Smoky Mountain CBD

Rebranding hemp products for a mature audience.

Smoky Mountain CBD was founded to cater to the needs of older adults, something often overlooked by mainstream CBD companies in favor of younger audiences. Ryan (founder of Smoky Mountain CBD) managed to build a significant consumer base through a simple, WordPress website.

However, Ryan, company’s founder realized that he needed to get his company website on par with his products.This is where we came in.

Join us as we raise awareness surrounding CBD and help bring these products in front of those who need them the most - through brilliant content.

Services

01

Content Strategy

02

Copywriting

03

Web Design

04

Web Development

Industries

01

eCommerce

02

Retail

03

Cannabis

The Results

Over the course of over ten months, we optimized Smoky Mountain CBD’s presence on Google and other search engines through a combination of unconventional (but white-hat) SEO strategies and quality blog posts.

We grew the company blog from a just handful of short articles to over two dozen articles. As always, we followed SEO best practices but our content is meant for humans first, and crawl bots second.

Through our sustained efforts, we managed to achieve some remarkable numbers.

410% Increase in Traffic in 11 Months

Organic traffic increased more than 4 times in a span of 11 months with just carefully written 24 blog posts.

766% Increase in Top Keywords

Organic keywords in the top 3 SERP positions doubled while keywords from 4th to 10th positions went from just 7 to 99!

100% Local SEO

As a US only retailer, it was important that 100% of the organic traffic originates from the United States of America.

Upward Trajectory

With the new, more optimized website, we expect both organic traffic and sales to continue booming.

About The Company

The CBD industry is so busy catering to the younger demographics that it has forgotten about the group that needs it most - working adults.

Smoky Mountain CBD, a premium hemp company from the mountains of East Tennessee, leads by example with its wide range of hemp products formulated with grown-ups in mind. In just five short years, the company has become the most trusted CBD manufacturer and supplier in the Tennessee area.

In fact, if you’ve ever had any hemp-based products in and around Tennessee, chances are that this company had a role to play in its making.

The Challenge

Ryan initially reached out to House of Brilliant Ideas to improve local SEO. The success of this early partnership deserved a sequel so we extended our retainer to focus on the company’s aging website copy as well.

And finally, to round it all off, we decided to bring the website on par with the copy, design-wise.

In other words, we had three goals.

01

Modernize the website to simplify the customer journey and complement the new website copy.

02

Come up with a business messaging framework that correctly conveys company values and goals.

03

Increase organic search traffic by optimizing the company blog.

Before

After

Art of Content Marketing

Our first goal was to produce some killer blog articles to drive traffic from Google Search and kickstart Smoky Mountain’s organic lead generation.

The deliverables during this phase were short, to-the-point informative blog posts. However, organic traffic is extremely competitive in this industry.

The Best Possible Spot on Google Search

Delta 8 Distillate is one of the most important products for Smoky Mountain CBD and our article for the target keyword reached the top of Google Search Engine Result Page (SERPs) within months of publication.

Business messaging

The next big challenge was creating a business messaging framework to guide the website copy as well as future marketing collateral.

We established the key principles of Smoky Mountain CBD, its products, and the team behind it all.

Based on this, we narrowed our focus to three key aspects.

01

The target demographic is older adults – make them feel heard.

02

Safety is the top priority. Everything is third-party tested and completely transparent.

03

This is an established manufacturer, supplier, and distributor of CBD products.

Web design & development

With the website and product copy done, we arrived at the biggest challenge yet, updating the company website.

Before

After

Choosing the CMS
Our first choice was Webflow but the unique payment regulations for the CBD industry meant there could be payment-processor related issues down the line.

So instead, we decided to continue on WordPress with the pre-configured Square account to avoid potential service disruption.
Setting Objectives

During this process, we had two main objectives in mind:

  • Ensure the website has a “standard” layout that’s easy to navigate
  • Make the website and product easy to update
Creating Mockups and Assets
We started working on website mockups as well as assets and media for the website.

Assets included product mockups, iconography, banners, hero images, blog images, as well as media for the new formulations.
Optimizing Existing Content
The website already had over 50 CMS items that needed performance and SEO optimization.

In addition to the blog posts and products, we also needed to improve load speeds and performance on both mobile and tablet breakpoints.
Iterative Development
Throughout the design process, we implemented feedback from the Smoky Mountain team into the staging website.

We know these things take time and we don’t do rush jobs.
Launch Day
The new Smoky Mountain website was moved from staging to the live domain around midnight to minimize user disruption.

We worked alongside the in-house team in case any issues had to be ironed out.
Post-launch Updates
Though the website was live and fucntioning as expected, our work wasn’t complete just yet.

We continued optimizing and improving the sales funnel based on live feedback from real users.

Flexible billing

House of Brilliant Ideas offers flexibility in billing to help address our partners’ unique and fluid requirements. Our work with Smoky Mountain CBD is a great example of the efficiency of this model.Since the initial objective of the project was a series of blog articles, we recommended a retainer for 10,000 words, giving us the flexibility to create the perfect article for each target keyword.At the same time, the client had complete visibility through comprehensive project trackers and assurance of on-time and on-budget project completion.Success from the content writing prompted Smoky Mountain CBD to extend the project’s scope to also include copywriting, website design, and development. Our hourly retainers were the ideal choice here.

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