Few niches are as challenging—or as unpredictable—as CBD. Thankfully, nobody was there to point out the warning signs of rough seas ahead. If someone had taken the time to draw our attention to the stomach-churning ups and downs, maybe we wouldn’t have been so keen. In that alternative universe, we would have missed out on our most successful – and informative – venture yet.
With the clarity of hindsight, we were under-equipt. We had limited business experience – aside from running a very small and scrappy SEO agency – we had no funding, no mentorship, and a plan that read more like a leap of faith. Our only reliable skill was SEO, though we had no idea we were diving headfirst into one of the most volatile niches in search. We thought…
“We can make a website, do a little bit of SEO work and see how this goes. If it makes enough to become like another client (£450pm at the time) we’ll be doing well”.
Despite what looked like a venture that was destined to be doomed before it began, we need with with a business that had an exit-valuation of £1 million. Today, it still generates six figures annually using our “search-first” strategy.
The process of writing this has been cathartic, to say the least. It represents 6 of the most formative years of our lives in business. This is quite a personal story masquerading as case study.
So, how did we manage to use SEO to grow a business that started with £3000 into over £1 million? Here’s how.
Lesson one: Jump.
Back in the simpler days of 2019, we spotted an opportunity in the CBD niche.
At the time, we were freelance & agency SEOs experimenting with side projects between clients – we tried selling fish tanks, safari tours, and Spanish food. Slowly but surely, we were learning how to turn ideas into businesses using SEO.
It was the perfect opportunity because CBD companies (even to this day) cannot use paid marketing services (like adwords, meta ads or tiktok) and there are some quite severe restrictions around the marketing of the products; so SEO was truly one of the only options for a small team like us.
Our first—and only—investment was £1,500 each (£3,000 total). With that, we bought our first batch of CBD oils, hired a graphic designer to polish the brand, and spent a little on customer experience details—like custom stamps for printing on rustic sacks. It was a significant amount of money to us then, but I don’t remember having much doubt.
In 2025, “brand” is vital to SEO, but in 2019, most SEO-first niche websites didn’t necessarily invest in branding. Our own approach wasn’t slapdash, but we certainly didn’t think enough about how the brand would scale, let alone go mainstream. We were more interested in having fun and experimenting. The most “strategic” we got with the “brand” was, “Let’s become the BrewDog of CBD,” an idea we had while sitting in a BrewDog.
In that spirit, we created a health product brand themed around angels and devils, with a (somewhat) hostile) bold black-and-red color scheme. It was a deliberately against the grain of green-and-white medical-looking websites that had zero personality at all. The risk paid off, and it helped us get noticed – it did have it’s limitations later down the line. It made perfect sense for an SEO ranking to be memorable.
As we had expected, we quickly scaled the rankings for local terms like “CBD Oil Edinburgh” (with search volumes of 200–300 per month). Sales trickled in, and we packed products ourselves, wandering down to the post office to ship orders. Thanks to our lean model, we turned a profit by month two. Our initial investment in stock was paid up within that time and, the only overhead was roughly £10-a-month for website hosting.
Our approach was primitive on paper, but it turned out to be – as we’d anticipated – effective. The grand plan was to “reverse engineer” this project into a real business. We’d use SEO to find leads, generate sales, reinvest profits into stock, tweak and optimise as we went, and handle fires when they popped up. Essentially, we winged it. I don’t honestly remember feeling nothing but excitement; there was no doubt that this was the most successful project yet, with everything to gain and nothing to lose.
We tracked our profits on a very scrappy spreadsheet with a (less than accurate) profit calculator but after the initial pricing of the product, we didn’t even think about it. Everything was reinvested into stock. We didn’t bother with other marketing channels and still hit our six-month revenue target within just two months.
It may sound all very rough and ready, but our acceleration wasn’t entirely by accident. In saying that, what we hadn’t anticipated how quickly our momentum snowballed and that we’d fallen lucky! We took a deep breath, swam a bit, and before we knew it we were competing alongside companies with multimillion-pound budgets.
For two guys working out of a café, we weren’t doing too badly.
What was the strategy in those days?
This bit is for the SEO nerds.
We kept the website super lean, focused on 10 or so keywords which had ‘buyer-intent’. At the time, the search term “CBD oil UK” had over 100,000 searches per month, and was fairly low competition. It didn’t seem necessary to pad out the website with other content. Ranking for CBD terms wasn’t easy, but our sharp, strategic link-building approach, got us to the second or third spot for several top terms.
How did we do it?
We’d publish hybrid content pages, a mixture of product listings with information copied below. That way we could cram a thousand words under the products without being too much of a bother to the user.
