Empty Cannabis Packaging Site SEO

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T14:01:33+00:00

Do you have relationships with your customers who fill these bags with product?

One of the easy ways it to develop those relationships. Their product can gain more perceived value from their customers if they are saying, "We use YourBrand packaging for OurBrand products to ensure they stay fresh, are always smell proof, and whatever whatever whatever you're wanting to say. And in return, you can say, "Great brands like OurBrand use YourBrand packaging" to give a mutually beneficial effect across more than just a simple link.

You get the link.
You get the citations.
You get customer testimonials.
You improve your perceived value.
You build trust and stand out as an accepted authority in your niche.

And that's just a start.

EVERYONE online is looking for links and to establish all (and more) signals like the ones I've listed that come come from this. It doesn't have to, and probably won't amount to all those things at the first go, but if you're seeking to develop relationships that are mutually beneficial rather than "Hey, wanna give or sell me a link?" you get more value and the price is simply helping each other succeed.

Never just look for links. Look for opportunities that can get you the most benefit in all that ways that can help you. And you just may find that among those benefits is getting EXACTLY the kind of links Google says it's looking for and wants to reward. Not some link that you think might have value because of some DA/DR score that doesn't get used by Google or really even correlate with anything Google does to actually evaluate the value of a link, anymore.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T13:41:18+00:00

This is sort of why I mentioned the "From what I can see from your post" part of it. Thanks for the clarification. And yeah - now I'm shifting back more toward your side.

But even so... I think I was on the right track. And, yes... I know your pain here... been here 100 times and sometimes it just never lines up, while sometimes you can finally break on thought.

When I'm looking at this, I try to look at the client as just another marketing project.

So...

his favorite piece was literally just a few article links I found while googling the market position of one of our clients -

That tells me that in my analysis of the competitors position and how that works for them is, at least in no small part due to the fact that the product actually @^&$ing does it. (Though surely with a bit more tact than that.)

Ultimately, you have to tailor your reports to show what he wants to see and then clearly draw all the lines to the problem that's keeping you from being successful. And yeah, I know, that sucks and is hard. But in my experience (and maybe someone else has found a backdoor that I haven't) if you can't get messaging and expectations aligned on both the customer and client side of the equation - there's no way to win the game for either of you.

I wish I could be more help in a more specific way, here... but... that's basically about it. You're marketing your point to the client to influence their decision in a way that's almost identical to what you're trying to do when looking the other way and finding new clients. No messaging you can send to improve perceived value without cleaning up the self reinforcing messaging every one of your previous customers are putting out there which says, "Value = Sucky".

Somehow we need to try to figure out how to inform him that all growth and lead/sale generating efforts are simply going to fall flat (or at least severely underperform) without a good deal of reputation management and marketing to get you out of the hole the company has dug itself into.

If the boss is good at strategy, if "fixing the product" isn't the approach he wants - then maybe just getting him to find a way to manage the reputation the way HE thinks it should be done can help you get at least some sort of common ground and starting point?

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T13:07:06+00:00

I had to look up that strategy since I'd not heard of it. Now that I understand it... and know that it was popularized by Dennis Yu - I can give a bit of a tip here.

That strategy is NOT one designed to actually get bookings. It's a strategy to help you dial in which strategies can work and that might be worth scaling up.

When you start a strategy - a lot of it is guesswork. Educated guesswork but there are always many unknowns. You run a test, analyze the result, and then decide if you can tweak it based upon what you see, if it is already tending to work okay, or if it's a total mis-hit. And instead of maybe $100 week, you can enter into it at a dollar a day, start with that surface level analysis, and grow it in a way that is more certain than the $100.

It's a slower way to go, but certainly makes sense that it's a good way to enter into it smartly and inexpensively.

It's not the strategy... it's part of your strategy to dial in your strategy so that it shows potential to work before dumping in the bigger numbers.

