Smokea

Background

Smokea is an eCommerce retailer branded as an online smoke shop, selling products within the cannabis space, including pipes, vaporizers, wraps, and other accessories. Smokea prides itself on selling top industry brands at affordable and fair prices, providing quality products that don’t drain the wallet.

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Elk Marketing approached the Smokea team in early 2021 when they noticed tremendous opportunities that weren’t being leveraged to help their site rank for industry-related keywords. Additionally, elk discovered several avenues in which the Smokea site structure could be improved for user experience and SEO purposes, both potentially improving their rankings and sales.

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Problem

Being that Smokea works within and adjacent to the cannabis space for all of their products, it was understood from the beginning that the optimization process would be more complex and delicate due to the obvious industry regulations surrounding several of their niche keywords.

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Not wanting to harm the site by breaking these regulations, the team at elk took tremendous care to prepare for their proposed SEO campaigns before moving forward, through both industry research and direct consultation with the Smokea team.

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Strategy

Elk Marketing devised a 6-12 month SEO campaign to first strategize a method for improving rankings for more attainable keywords, the “low-hanging fruit.”

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By executing a three-pronged approach to SEO, elk began optimizing Smokea’s site both on-page and off-page through the methods of a thorough content strategy, and meticulous on-page optimization and internal linking plan, and by acquiring high-powered, strong DA backlinks.

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Each pillar of SEO requires thoughtful strategy with an analysis of competitors and a deep understanding of how to carefully optimize for each keyword target correctly without harming any current rankings. Because of this, SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. Additionally, SEO cannot be done effectively by one person with over 200+ factors to consider. The elk team brought industry experts to strategize and execute each pillar of SEO in order to increase Smokea’s organic search traffic.

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After performing in-depth research surrounding the smoke shop niche, elk optimized Smokea’s site through new optimizations and correcting/altering older or existing optimizations that were either not up to best practices or not current.

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Results

Prior to working with the elk Marketing team, Smokea ranked for sub-1,900 page one keywords. After one year of successful SEO campaigns, the Smokea site now ranks for over 3,300 page-one keywords, increasing their page-one presence for industry-relevant keywords by over 1,400 keywords.

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Additionally, through the optimization process, Smokea’s site structure improved greatly for user experience and optimizations, building out a significant amount of new, organic content on collection pages, and refining the top navigation to better support the site’s interaction with Google and visitors.

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