Category pages (like “Disposable Vapes” and “Vape Juice”) and brand pages (like “Geek Bar” and “Vaporesso”) represent the main points of entry into your site for people who want to view broad collections of vape gear rather than specific products. It’s important to keep that intent in mind when you develop the text for these pages because you don’t want to turn a category page into a miniature product page.

In other words, if most of the text on your Geek Bar brand page describes the Geek Bar Pulse and the Geek Bar Pulse X, you’re missing the mark because the brand page will end up competing for the same keywords as your product pages. Instead, most of the text should focus on the brand and what makes it special.

The goal for a product page is always to rank on Google for the name of that product, and people will generally search for a product name on its own when they’re interested in buying it. Keep that in intent in mind when you develop the content for your product pages because a product description should include plenty of helpful information for people who want to buy that product.

Learn More: How to Create Perfect Vape Shop Product Pages

A good product page should usually include:

• High-quality photography. It’s ideal if you have the ability to take your own pictures rather than using pictures from the manufacturer or distributor.
• Helpful description text. Explain what the product is, how it works and why someone should consider buying it.
• Easy access to related products. For example, a refillable vape typically needs replacement pods or coils. Make them easy to find.
• A link to a higher-level page. This reinforces your website’s hierarchy and will typically be a link to the related category (e.g. Disposable Vapes) or brand (e.g. Geek Bar).
• Links to alternative products. If this product isn’t quite what the customer wants, you don’t want them to leave your site. What should they view instead?

The blog is where your vape shop’s long-form text content will live, and it’s a potentially valuable source of traffic for two reasons.

• When your site is new, your blog posts might have higher rankings on Google than your product and category pages because informational searches have less competition. In other words, your blog might help your vape shop generate some web traffic while your product-related content is still gaining traction.
• Your blog is also a good place for product-related content targeting keywords like “best (product)” and “(product) review.” This content can potentially lead to sales if it’s done well.

Keep these tips in mind when you create content for your blog.

• Have a target keyword. Every blog post needs to target a keyword that people actually search for, or it won’t get any traffic.
• Satisfy the keyword’s intent. You need to understand the intent that people have in mind when they search for your target keyword, and the blog post needs to satisfy that intent fully.
• Avoid easily summarized topics. Your informational content isn’t just competing with other vape shops’ websites – it’s also competing with Google’s AI Overviews. If Google can summarize your topic in a paragraph, you should probably choose a different topic. Even if your post ranks well, most people won’t click through to it because the overview is good enough.
• Focus on readability. Use elements like subheadings, images and bullet lists liberally to maintain logical flow and hold the reader’s attention.
• Highlight your expertise. If you’re writing a review or a how-to article, for instance, it’s useful to include pictures showing exactly what you’re talking about. This is particularly important in the current environment because people are distrustful of content that doesn’t show first-hand experience and might assume that it’s generated with AI.

Is your vape shop’s website properly optimized for Google and customers? Add the final bit of polish with these bonus SEO tips.

• Organize your site logically. Every page on the site should reinforce the relevance of the page above it in your site’s hierarchy. For example, a product page for the Geek Bar Pulse would link back to your Geek Bar brand page, which would link back to your Disposable Vapes category page.
• Implement an intuitive menu system. The menu should reinforce your site’s hierarchy, and it should also provide quick access to the sections that people will most likely want to visit. At the same time, you want to avoid having so many menu options that people will feel paralyzed and won’t know what to click.
• Have a robust search function. Think about how real people find vape products. If a visitor doesn’t land on the right page, it should be easy for them to find what they want.
• Avoid using AI to generate text. AI typically isn’t good at creating product content because you’ll end up getting virtually the same text that other vape shops have used to describe the same products, brands and categories. There’s a good chance that Google won’t index your content at all.
• Make the page’s main idea clear to Google. You can do this by putting the target keyword in the title tag, the H1 header and the URL. The main keyword should also be in the file name and alt text for the page’s primary image. Don’t repeat the keyword over and over in the page’s body text.
• Implement schema. Schema is extra information in a page’s source code that helps Google understand and properly classify the information on a page. The schema for a product page, for example, might include the name of the product along with its price and whether it’s in stock. There’s a good chance that your site’s e-commerce platform handles schema automatically, but it’s worth the effort to confirm this.
• Establish trust. Your contact information and shipping/return policies should be very easy to find. If anything about your website looks sketchy, people will buy their vape gear elsewhere.

