SEO CASE

Cannabis Seeds & Grow Equipment Store

From Low Visibility to Steady Growth in a Challenging Niche

Client

Cannabis seeds & accessories

Location

Ukraine

Platform

OpenCart

Start Date

September 2020

Growth in Organic Visibility

0 x

Increase in Top 3 Rankings

+ 0 %

Growth in Referring Domains

+ 0 %

The Challenge

When we began, the website had been live for over two years — but was barely visible in search.
We were dealing with a highly restricted niche, very low traffic, and a weak backlink profile.

An initial audit revealed multiple technical issues:

No HTML/XML sitemaps or robots.txt
Slow loading speed and pagination problems
Duplicate content and cyclic internal linking
Missing structured data and image alt attributes
Poorly generated meta-tags and non-unique pagination
No real SEO content or semantic structure

Our Strategy

Step 1: Technical Foundation
We created a detailed technical task list and worked with a freelance developer to:

Fix duplicates, canonical issues, and pagination
Set up schema markup and meta-tag automation
Clean up URL structure and improve crawlability
Ensure mobile-friendliness and usability

Step 2: Semantic SEO & Content Optimization

Built a custom keyword set for all key categories
Wrote optimized meta-tags and unique category texts
Added SEO copy to previously empty commercial pages
Launched blog content to target informational queries

Step 3: Link Building (Manually, with Care)
Given the niche, outreach was incredibly difficult. Many platforms refused to publish cannabis-related content.

So we pivoted:

Published articles under broader topics to bypass restrictions
Registered the site on relevant business directories and niche catalogs
Ordered real reviews from users via social media
Added comments on trusted forums (where allowed)
Cleaned the backlink profile from toxic links

Setbacks and Recovery

In early 2021, technical errors caused by careless developer changes triggered ranking losses. We spent months searching for the right developer to rebuild the site — and finally found a reliable partner.

The site was migrated to a clean version of OpenCart, and all SEO recommendations were implemented.

Our team continued content, technical, and backlink work — adjusting strategy to Google’s new updates.

Results

🔗 Referring domains: 30 → 100

🔍 Backlinks: 260k → 1000

*Toxic links dropped off naturally, helping domain rating increase

Domain Rating: 12 → 27

🎯 Top 3 keywords: +45%, Top 10 keywords: +77%, Top 30: +87%.

📈 Organic traffic: 50 → 835 daily visitors

Total clicks: 144K, Total impressions: 1,52M

Key Takeaways

✅ In sensitive or restricted niches, standard SEO approaches don’t work
✅ Manual effort, flexible strategy, and persistence are everything
✅ A broken site can be revived — if you’re willing to rebuild it right
✅ SEO is never “set it and forget it” — it’s alive, and so is your site