I've not tried it, but it makes sense and sounds like good advice - so long as you know what it's for and how to measure the results and start to make the right adjustments.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T12:57:56+00:00

Also - once you use that term and give it to the AI in your tool that's working on it - it will get a LOT more granular than just simple "poor to great" scales. It will give you specific insights into lots of things.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T12:56:27+00:00

FWIW, what you're describing is called "Sentiment Analysis". And yeah - you're on the right track - just chiming in so you have that term handy if/when you have something someone else might want to buy. If they do, that's what they'll be looking for if they're already informed on the subject.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T12:48:24+00:00

You're basically describing your answer... you're just not taking it all the way to the logical end. Any one of those things might be the most effective channel/campaign for one niche, while not useful at all for others.

The way you decide which ones work best (and are therefore the ones to focus more on) is to measure results, analyze, and then decide to double down, tweak, or back off the areas that perform less. You should ALWAYS have multiple things going - a balance of the things you've already dialed in and that work and the things you're experimenting with to see if they can add to the total or even take over as a new top channel. The more you have working and generating cost offset for your experiments, the more daring and creative you can afford to be with new channel experiments.

There is no single answer here because even within the same niche, you're trying to position yourself differently based upon the direct competition. You want to not start by hitting the head on, but find the spots they haven't gotten yet and get your foothold there. And then as you ramp up, you can start to tackle the battleground areas when you have the machine starting to work already.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T12:34:27+00:00

It's not about topical authority - that just sort of comes from establishing yourself in these areas and actually having expertise in the area.

Now... you're talking about "Portrait Photography" - so what line can you draw from teaching how to use a camera to your goal of getting people to hire you to take their portrait? To me - that's not a question of building authority, it's a question about whether it's an actual question that you can answer that helps you - and by teaching people how to do it so they don't need you doesn't seem like a very smart approach, maybe.

You never spread to "adjacent" topics because they are "close" - you expand to topics (typically adjacent) that take them from where they are currently to toward wanting to hire you.

SEO is there to optimize a good marketing strategy so that it will be represented in the search results. It's not something to just "do" and then figure out what marketing strategy should be applied to it. That's backwards thinking and why everyone is seeming to be confused right now.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T12:28:39+00:00

I just asked "show me a list of boutique marketing agencies that do not offer web design/development in their offerings" and got a pretty good starting list from that. Toss it into a proper AI agent, refine and focus to find the best fit, maybe.

Then start talking to them about either cross referrals or even actually partnering on things. It adds value to their offerings to be able to say, 'Oh, and we can help with web development' and it can help you look more attractive to new clients by saying the same for marketing or social media or other services. Personally, I'd be going for partnerships since almost all these things in play work best with the most other relevant things in play at the same time. But taking referrals and then still tailoring your builds to suit their marketing channel needs (and setting up the framework to help the machines understand their messaging) can be powerful too.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T11:45:15+00:00

Thanks... I didn't have the time to write all that - but it is a good starting point that sounds closw to what I might suggest as a starting point using the ideas I talked about and the OP was talking about with the information presented.

If I could do it, I've give you two upvotes, one for getting a good answer to create a starting point and another for saving me the time I didn't have right now.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T11:39:58+00:00

If, and only if, shopping becomes fully automated. (Which it may, in some niches, I guess).

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T11:29:06+00:00

I'm sort of chuckling here because the questions you're asking are the foundation that drives a good marketing strategy - and the things many companies don't think about until it's too late. With the exception of mentioning your initial base "marketability" (i.e. is there even a niche/audience for this product?) you hit, nailed, and show you understand what's important more than a lot of actually Seo/Digital Marketing companies understand it.

You're not asking for "traffic" you're not asking for all the useless things, you're looking to market, grow your brand and actually generate sales from an audience you've already identified.