Yelp is the most prominent directory for local businesses, receiving upwards of 100 million monthly visits. Many people skip Google entirely and go straight to Yelp when they want to find businesses near them, so you definitely need to be there if you’re running a brick-and-mortar vape shop. A little-known fact about Yelp is that they allow vape shops to pay for more prominent placement, making this one of the few traditional avenues for promotion that’s actually available to you. If you’re in a competitive market, promoting your listing on Yelp may help you get a leg up.

If you’re already on Yelp, you’re probably aware of the fact that positive reviews are important for improving your search positioning and building trust with potential customers. You’re probably also aware of the fact that Yelp doesn’t allow businesses to solicit reviews from customers.

There’s no rule, however, against encouraging people to check in through the Yelp app.

If someone already has the Yelp app open, what’s the next logical step? If they’ve just had a great experience, they’ll hopefully leave a review. Take advantage of this by offering instant discounts or bonus loyalty points when customers check in.

You might think of Facebook primarily as a social platform – but for many people, it’s an important way to discover local businesses and find out what their friends think about them. Having a Facebook Business Page is valuable for both local and online vape shops.

Bing may be a distant second place to Google, but you shouldn’t ignore it because the web search ecosystem is so huge that even Bing’s relatively small market share is enough to garner them more than 100 million daily users. It’s worth the effort to make sure that your vape shop has an up-to-date listing on Bing Places for Business.

In addition to the many direct users that it receives, Bing is important because:

• It’s the default search engine on many Amazon Kindle devices.
• Other popular search engines like DuckDuckGo display results from Bing.
• Bing is the data source when people use Copilot to search the web on Windows devices.

If it’s generous, offering a single-use coupon can be a great way to get people to subscribe to your mailing list. With some e-commerce platforms, it’s possible to generate a coupon that’s linked to a specific email address, which means that only the intended customer can use it. Remember that people often plan to search online for coupon codes before checking out anyway, so the coupon needs to be special if you want people to take advantage of the offer.

• Do you have a brick-and-mortar vape shop? This technique can still work; just make the coupon printable instead.
• Does your platform also support SMS marketing? Offer an even bigger coupon if people give you their email addresses and their phone numbers.

The content upgrade is an offer that basically says, “Do you like what you’ve just read? If you give me your email address, I’ll send you more content just like it.” Unlike the other two types of offers described above, a content upgrade costs you nothing. It’s very difficult to do successfully, though, because:

• The upgrade needs to be worth something to the reader.
• It also needs to be something they can’t find for free.

For example, suppose your website has an article about the basics of making DIY e-liquid. You might consider an offer such as, “Looking for some can’t-miss vape juice recipes? Subscribe to our mailing list and instantly download a PDF showing how we cloned the formulas for our 10 best-selling e-liquids!”

Other types of content producers typically have up-front fees. You can work with a video reviewer on YouTube or a social media influencer, for instance, but they’ll probably want an advance fee in order to produce the content. That’s on top of the commissions that they’ll earn for successful referrals. The up-front fees can sometimes be quite high, so you’ll want to be sure that the person gets real engagement from their audience before you proceed.

Having an affiliate program means that you’ll be paying a portion of your earnings to affiliates when they refer customers to you. Most affiliates won’t even look at an affiliate program if the potential earnings aren’t very attractive, which means that your potential profits will be greatly reduced in an industry that already has a lot of price pressure.

