brand and uniquely valuable.

Most Common Cannabis Content Writing Mistakes We See 

We’ve designed our cannabis content writing services to produce high-quality content while addressing and sidestepping content writing mistakes we find prevalent in cannabis:

Prioritizing quantity over quality

Many cannabis brands hear that blogging is important and begin writing and posting content on their website in a rushed and disorganized manner. 

The problem here is that content must meet a certain standard to begin ranking, and if you’re publishing lots of content, all of it must be high-quality for you to see the benefit of accumulating traffic and website authority.

As an example of this, publishing 100 mediocre blog posts won’t drive any better results than publishing 1 mediocre blog post; you’ll never break past the “SEO barrier” and begin ranking if your output doesn’t meet a certain quality threshold. 

Additionally, “quality content” has a unique definition in cannabis, where consumers like to be highly educated before purchasing: they are, after all, researching products that may create psychoactive effects. 

Therefore, covering every topic comprehensively is an absolutely must if your brand is going to win in search.

Not focusing on core topics

The main reason your cannabis brand should blog is to build authority for their website. By writing many high-quality blog posts on a certain topic, Google will perceive you as an authority on that topic. Consequently, you’ll have an easier time ranking for all keywords related to that topic, including lucrative, often competitive terms that relate to purchasing products or visiting a physical location. 

However, many cannabis companies don’t write enough blog posts about each of their core product lines (e.g. different cannabinoids or different types of products), so they do not reap this lucrative benefit of blogging. 

Not differentiating their content

To rank, a piece of content must cover certain topics that searchers find important. The easiest way to figure out what these topics are is to examine the content already ranking on Google, and then aim to cover the most frequently-discussed topics in your article. 

But some brands stop here when building their content outlines, and end up producing content that covers the exact same subtopics, in the exact order, from the exact same angle.

This results in content that:

• Is a derivative version of top-ranking articles, so has a hard time breaking the top 5 results
• Isn’t memorable or uniquely insightful to readers, so has a hard time getting readers to give their email address or remember your brand name

Your content must be differentiated. 

Our Cannabis Content Writing Process

We employ a four-step content writing process that allows us to produce the highest-quality work for our cannabis clients.

1. Content audit & in-depth customer research

We start every engagement by auditing your current content marketing operation, according to your goals for hiring us. 

During this phase, we also conduct in-depth research about your business: what problems you solve, for whom, and how, as well as how your business speaks (tone and voice) and what your readers prefer in written content. 

We also discover the key ways in which your current content efforts are lacking so that we’re able to address these specific issues and deliver meaningful improvements for your business in the content we produce. 

2. SEO content marketing strategy

In some cases, our clients have an existing SEO strategy and want our team to plug in and deliver high-quality content targeting pre-selected keywords. 

But many times, they don’t, and need an SEO strategy for their blog that achieves key objectives, such as:

• Building site authority and opening up ranking opportunities for lucrative keywords
• Driving relevant traffic that will convert to email signups and revenue
• Building authority to support a key set of pages

3. Content production

Once we have a thorough view of your business, customer, and content needs, and we have an SEO strategy in place to meet those needs, we get to work producing content. 

We produce between 2 and 12 blog posts per month for our clients. Before producing new content, we update pieces of your existing content that have the potential to help your business achieve its goals. 

If you have content that can’t be turned into something beneficial, we coordinate with you to archive or repurpose it so it doesn’t go to waste, but also doesn’t weigh down your site.

4. Reporting

Typically, we report on organic revenue generated as the key performance indicator for our SEO work. But for our content writing clients, we only report on blog traffic and email signups from blog content, as these are the only metrics we have complete control over.

Blogging is only part of what you need to do to increase your organic search revenue. Therefore, this service puts our agency more in a supporting role, rather than in a role that sees us taking ownership of your entire SEO channel and therefore owning the results of that channel (as we do with our cannabis SEO services and dispensary SEO services).

FAQs About Our Cannabis Content Writing Services

What metrics do you report on?

We report on organic traffic and email signups generated by your blog (our impact is equal to the increase in these metrics after working with us). 

How long does it take to see an ROI?

Because, with our content writing services, we don’t measure the revenue we generate and weigh that against what you’re paying us, we typically work with you beforehand to agree on what constitutes a good ROI. 

Generally, our clients are looking for a certain amount of traffic growth, email signup growth, or growth in keyword rankings. 

That being said, we generally are able to deliver top-3 rankings within 3-4 months (or ~12 pieces of content published) and a large increase in traffic and email signups within 6-8 months (or ~24 pieces of content published). 

Again, these are benchmarks from our past work: we can not, in good faith, guarantee you a certain ranking or result.

Do you require a long-term contract?

No. Our content writing services operate on a monthly rolling contract where you pay for the deliverables we produce each month.

How soon do you get to work?

We send onboarding materials (for our research phase) over to you as soon as you sign our contract and pay the invoice for the first piece of content. 

We start each engagement by writing a single post before invoicing you on a monthly basis for “batches” of content to ensure you like what you see before forking over larger amounts of money. 

We aim to have the first blog post submitted to you for approval no later than 2 weeks after you sign our contract and pay our first invoice. 

Do you upload the content to my website?

Yes. Our cannabis content writing services include uploading, formatting, title tag and meta description optimization, and everything else you’d normally do when adding content to your site. 

Do you require me to review content before it goes live?

No – it’s up to you. You can review each piece in-depth, or you can choose not to.

Most of our clients give the first few pieces we produce a look-over, and then turn the process over to us completely once they’re confident that we can put out high-quality, on-brand content on a consistent basis.

Turning the process over to us completely allows us to execute more quickly and drive more value, sooner, for your brand. 

Do you use AI to write content?

No – when you hire us, you’re paying for humans to write content. We use AI (ChatGPT) for data analysis, brainstorming, and other similar tasks, but we do not use AI to write copy or content for your brand.

Do you understand industry compliance?

Yes. We’re an agency built specifically for the cannabis and CBD space, and we understand the FDA restrictions that apply to advertising these types of products. We use checklists and a thorough editing process to ensure that every piece of content we write for your site complies with these rules.

What processes do you have in place to ensure the content you produce for my brand is high-quality?

In addition to the obvious (editing), we use three tactics to ensure our content output is high-quality. 

First, during onboarding, you’ll fill out a content style guide so we have an in-depth understanding of your brand voice, tone, values, and more. This style guide will be continuously updated based on your feedback. 

Second, we interview you or one of your employees for every blog post we write so that we’re able to include accurate, interesting, and on-brand insights, rather than copying the articles that are already ranking.

Third, each piece of content is written by someone with cannabis or wellness expertise. 

Fourth, we offer you the amount of latitude you wish in terms of content reviewing. Most of our clients don’t feel the need to review each piece of content we review, but you may review and provide feedback on each article before it goes live – if you want. We use your feedback to update our style guides and inform the way we conduct our interviews to ensure continuous improvement.

What do I have to do?

We ask for two things from our clients on an ongoing basis: attendance at a monthly reporting and strategy meeting (~30 minutes) and the provision of a subject-matter-expert (you or an employee) for 1 hour per month that we can interview to develop content for your site. 

What level of customer support do you offer to me and my business?

You will have access to our team five days a week by email and by a personal Slack channel that we will set up for you. 

We respond to all communication in one business day at a maximum, barring team members being out of town and away from their devices (which you will be notified in advance of).

Our founder, Wells, is also typically reachable seven days a week. However, he can only guarantee a response Monday-Friday.