Link building was much more of a challenge than we’d anticipated.It has always been difficult to build links directly to a page that sells something, especially from high-authority websites like Universities and Media Publications. The CBD niche, being associated with cannabis, was met with much more scrutiny and suspicion. We needed to adjust the way we contacted websites, and what content we provided them. How can we convince somebody to publish a link, when they don’t want to give links to CBD companies?
To combat the resistance, we researched broken link opportunities and published niche-relevant content on our blog. We’d remove the header from the page (to hide our logo and other links into the shop), flatten the page to look like an article, tell the webmaster the other publications that linked to it and make the content look as academic as possible. Our approach was adjusted based on the website we were emailing, and we’d try to anticipate any of the reasons why somebody would refuse to link to our website.
Tell you what, it worked. Once we’d landed all the key high-authority links we could, we’d redirect the page to our key landing pages. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
A mighty rise is always followed by a mightier fall.
March 2021 marked our golden age in the CBD niche.
Several factors worked to our advantage – CBD was trending, the pandemic had spiked spending on health products, and with lockdowns in place, everyone was on their phones shopping online.
As a two-man team focused on SEO, we began to achieve results that both scared us. Exhilarating, but, genuinely terrifying. Every day broke a record. The morning we landed on the first page for “CBD oil UK,” the deluge of sales put our most popular product out of stock within an hour. For a while, the hardest part was to keep the wheels on the soap-box. Our supply became a bottleneck, and it took some weeks to get our products back in stock, ready for Google to take it all away – and it still breaks my heart thinking about it.
In April 2021, Google decided it had other plans for us.
The infamous YMYL core update hit, and Google reshuffled the rankings in our niche. Product-focused websites like ours were replaced with blogs and publications catering to informational searches. Overnight, our rankings crashed. In the initial few days of the rollout, our sales dropped by over 90%, eventually levelling off at a 60% reduction in traffic and revenue.
Honestly, it felt like a death in the family – a crushing sense of disappointment and depression followed us for months after the update.
The feeling was less so about the loss of what had become our sole source of income, but our aspirations of what the business could become. We were still young and this was our lucky break! The hopes of what it meant for our lives filled our minds. We’d been standing on the precipice of “success” for it all to have been a mirage.
The desert into a new spring: April 2021 – December 2022
Our mistake was undoubtedly being too narrow with our approach.
The entire business relied on SEO—one lead source, one revenue stream. When that failed, it nearly took down the entire business.
We hadn’t accounted for the CBD niche, or the YMYL to become like gambling or payday loans. It now operated under a stricter algorithm. Our tried-and-tested strategies remained effective in other niches, but no matter what we did for our CBD site, it couldn’t be shifted. Even deleting the page’s content did nothing. Something was very wrong. We are convinced we’d been sandboxed, and the only thing that could fix it was time. There were rumblings that taking time to develop Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) could be effective, but it wasn’t going to be a quick fix.
Without SEO, we’d left ourselves in a little bit of a pickle: we hadn’t invested in other marketing channels, brand development, customer retention, or trust-building.
We were out in the desert, and even then, we knew we’d be there for a long time. We found ourselves in the the height of COVID-19 and lockdowns (no cushy furlough money for us freelancers), so we had no choice but to trudge forward. Adapt, or die.
Adapt, or die:
We had a new challenge: how do we make the most of what we have left? Can we take the traffic we still had, improve the chance of an initial purchase, and make the experience so remarkable that they return and tell their friends? Can we create a self-sustaining cycle of evangelistic customers? How do we make the most of the precious drops of traffic we have? What can be done to elevate the experience for customers that stuck around to support us?
We needed to adapt, or die.
The first step forward was to focus on what we could control: our brand. We realized our website was optimized for SEO, not for HUMANS. We suspected that neglecting the UX (& customer experience) might have been part of why we’d been punished in the Google update – and of course, this was later confirmed.
So, we slapped together a paper-mâché strategy inspired by Ryan Holiday’s concept of a “sticky product,” and thinkers like Rory Sutherland (before he became TikTok famous), Tim Ferriss, Daniel Priestley, and others. Maybe this inward focus would help us survive.
Our renewed focus centred on delivering a remarkable customer experience while tapping into the emotions behind why people bought our product. We revamped our packaging, developed processes to highlight our personable brand, and ensured our customer service was hotter than hot. We experimented with ways to encourage customers to share us with friends – a tough ask for CBD users, who usually prefer discretion. Yet, we found a few passionate evangelists.
We redesigned our sales funnel to prioritize “soft conversions,” such as newsletter sign-ups – which set in motion automatic welcome, follow up and order emails. It made it easier to get new customers into our marketing funnels and make them feel welcome once they made themselves comfortable.
One of my favourite ideas—credit to my partner, Bonita—was thank-you cards (handwritten personalised “thank you” too) that doubled as parts of a puzzle. It was simple, interactive, and a wonderfully creative way to keep regular customers engaged.
