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So you’ve decided to open up a vape shop online or in Korea Town or anywhere Orange County. You’ve either created your own juice brand that no one has even thought of, perfecting the bacon and syrup pancake flavor. Or you’ve been able to get all of your favorite vape flavors and equipment into one online super store. Now what?
Well Let me tell you it doesn’t get any easier. I’ve been working in marketing for several years now, in many different industries, and nothing was more challenging than my 2 years working as a digital marketing director for a well funded vape manufacturer in Irvine.
The hardest part about marketing your product is getting it in front of the right people, wholesalers and stores, and they will only take your juice if you have a strong social following or come up at the top of Google when they do a search.
Your next best bet is direct sales through a website or an online storefront.
“Now how do I do that” you may ask? Well by implementing proper SEO on your site.
The reason for using the very best practices in SEO is because as a vape company you are prohibited from online ads like so many other companies have access to. Google has put the vape industry and any related product in its prohibited advertisers section. It actually labels vape as a Tobacco product, which is prohibited to advertise on Google, right along with alcohol and pornography.
If you don’t want to advertise with Google’s adwords platform you may choose to advertise with another platform, called an RTB or a (Real Time Bidding) platform. This gives you the ability to hyper target an audience based on the segment and product that you are trying to market and sell. However, most will only have a general tobacco section or at the most an E-cig section, which is not all the best in getting qualified leads. There are also some ad serving platforms that are very basic and simplified like Ecig Advertisers. They serve impressions to the market you want to target however they don’t have a very high number of publishers and even lower numbers of impressions.
Next lets look at direct Ad placement, this is probably the best way for you as a vape e-liquid company or vaping device seller to get your product in front of the right buyers. But this type of lead generation takes a lot of work. This entails searching for forums and related vape sites that “are not your competition” and post a banner ad on their site. Currently, forums like Vaporjoesnetwork.com charges $250 to put an ad on their sites and related site. There are more interest based sites popping up, it’s just going to take a little bit of research.
Lastly, SEO is the smartest way to get your company really good, inexpensive exposure. The reason being, that competition is relatively low in the vape industry for SEO as not even some of the big guys are really implementing strong SEO tactics. Also, Google has not totally banned vape companies and products from the face of the map. That is, not until legislation passess anti-vape advertisement laws as they do with the other prohibited products.
Here is some homework, do a search for “Best Cigarette brands” you’ll notice that there are just a list of blogs and top 10 lists. There are no companies that are listed, only blogs and articles.
Now do the same search for vape “Best Vape juice” Now you get a nice little shopping carousel up top, a few blogs and some companies that actually sell e-liquid. What does this mean? Well it means that you have a better chance than cigarettes to get seen in search engines.
How do you get your Vape Company to rank on Google?
Some of the first things you need to do is make sure all of your meta content on your site is relevant to your market. As Long as you don’t mention that vaping “saves lives” or “helps you quit smoking” then you’re okay. Use relevant key words for all of your pages and products (every product) and they all have to be different.
Create great content for your page and continue to create content for your page. Google is now making Panda the core of its new algorithm. And that means that content is now supreme ruler over everything else. The amount of words in an article has gone from 400-500 to 1200-1800 words per article. That doesn’t mean that all of your items have to have this amount of content on it, as long as you are properly describing your product it should be fine. Just make sure that you have a section where you can write a large a mount of relevant content.
There are many other internal and programic things you can do for a better performing SEO driven site, but we will take that up in another discussion.
Rich Snippets, Knowledge graphs and Schema Data Markup for Vape companies.
So in my homework assignment that I gave you, you may have noticed the pictures of the bottles of vape juice at the top of the search query. These are called knowledge graphs and use a special coding. Rich Snippets and Schema Markup are used to produce all sorts of these graphs, whether it be your companies address, an article you are writing or a Google Shopping list. It’s not easy to do or even uncover all of the time unless you have a programmer well versed in SEO that can create this for you. But it is a great way to get your item up there and seen by hundreds to thousands of people.
Once your site is seen on google, then it is your job to have a well-crafted sells oriented web site. Just like any other site you’re going to need great call to actions. Have buttons, photos, sliders or text that let your viewers know exactly what it is that you are doing.
Continually create rich content for your site. That is content in the form of blogs, articles and photos. And with anything make sure you are using original content, pictures, videos and text.
That’s it! Keep making great product and I’ll see you on Google. Vape On!