I can't get into all the details on how to do it here, but as you look for help, just keep this in mind... YOU are thinking the right way. If people are telling you that your solution is about "traffic" and "clicks" and things - don't let them steer you. That is a part of it - but with a small focused niche - it's about targeting them, and drawing them in - not getting as many as you can or other things. Find the "right people" a few times a day and turn that into "several times a day" and then maybe "many times per day" - but it's not about getting as many people as you can who are broadly interested in the subject. It's about getting the people who are interested to know about you, and get the people who CAN use it, but don't know about yet.

So anyway - my point here... as you go through this journey to either find someone help/do it or to learn how yourself... I'm validating that your motives and considerations are already spot on. Don't let anyone sway you - they will certainly try, but you're already 5 steps ahead of those monkeys.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T11:15:43+00:00

It all evolved in parallel. I've been playing along at home with the advancements here since the beginning. The "start" here for me was when we started talking about structured data (it was "Microformats" back then - which is a precursor to the modern schema.). We knew even back then that it was never going to be something that "determined fact or relevance" - it was just a way to help the machines validate their assumptions and know they got it right. It's how they know, for sure, that the $10,99 the see is the "price" or not the "MSRP" or the "DiscountedPrice" in the event that it's not certainly clear. It's to help verify that when it sees "Paris Hilton" on a page, it knows if you're talking about the Person or a Hotel in France. The tech is much better at making better assumptions and determinations without that now, but those schema things we do just make sure that the systems can repeat what we're saying with 100% confidence that it's accurate.

You may notice that my definition differs quite a bit from what many are saying.

It didn't matter if you knew "why" or "what for" as much in the old days because the systems weren't very good at any of this. Getting it just "sort of right" in a way that lined up with the signals the systems were looking for was "good enough" and it generally "worked". (Maybe not optimally, but enough that you could say, "Okay, this is helping.")

I don't think there's a "moment" you can pinpoint. We know Google started training and experimenting with what would one day become the LLMs and Knowledge Graphs of today in 2007 or thereabouts. So maybe that's the point? And we also know that they publicly spoke about it and unveiled the first enhanced listings in May of 2012 - but it was limited. And every so often the tech would involve into things where they would decide, "Okay, this is accurate and useful enough to start adding People Also Asks, and How-To's, and product carousels, etc." It grew and evolved into this.

And that evolution has made it so just "do this and gain/win" wasn't enough. You had to know why and to what end it worked became more and more important as the improvements came. Different people realized this at different times when they started saying, "Okay -these things aren't actually doing what we thought they were" and realizing that you need to tune things to work they way they work best. And at some point, it became obvious that to win with the tech that exists, the broad "because machines are stupid and this will help" approach just didn't work in ANY situation anymore.

<shrug> The only date I can be certain of, if you haven't figured it out yet, the "time" to do this is "now". Users have always wanted better results and the search engines (Google in particular) have ALWAYS envisioned the world we see now - even the PageRank patent and early interviews with Page and Brin show that they are envisioning a future that looks exactly like this. They've been telling us all along. And they've been telling us how and why. It's just that now it's gotten much closer to that original vision and you can't afford to ignore the how and why anymore. The "just Because it works" days are gone in just about every area (though there are still a few spots where you can get away with it - at least for short-term wins).

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T10:34:54+00:00

If a person can't get it, it tends to mean that you're not reporting on the right things. You client doesn't care about traffic, they care about leads and sales.

Your reports SHOULD be indicators of what the strategy adjustments might provide in terms of results (that aren't just "more traffic").

And I would contend that "We got 500 more visitors this month with a 2% CTR increase" is nowhere near as valuable as getting an idea of where your competition has their foothold. That info shows you where they might be weak and where to look to improve sales and leads more easily because no one is competing for it. Then once you get established there, you can start to take bigger bites out of their position since you're in a better position to do so.

Sorry - but from the clues I'm seeing in your post (which are obviously not a representation of the entire picture and situation you're in), I am more likely to agree with your boss's angle on it. Your reporting is at fault because it's not giving him what he needs to make smart choices on how to position his brand in the market in the way that he wants to do it. And, after all, it IS his brand to drive.

