Is your hemp business ready for a website?

Are you putting your best farm forward?

Hemp cultivators may be most at home tending to their crop, but their customers find them using phones, tablets, and desktops. The design of your hemp website, SEO, and marketing services all sell your business when you aren’t directly tending to it. A great hemp website doesn’t just woo customers, it actively brings them through the digital front-door. Sherpa has been specializing in cannabis web design since 2016.

We’ve helped grow dispensaries, cannabis farms, CBD product manufacturers, and hemp farms just like yours.

So what should you know before you choose a company to build your hemp website?

Your hemp website design must be mobile-friendly.

There are two major Google algorithm updates that affect mobile versions of websites.

Mobilegeddon released on April 21, 2015 and gave a boost to mobile-friendly pages. It pushed mobile-friendly websites and pages up the search rankings, and was a precursor to the biggest change yet.

Mobile-First Indexing rolled out between August and September of 2018. This update makes it so that Google looks at, and ranks, all mobile websites first and uses those rankings for desktop and tablet searches.

What does that mean for you?

Your website has to be optimized to load quickly and scale correctly on mobile phones. If your current website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s hurting your rankings for desktop and tablet searches too.

We recommend testing your website for mobile-friendliness. Just click on the link, input your website address, and Google will let you know if it is mobile-friendly or not.

Real Hemp Farm User Data: Sample 1

Real Hemp Farm User Data: Sample 2

As you can see, hemp farms receive most of their website traffic from mobile users. When the top 3 spots in a Google search get 90% of the clicks, and 50% of your traffic comes from mobile users, you want to make sure your mobile website is as optimized as possible to produce a reliable, easy to use, and enjoyable experience for users.

Are you taking advantage of hemp SEO services?

SEO stands for search engine optimization—it’s the art of optimizing a website so that it loads as quickly as possible, is easy for Google crawlers to read, and increases the website’s opportunity to rank for your most profitable searches.

We do everything in-house.

Our SEO and website design are all performed in-house. That means our hemp website designer works directly with our SEO developer to optimize your site. Work isn’t outsourced, and our staff has a combined 40 + years of experience building and optimizing websites.

How does SEO benefit a hemp website?

As a hemp SEO company, we get to look at Google Analytics and rankings data all day long. One of our newest hemp farm clients just received their first optimization on August 20th, 2018. Let’s look at last years (pre-SEO) traffic compared to this years.

The orange line shows traffic from 2017 (pre-SEO).
The blue line shows traffic from 2018 (post-SEO).

Now let’s see how much of that increase came from mobile users.

You can see that it isn’t just website traffic that has increased, but the percentage of traffic from mobile users has increased from 40.29% in 2017 to 53.42% in 2018.

What exactly does SEO do?

• Reduces load-time and increases the speed of your website.
• Makes your site easier to use with UX improvements.
• Simplifies your site structure for web crawlers.
• Updates content to include searched for terms and topics.
• Increases your backlink portfolio and reach online.
• Keeps your website in Google’s good graces after algorithm changes.

Is your hemp website E-Commerce ready?

Many of our hemp clients don’t just cultivate raw hemp; they process and refine their hemp into a wide range of CBD products including CBD oils, powders, tinctures, and edibles. Whether you produce edible goods, textiles, or just raw materials, you may want to cut out the middle-man and start your own online hemp store.

Though options like Wix and Squarespace might be easy to use, they strip out a lot of SEO features in favor of usability.

A neutered toolset might be great for an at-home hemp oil website designer, but if you want the best opportunity to reach your customers you want the ability to SEO a hemp website at a professional level. That’s why we offer E-Commerce integration using WooCommerce.

Our online hemp stores are built specifically for each client. We can even take over photography duty!

We’ll show you how to update your product listings or do it for you.

Woocommerce also provides complete customization for order shipping. We can restrict shipping to certain areas, add state-specific taxes, provide unique shipping options for standard, guest, and wholesale customers, as well as setup automated email systems for each order step.

Google judges websites as a whole, and that includes your hemp product listings.

Search engines give a lot less weight to individual listings and pages than they used to—that means your homepage is more likely to rank for a given search than any other page. You want to make sure that your product listings are optimized because they can help or hurt your rankings for other major non-product search terms.

Our whole hemp site approach to web design and SEO provide the control over the backend of a website that a modern hemp business needs.

If you’re interested in e-commerce, SEO, or web design for your hemp farm or product business, call us at 971-865-5158.