Before you get too discouraged, though, you can think of vape affiliate marketing as being a bit like what traditional companies do when they bid for keywords on Google. They’re paying for each click, and not every person who clicks ends up becoming a paying customer. By the time a customer has been won, the company may have paid more than what the initial purchase is worth. Acquiring the customer becomes a cost of doing business, and future orders are pure profit. Only you can decide whether this model makes sense for your vape shop.

No matter how good an advertising opportunity is, the campaign won’t produce a positive result if your ad looks unprofessional or doesn’t have a hook. If you’re going to invest in placing an ad, it’s wise to consider investing in professional marketing help as well. If your ad looks great and clearly communicates your vape shop’s unique value proposition, your campaign will be successful.

Have you ever browsed the social media profiles for some of your local businesses and found that many of them looked a little generic? Generic content doesn’t get engagement, and engagement is necessary on social media if you want to expand your reach. Don’t just post pictures of products and expect people to start sharing them.

For example, you might consider creating a March Madness-style tournament bracket for your vape shop’s most popular disposable vapes. Here’s how to do it.

• Create a tournament bracket. Publish it on your website and on your preferred social media platform. If you have a brick-and-mortar shop, you can also post the bracket in a prominent place where your customers can see it.
• Have your customers leave comments on the social media platform to vote on each head-to-head matchup.
• Offer a discount on each week’s winner to encourage customers to vote for their favorite vapes. Make the discount bigger as the vapes advance to the final round of the tournament.

Creating content for your social media profiles generally means that you’ll either need to pay an employee or do the work yourself. Either way, there’s a cost involved. That’s why many vape shop owners end up deciding that the poor reach isn’t worth the effort. However, there’s an alternative – you can have your customers create content for you instead. When customers share pictures of the products they’ve purchased on social media with your account tagged, give them free loyalty points.

If you have an online vape shop, offering loyalty points can also work well for getting customers to leave reviews of the products they buy – which can have significant benefits for your website’s rankings and engagement.

Content creators on websites like YouTube and Instagram will happily create content promoting your vape shop and linking to your social media profiles if you pay them for their work. This type of arrangement doesn’t have to involve an affiliate partnership and can potentially be accomplished with a one-time payment. Once again, though, it’s important to vet creators thoroughly and confirm that their content generates real engagement before proceeding.

Video platforms like YouTube, forums like Reddit and question-and-answer sites like Quora are all essentially social media sites because they provide avenues for users to interact. Any platform with user-contributed content can be valuable to your vape shop if you leverage it correctly.

• Reviews and how-to videos on YouTube might have a chance to rank well and can potentially be good sources of traffic if the content on your own website isn’t ranking well yet. Also, video creators with engaging personalities tend to be well liked by their followers and aren’t easily replaced by AI and other automated content production techniques.
• Contributing helpful answers on a forum or question-and-answer website can increase brand awareness and trust. It could even drive direct traffic to your vape shop.

Offer a huge loyalty point bonus when an existing customer refers a friend or family member to your vape shop. This is essentially the same as having an affiliate program, but you don’t lose money when the referral is made. There’s a cost associated with giving a discount to the referring customer, of course, but the customer still has to make a purchase to obtain the discount.

A good reward program should increase the amount of business that your vape shop receives. Consider putting that concept to work by offering double reward points on your slowest day of the week. Alternatively, consider blasting your email or SMS list with double-point “flash sales” on days when you aren’t getting a lot of traffic.

The more your loyalty program feels like a game, the more customers will engage with it. Beauty brands like Sephora and hotel chains like Hilton gamify their reward programs to great effect by offering better rewards at higher tiers. If you can find a way to make that idea work for your vape shop, you can expect to receive a lot of repeat business.

Another way to gamify your vape shop’s loyalty program is by attaching a huge point bonus to a different product every day or week. To find the bonus product, though, customers will have to search through your website. This idea can be fun for your customers because it’ll feel like a scavenger hunt. Customers will also discover other interesting products that they might not have found otherwise. A scavenger hunt can have SEO benefits as well, since it’ll increase the amount of time that people spend on your site.