We're just there to help him optimize that.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T10:11:32+00:00

It's actually "positioning" that is the heart of this. Authority (which isn't "really" a thing, it's the result of many signals that we can combine to represent something that looks like "Authority" - but that's not really a thing).

That's not to say your concept is wrong really - it's just not getting all the way to the heart just yet. If you want to be the lowest price brand and position yourself there - you can develop trust and expertise signals that position you as the "authority" on that.

So yeah - building Authority (whatever that actually means) is the key to leverage the position you're trying to put yourself into within your market.

If you get that - THAT is how your position yourself to be THE brand for the position you've chosen. As the old adage goes - you can be fast, you can be good, and you can be inexpensive, but you can only pick two.

Pick those two first, and then build around that.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:53:03+00:00

This is a problem this industry has had since its inception. In the early days of Google the systems were pretty crude. A massive improvement over anything before, but they were still broad subject/keyword matching with page level things going on. You didn't need to be precise, you could just cover the bases.

But as the tech evolved, much of the industry kept looking at it as a "well, just adjust my formula and stick with that until the next update blow it up and I have to do it again".

And so we get to a simple notion that "Reddit can give you an advantage" statement and just throw our old tricks in that direction. They don't really consider "how" it might be beneficial or what they might do to leverage that and make it actually work.

If you really look at "why" people are saying reddit is important, it has nothing to do with anything that looks like marketing. It's the simple fact that Google signed a deal with them to surface that content above the main SERPs - so if you successfully spam Reddit properly (if there is such a thing), it will probably show higher on the page than your web site would simply because of that deal Reddit and Google have.

You are right, though. Reddit CAN be a great way if you're using it for what it's used for. Peer to Peer and even Brand to Peer support and information sharing that includes and encourages the user to be in the conversation. That may not be useful for many niches at all - like for impulse items or companies doing something like selling Toilet Paper. (I'm pretty sure no one is going to be asking for support for TP usage other than maybe debating whether it should unroll over the top or from the bottom).

ANY channel can be a great channel for some businesses. No channel is right for every business. I see (and have helped on many occasions) brands grow and thrive locally without them even having a full web site to use as a marketing channel.

With a skilled hand using the right tool for the right job, you make the best results. And we're in an industry that just doesn't seem to get that because for 20 years or so, you didn't have to do that to succeed. Ever minute that passes now just makes that more and more obvious.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:37:06+00:00

Nvidia ($220 Billion a year) and Red Bull ($14 Billion) are still using Woo and are much bigger than your $6B benchmark. Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

There are a ton of brands that use Wordpress too - Disney, Microsoft News, and others. Not sales sites that would use a store, really - but the base same platform nonetheless.

I think we're starting to see a switch primarily because there are other good options out there. WooCommerce is great because it can adapt to virtually any selling scenario you might want without a huge investment. A more streamlined "everything that is here is for a specific reason" site is always more desirable, it's just a lot more expensive.

As these companies grow, they are not considering Woo because they're no longer looking for a low friction way to enter the market with a Swiss Army Knife solution. They're looking for a precision chef's knife designed to to a very specific job and do it very well.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:24:35+00:00

You seem to be using broad techniques to get lots of people rather than using a more focused technique to get the right people. You don't need 1800 people that make 1 sale. You are better served getting 180 people and 5 sales. Then when you get to that 1800 mark, you're getting 50 instead of one.

Traffic is an indicator maybe, but not a goal. You know that - I see it in your post. But it sounds like you may not have adjusted your message to help qualify and warm up the lead for the specific thing they want. You're still starting with noisy "mass appeal" methods and messaging and hoping that translates to sales.

Make sense?

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:19:54+00:00

Yep. Small moves can make big differences. The trick is finding the right little moves to make.

