Search Engine Optimization for Vape Shops: What You Need to Know

Updated on November 26, 2020
electronic cigarette store

Cigarette smoking has affected so much people around the world—yearly, the tobacco epidemic kills roughly more than 8 million individuals, with almost 7 million of those deaths being of tobacco smokers themselves and the remaining being people who, while not smokers themselves, were consistently exposed to second-hand smoke. 

Fortunately, there is an alternative to traditional cigarattes—vapes, or e-cigarettes. These devices are specifically developed for smokers struggling with their nicotine cessation. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat up vaping liquids to produce a vapor that is then inhaled.

The Rise of Vape Sellers and Businesses

The e-cigarette and vaping industry is currently a multi-billion industry valued at $12.41 billion in the last year, and is expected to climb at a rate of 23.8% until 2027. The growing consumption of e-cigarettes and vape products is highly associated with teenagers and young adults who are curious about vaping

As the popularity of vape products boom, vape sellers and shops are on the run to make the most revenue possible. While running a brick-and-mortar shop is advantageous for your vape business, you can further boost your sales through operating an online store. However, along with the industry’s progress, various online platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, have banned the advertising of tobacco products—including e-cigarettes.

In order to keep marketing your vape business online, you’ll have to be creative as there are ways to bypass these platform restrictions. If you want a powerful tool for marketing your business, search engine optimization for vape shops got you covered. When marketing online, businesses strive to achieve excellent search engine optimization (SEO) performance as it primarily drives traffic into their website, and makes it possible for interested clients to look into their products. 

SEO is the process of creating, designing, and developing website content and metadata that will make your website rank higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. While SEO can’t promise immediate results, optimizing your site consistently will give advantages in the long run.

Promoting Vape Products: Why SEO?

As a vape business, how can SEO affect your online presence? Try searching the keywords ‘vape store in [your city’s name],’ and look at the results. Does your website show up on the first page? When someone is searching for a vape shop, they tend to navigate websites on the first page only, and they won’t bother clicking the succeeding pages if they’ve already found what they’re looking for. Therefore, you’re missing a lot of opportunities.

To increase your ranking on these search engines, you’ll need to perform excellent SEO strategies that search engine algorithms will love. Check out these tips and strategies on how you can do so:

  1. Write Unique Content

Searching general keywords generate a large volume of search results that will increase your competitors. Most websites tend to use generic keywords which puts them into more risks of ranking lower. Thus, opt for unique and precise keywords highly related to your vape shop to increase your chances of landing at the top. 

  1. Develop Existing Content

If you’ve recently just discovered SEO and you already have posted content on your site, you can still work them around instead of writing from scratch. It’s a lot faster and more convenient to do so. Also, it’s important to improve your content to make it more informative and unique as possible compared to other vape websites. 

  1. Design a Mobile-Friendly Site

Website design and functionality are important to a consumer. If your website doesn’t look easy and pleasing to browse, potential customers will immediately leave. Also, Google puts mobile-friendly websites first on their search ranking index list. Through building a simple, functional, and mobile-friendly site, Google can put you on a higher ranking, and will give potential customers an outstanding mobile experience. 

  1. Prioritize Website Security 

Payment security is one of crucial factors that consumers consider when making an online purchase. Since they’ll be purchasing directly from the website, they have to check out and type their card details successfully without any threats. Therefore, ensure that your website is safe and secure 24/7.

If the address bar shows ‘http,’ your website is not secure, while ‘https’ confirms that you have a secure website. 

  1. Achieve Fast Load Rate 

Lastly, consumers who are on the search for a particular product will more likely be impatient in waiting for websites to load, especially if they’re in a hurry to find them. Moreover, Google will favor your website more if you have a faster loading rate than your competitors. Optimally, website load rates shouldn’t last more than two seconds, or people will be annoyed and leave your website. For a fast-loading website, it’s paramount to optimize your website’s code, remove unnecessary plug-ins, invest in hosting upgrades, and compress images and other multimedia content. 

Takeaways

As online shopping is rampant nowadays because of its convenience, you can take advantage of this opportunity and create your vape shop’s online presence. However, since vapes and e-cigarettes remain controversial, expect that your marketing will be prohibited by many platforms, unless you utilize SEO and perform the right strategies to make your vape business marketing successful.

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