SunMed Growers - Big Sea

SEO-Led Content Marketing Yields 10K Monthly Organic Visits and 200 Top 10 Keywords in Just 4 Months.

SunMed Growers is a medical and recreational cannabis company in Warwick, Maryland with over 150 employees and 200,000 square feet of state-of-the-art greenhouse facilities. SunMed produces high quality, affordable, sun-grown cannabis products for sale in Maryland dispensaries, including edibles, concentrates, vapes, pre-rolls, and nearly 100 different strains of flower.

SunMed was looking to increase their visibility in online search results in order to outrank their competitors and grow their market share. They needed an SEO strategy for their website architecture and an overall organic growth strategy. We worked closely with SunMed’s communications and branding agency, Adeo, who handled their web development and creative strategy in perfect harmony.

SEO
Content Marketing

Our Objectives

We developed an SEO strategy specifically to:

Capture 1200+ keywords in order to catch up with their main competitor online.
Attain at least 75 Top 10 keywords on Google.
Achieve at least 10% keyword growth by 3 months after the launch.
Realize 20% MoM growth in organic traffic by the 6 month mark.

The Problem

Ready to Outgrow the Competitors

The Need for Visibility

In order to achieve the results SunMed wanted, the site was going to need an aggressive content strategy: one that could quickly deliver a significant number of new SEO-optimized blogs to boost SunMed’s visibility in online search results across an array of keywords associated with their products.

Maintenance and Development

After we’d accomplished the first phase of the site’s growth, the strategy would then transition to a plan for maintenance and further development through continued blog production and regular content updates to keep on top of the search results.

The Strategy

A Plan for Rapid Cultivation

Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis

Big Sea conducted an audit of SunMed’s site and in-depth keyword research focused on building SunMed’s topical authority around the term “sun grown cannabis.” At the outset, that meant producing a series of blogs explaining the benefits of natural sunlight in cannabis growth, differences between outdoor vs. indoor cultivation, and explanations of Dutch greenhouse technology.

Editorial Strategy

Beginning with blogs focused on sun grown cannabis cultivation, Big Sea’s editorial strategy then branched out into pieces on:

Home cultivation techniques for amateur growers
Widely-searched health benefits for medicinal users
Commonly asked questions about THC levels
Regional topics specific to the company’s Maryland customer base.

AI-Assisted Workflow

In order to scale up production to meet the client’s needs, Big Sea launched a pilot program incorporating AI assistance into our content production workflow to aid with drafting and pre-writing blog content . The new method made it possible to deliver 10 articles per month to the client, populating their new blog with over 30 new pieces between August and the end of October.

The Results

The results have exceeded expectations.
Thanks to our SEO-led content marketing strategy, the client saw:

132%

increase in organic users since the start of the project

74.6%

increase in URL clicks

394%

increase in top 3 keywords

1,920%

increase in SERP features

SunMed’s success demonstrates the power and efficiency of SEO-focused content marketing for building brand awareness, especially in industries with few other options like cannabis. Within just a few months, SunMed online visibility has risen across a range of hundreds of keywords, and they’ve established domain authority as their content gets consistently excerpted on Google for questions from cannabis consumers and hobbyists looking to learn more.

“Our SunMed work is a real testament to how AI can boost a traditional content marketing approach. Everyone wants to scale these days. But what about just making a standard strategy more robust, and offering a slightly higher level of output, while maintaining the same level of human care and quality? That's what we did here, and I think it's the way forward with AI for most small businesses and agencies.” — Kate Blake, Director of SEO & Content, Big Sea