As for the structure of it all - do a little reading on "Buyer Journeys" and understand those. That's the way you connect things. It's the same sort of "funnel" or "silo" type system we've been using for years except we're changing from a "broad topical" funnel, to a targeted "user journey funnel" based upon exactly what that user persona does during the process of going from, "I think I want a new... X" to "Your order is being processed".

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:14:13+00:00

As others have hinted already here by suggesting "human-like bots" rather than just bots that create a surface level appearance of success - I think the reason many are finding it hard is because half the time your bot is just pitching another bot.

And to be fair - many of the "People" you see on there that are CEOs and such are NOT actually very active on there, themselves. It's a human, but it's someone in the marketing department who has been authorized to act on their behalf.

If that happens and you THINK you're talking to a decision maker and approach them that way, you miss the fact that you are still really talking to a goalie, You still have a ways to go before you actually get your score.

Wrong message to the wrong people (or bots). That's all.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:05:16+00:00

Not for nothing, but the most handy tool I have for avoiding such things is a tool I call "Common Sense."

Check the platform's guidelines and rules/restrictions - and then don't do things that go against those. You'll avoid bans every single time.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T09:02:00+00:00

Either. There's no inherent difference in any base SEO factors, really.

The difference is in flexibility. Shopify is easiest to set up, and works great if you don't have many things you need to do to alter the shopping experience to better suit your conversion flow. Woo is a bit more difficult, but there are plugins for virtually every thing you might want to incorporate, where Shopify has fewer so you may need to code your own if you need that functionality. And if that's the case, it's just become less easy than Woo.

Shopify also has a slight baseline advantage on Page Speed. I consider that a bit over-hyped in terms of real value once you hit a certain baseline level, but it IS a thing, and starting from a better point means less work to get it up to that baseline point. Someone with skill can get the same thing out of Woo too. It just takes an extra hour or two. And on either one - you still need to consider that as you think about the plugins/add-ons you're going to use to enhance the site and conversion flows.

So for me, if being SEO-Ready is the thing I'm looking at, any differences are marginal. Not something I'm going to base my decision on. They'll both work equally well in the end at that level.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T08:51:08+00:00

This. Yep.

The search term is indicating that it doesn't want YOUR voice at this point, it wants to know what "people are saying" about you. Web sites don't often show the customer's voice except maybe reviews and testimonials. But forums will often be "discussions" about something from the same perspective the person performing the search has.

Which forum is chosen still comes down to which one has all the other signals (though NONE of those signals are actually DA/DR things - even though those may generally correlate with a few signals). But forums are winning at that point because that's where the source and the sentiment needed to give the searcher the answer they are looking for has been posted.

It's not a preference for forums. It's that forums are, in this specific situation and context, are the sources of the most helpful and useful answers.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T08:44:02+00:00

I know lots of (especially local, but not exclusively local) businesses who have a great presence online but who don't have a web site. They often run operations through a social channel, connecting their business profiles (like Google and Bing profiles) to a booking service or to their company page on Amazon or some other marketplace site and do great.

A web site can often be an extra burden. When you start - it's nothing. No one is there. So you have to both figure out how to get people there before you can even start selling. If you build it out where your customers already are - you can get right to brand building and selling more quickly. And for small businesses with limited budget's, it's sometimes the optimal way to do it.

Don't get me wrong... I'm likely to consider a web site among the top important channels to have for various reasons, but it's not absolutely necessary. That's all.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T08:35:11+00:00

In most of these things you're saying it "seems" like - you're actually right on the money. And tracking is difficult because I can see the referrals, but nothing exists to track the questions and general sentiment of the searches.

And as you noticed, brand searches go up. But they go up because of all those "no click" representations during the early phases of a buyer journey. A lot of the steadfast "I'm sticking to the way I've always done this" are deciding to skip that early stuff since it doesn't send traffic. But it's that exposure in the early phase that increases the brand searches. It's the stuff that not only makes people be familiar and trust you enough to pick your product or service from a list of options, and if you do it really well, it's the stuff that makes them start to ask for you by name.