It is hard to measure any of these things, but, we could feel the changes having their desired effect; we noticed how customers interacted with us differently, the types of things they were saying about the company and made an effort to recognise when we saw the same names ordering every month.
Off-site, we focused on building social proof. We invested in external review sites like Trustpilot and Reviews.io, ensuring they ranked well when customers searched our brand. We also explored PR opportunities to share our story and showcase the quality of our service, and push down coupon sites, competitors and ads in our branded search.
We didn’t bother building any more links to our central website but had the idea to focus our link-building on assets off-site…. which turned into some surprising and extremely effective little (sometimes dirty) tricks.
Parasitic SEO & SOME other NAUGHTYNESS.
In the desert, we tried anything. It is hard to remember all of the wild, whacky and lateral ideas we had, but I do remember how that time felt: defeated, constantly hopeful to be disappointed, stressed, worried, frustrated and depressed.
Whether it was social media marketing, billboards, signs in bus stops (we pitched the idea to a 3rd party we were working with, and 2 months later they had taken the idea and run with it themselves without us!) programmatic ads, sponsoring a local sports team, we couldn’t get anything to work or deliver results like we had before. SEO was still – by far – the most effective sales funnel… and our website was still buried in the sandbox.
As if losing 70% of our income overnight wasn’t enough of a sick joke, our payment gateway turned our to be a scam. They refused to pay out, keeping over £30,000. The company eventually went insolvent, owing hundreds of thousands to other businesses. We didn’t see a single penny of that money.
With such a catastrophic situation, we were forced to think about search differently. How can we use our SEO mindset to make the most of the “non-SEO” marketing efforts we were doing?
We found some cheeky opportunities that we couldn’t say no to. We were desperate and needed to get down in the mud and get dirty.
Parasitic SEO.
One of the answers to our problem could be answered within the SERPs themselves. Informational articles and blogs were ranking for buyer-intent keywords, so the question became: how do we get featured in those articles or rank for those keywords ourselves? We didn’t know the strategy would be called Parasitic SEO by SEO community.
If you’re not familiar, with parasitic SEO is when you leverage the domain authority and ranking power of another website to promote your own content – be a parasite.
First, we did some research and used our outreach tactics to find niche blogs to partner with. For those blogs that weren’t already ranking for the keywords we targeted, we created content and began implementing a link-building strategy.
By far, the most effective keywords were the “best” terms for different product categories. We created content offering recommendations for which products to buy and why they were the best. To marketers outside of SEO, it might sound a bit cheeky, but next time you search for the “best” of anything, don’t be surprised if the article is covered in ads, affiliate links, or is sponsored by the brand listed at the top. Just saying…
We’d take these pages from other websites and build links to the:
- Using top-of-the-funnel content to generate links (broken link building & Reddit abuse) and redirecting those pages to our “best” pages. When Google warned against this practice, we added internal links instead. Used the same tactic that we ranked our actual website with, but instead employed several offsite assets that had more authority.
- Pinterest was a great link-building tool back in the day, and was still showing potential. It’s harder to tell whether it has benefits today, but allows a good diversity of back-links regardless.
- We requested/ wrote content for niche blogs – leveraging their authority by writing “best of” lists for things like the “best eco-friendly cannabis company”, or “best up and coming well-being products” and requesting a link inclusion from those included. It’s all stuff people have done before, but the trick was that the blog already had authority in the niche, and had high enough quality content to pass as legit.
- We often took the content we published (some in national news publications) and shared them on Reddit with a sprincle of up-votes. It didn’t just improve the SEO of our off-site articles, it set lots of through traffic to our product pages.
As a reader, you may understand the power of these “best” features – such as the coveted “indy Best”, but not quite how powerful they are. On the surface, the obvious benefits of increased sales and brand reputation pay dividends, but what turned our books around was when we realised customer reviews started to feature “best in the UK” unprompted.
Our brand built a word association with “best” which was a total surprise, and search engines started prompting “people also search” under competitor brand searches. We can’t prove it, but we’re convinced it helped our SEO across the board form our site. We also started getting organic mentions in Reddit threads, and users were recommending us organically. We’d created an asset-ecosystem that started to take a life of it’s own.
At first, we thought this was some groundbreaking, innovative tactic that no one else was using. WRONG.
It wasn’t long after we started our own campaign when one of our competitors began publishing several articles a week, with some with syndicated content. They hijacked the biggest publications with focused, keyword content, that claimed to be “the best”. We’d been quoted for these articles and simply couldn’t afford the price. It must have cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds, but the SERP real estate was overtaken by their content.
We’d been beaten to the punch, by another SEO with larger pockets than our own. It has paid off big style for those guys. For a good 2 months, they owned every single SERP result – soaking up hundreds of thousands of clicks per month.