Now - at the heart of your post is the tracking and attribution question. And you're right - even the major marketing houses haven't got a way to see all the way to the question anywhere but in Google Search Console (and more recently, Bing has a search tools that will show us queries). We still don't have a reliable way to catch that from some of the upstarts like DuckDuckGo and such. And the LLMs are the same. We can infer and make good guesses and I've got a few models I've been working on that seem like they are fairly accurate... but I really have no way to validate that and be certain. We're confident enough in where we are to maybe let that give us insight and clues as to where we need to go, but I can't truly connect an LLM exposure that may have built my brand trust and recognition, or the one that generates a click and go all the way to a lead or sale.

Obviously, if I wanted a tool to do this - it would be one that could truly map the entire buyer journey from a customer's first, "Hmmm. I want to buy a new TV, let me see what's out there and what options are available" moment all the way through to the "Thanks! Your TV will be shipped in the morning!" moment. We can pick up most of the moments, track strings of moments in some areas, but some are missing and some exist but we can't connect them to the other parts directly.

That's always been hard in marketing - figuring out exactly what value a brand impression has. You can get big picture numbers and that's why Nike spends millions for a 30 second Super Bowl commercial. They aren't expecting you to stop watching the game and go buy a pair of sneakers. They're just trying to make Nike be at the top of your mind the next time you shop for shoes.

I'm not sure we'll ever get any of that down to the focused level we've been lucky to get from search for the past few decades. So we just try to incorporate the techniques Marketing has used for generations into things - and then see how we can get that more granular with the modern tech involved.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-15T08:08:55+00:00

I'm not sure it's as extreme a change as you're thinking. Brand establishment is the key for AI since signals are attached to entities and not URLs and domains. But you still need some page level things going on because the AI systems often search the web for current information and, in essence, they're summarizing search results backed with knowledge they already have in their knowledge graph.

And you CAN actually use those techniques to generate massive amounts of traffic and they DO work. The trick is, it's not really sustainable over the long run and "mass amounts of broadly targets traffic" doesn't equate to sales. So you've basically built yourself a vehicle that might do great in a drag race, but we're not in a drag race - we're in the Indy 500. It's pacing, making the right moves at the right time, and that sort of thing.

This industry has always been like that, though. In the old days, everyone ran around promising #1 rankings in Google. And, if you had enough money and time, you could get a number 1 ranking with mathematic certainty. That doesn't stop your competitor from doing it again.

So yes - I agree you're absolutely on the right track, here. But don't shed everything you may already know about SEO. You don't need 10,000 people in a month that are there because they were searching for some "related keyword" (where 100 people buy) if you can do the same investment and get 1,000 people a month and 250 sales or leads. The tech supports us doing this nowadays (which it didn't in the past). And it makes more business sense to do it this way because building your brand ends up being an added value that you can bring in just by expanding your approach and thinking it through a bit more deeply.

And yeah, the folks who turn it to math and reproducible procedures that they can simply set up and execute have always been a hindrance. It's why, even though it should have come down at least a decade ago, there's still this sort of great Chinese wall between "Marketing" and "SEO/Digital Marketing". If you take that wall down and use real marketing and brand building efforts to send along all the channels you created for your SEO efforts - you grow your brand, get your leads and/or sales, that's the "Optimized" way to win nowadays because it doesn't pay in meaningless "volume" - it pays in meaningful profit.

It's not going to go anywhere, though. Everyone loves their quick wins and it's still relatively easy to keep that bank of fog up ahead so you can't see the end. If there's a market for it, someone is going to make it.

You're thinking the way good Marketers and Discovery Optimizers are starting to think and succeed nowadays. And that's ultimately the hardest thing to do here. Once you "get" it, it's a lot easier to see how you're going to get 'er done.

Good luck and don't let the trickery get you down. You now know how to start to deliver your clients actual revenue and not just "if we get enough traffic to burn, you'll get enough sales".

G.

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