Funny, any kind of success does always come with it’s shadow of consequences: later, we found out that others had tried to do the same but had been out-monied, and made a complaint to the Advertising Authority about the publisher. It turned into a little bit of legal trouble and Google eventually published the publisher for low trust/low-quality content.
Moral of the story – national publications sell their recommendations to the highest bidder – and always have.
Reddit Abuse
For whatever reason, Google loves Reddit.
Google bought Reddit data – (just used Google to search for a source, and I had to use Bing to get a good result!) and has used it to train their AI (with catastrophic results) and ranking algorithm. In recent years, Reddit has enjoyed a surge in visibility on Google.
Google – unwittingly – provided the perfect opportunity – or excuse – for SEO’s and growth hackers to ruin Reddit. We took full advantage of where Google was pushing users, and it didn’t take much effort considering how susceptible Reddit is to abuse.
We talk a little bit about some best practices when it comes to Reddit abuse in our article about it.
Again, very naughty, but, one of our competitors owns one of the UK subreddits for this niche, and regularly spams his brands with affiliate links, and deletes comments promoting other brands. It’s a scrappy world in digital marketing.
The only reason some of our Reddit tactics worked, is because ours was among one of the many that we’re often recommended.
Our Oasis: Jan 2022 – August 2022
Although some of the non-SEO marketing we had been doing drove some sales and results, we had been spending a fair bit of money to keep those going.
Once our SEO work gained traction, our off-site parasitic pages started to deliver results. We’d managed to create a sales funnel that people would find organically and convert leads at a higher rate than anything else we had been doing.
We had become really good at being able to put ourselves into our potential customer’s shoes, understand not only how they found us, but what they wanted to see along the way, and demonstrate our value in a way that made sense to them. After that, started to all happen organically.
At this point, we’d outsourced our fulfilment, managed only a few emails a day, and had created an online business that required little more than a nudge in the right direction every so often.
Thankfully, with all the referral traffic, great SEO signals (huge links that were driving sales) and the signs of being a real brand, our mission-critical websites emerged from the sandbox and started to rank alongside the off-site websites. When people researched our brand, they found a wealth of great content about us, our brand and the products.
After such a long, grinding, difficult year, it was nice to sit back and enjoy the fruits. With many more grey hairs, ground teeth, bad backs and burned-out souls, we’d scraped and scrapped our way back to the proverbial cliff-top.
I bet you can’t guess what happened next?!
HELPFUL CONTENT- an unmitigated DISASTER: August 2022
If you know anything about SEO, then the helpful content update will go down in history as one of the most catastrophic updates for the SEO industry. Like us, SEO’s and entrepreneurs have been building blogs to answer questions, be helpful, follow trends and engage niche communities. The reward: ad revenue, referral sales and affiliate income.
Whole businesses and teams were created to write content to entertain and inform; to do exactly what Google asked of webmasters.
Although Google will never admit it, it seems as though somebody at HQ saw an opportunity to supplant the “helpful content” industry with their interests, namely AI overviews (to come a little later). This destroyed a whole industry of people you may never have even known existed; independent bloggers (including travel bloggers, food blogs, dog walking blogs), news websites, and niche websites (like a wiki for Disney Fans). It likely affected millions of people around the globe, who, overnight, lost years of work and their sole sources of income.
Their crime? Falling within an industry that was targeted by Google to hoover up search-market-share.
We, like many others, got crushed. Traffic and sales funnels to our CBD business disappeared from the rankings to be replaced by several very high profile- again, sales dropped into the abyss.
The only difference is that we’d been here before. We knew how this felt, we knew that there was almost nothing we could do, and thankfully, we’d already invested a lot of time making sure that if this happened again, we’d have cultivated a core audience who would keep our business going.
While our website didn’t go to zero, August 2022 saw one of the biggest drops in traffic that we’d seen to date, and it crushed our revenue again by nearly 60%. We didn’t take too much time to feel sorry for ourselves, because there were others who had faired much, much worse.
Up to today – Jan 2025.
So, what are we doing now? Well, after the helpful content update, we have been doing much the same as we did during the first crisis. We adjusted the brand, looked for other opportunities and continue to work on ways to drive traffic to our website. It’s not the best situation, but luckily, we’ve retained our core audience and have a product, company and service we are proud of.
Other search engines – unlike Google – reward our websites with the traffic they deserve, and we’re seeing some traffic coming through ChatGPT and AI.
We know that the winds of change come and go – we learned that the hard way. So long as we keep the brand as good as it can be, customers will find it and search engines reward it.
We’ve learned a lot from our experience in the CBD niche, and many of the challenges we’ve encountered bring us to today. All the neat little tricks we’ve tried still work in other niches, so we thought we’d try other niche-pursuits and offer our sharp skills to clients. If you’re reading this – more so made it to the end of this article – that may be you!
If you have your own challenging niche to conquer – get in touch.
