Everybody has their own working definition of what SEO is and how it works. I’ve met plenty of CEOs, founders, and CMOs who hate Google and think they can get by without any focus on SEO, and it always ends the same way: pathetic sales, layoffs, and failed projects.
Whatever your thoughts on Google are, park them for now. The takeaway you need to remember is this: businesses that do well on Google do better overall.
- They sell more,
- they make more money,
- and they spend less time spinning their wheels on hacks and gimmicks that never work out as advertised.
The key to doing well inside Google and, by proxy, AI search (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity) is good SEO.
If your SEO is on point, your pages and product pages rank and you make money. It’s really that simple.
The trickier part (and that’s where we come in) is earning those rankings in the first place.
If you’re still on the fence about investing in SEO in 2026 and beyond for your business, here are four simple reasons why SEO is still the number one marketing channel for increasing sales for vape and cannabis brands, retailers, and stores.
1) Traditional, Paid Marketing Channels Are Not Available
The main reason to invest in SEO is obvious: unlike every other business on the planet, vape and cannabis brands cannot use adverts to promote their products and business.
Hell, you’ll even get booted off some email platforms (hello, MailChimp) for “promoting” vape or cannabis products, even if they’re your core business model and they’re both perfectly legal.
Basically, if you’re a vape or cannabis brand, in the eyes of Big Tech, you are the enemy.
- They do not like you,
- They will not condone want you do,
- And they won‘t even take your money.
It sucks, of course, but this is just a fact of life.
And please, for the love of all things holy, do not go thinking social media is somehow some magical salve to this. Read point number four on this list for a true-life horror story about the reality of running vape and cannabis channels on social media.
2) AI Search Visibility is Impossible Without SEO
If you sell products, you need traffic that converts, and for the last couple of decades, the best way of getting this traffic has been from search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others.
But wait, I hear you say: isn’t SEO dead now that everybody is using AI search like ChatGPT?
That’s what the AI bros would like you to believe, but as usual with most internet-based reality-tunnels, it simply isn’t true because AI search is just search—it’s just the setting that has changed.
When you do a search inside an LLM, all that happens is it makes an API request to a search engine using something called a query fanout. It then quickly processes the fetched data and gives you an answer.
If you were a billionaire, you could replicate the same thing by having an assistant follow you around everywhere you go and perform Google searches for you whenever you wanted. It’d be slower, of course, but it works in much the same way as AI search does.
So, if an agency or GEO grifter tries to sell you on a separate AI search retainer, tell them to take a hike.
GEO is predicated on SEO, and you cannot do any kind of GEO without a solid and established SEO foundation.
It is NOT a chicken-and-the-egg situation, as some claim. SEO is primary; GEO—at best—is an extension, not a new discipline only understood by a select few disciples on YouTube.
3) Social Media is Not A Reliable Sales Channel
The amount of money I see wasted on social media by vape and cannabis brands is mind-blowing. They pay influencers, they pay people to run their channels, and for what? The worst click-through rate of any referral channel since the dawn of the internet.
First and foremost, social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are borrowed audiences—you do not own them, and Meta can (and often does) take them away at the drop of a hat. Add in their ever-changing, dopamine-draining algorithms and it quickly becomes way more work than it’s worth.
Still not convinced? Remember that real-life horror story I mentioned in point number one? Here it is in all its glory…
Back in 2023, I worked with a chap who had built a 25,000-member vaping group on Facebook.
It was his living, and he’d poured years of hard work into building it up organically using word-of-mouth, helpful content people loved, and good old-fashioned graft.
He woke up one morning, expecting to spend the next few hours answering questions and replying to comments. Instead, he found nothing because his group had been deleted by Meta.
There was no explanation, other than it went against some bullshit platform T&Cs. He tried to contest it but didn’t even get a reply. This isn’t an isolated incident either; Meta routinely nukes groups and pages that “promote” anything it deems unsavory (which is a lot of things).
4) Organic Traffic Drives More Sales Than Any Other Type of Traffic
Google isn’t as popular as it once was—everybody knows that. Kids use social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to get their information, and that trend isn’t going away.
But people with actual money to spend? They tend to use search engines for purchase-intent queries. Yes, sales do happen through social media, but they’re dwarfed in comparison to the number of sales driven by clicks from inside search engines.
And this isn’t just me being an old-fashioned, grumpy SEO either.
Data shows that organic search consistently drives the highest conversion rates, bringing in roughly 10x more e-commerce revenue than social media referral traffic.
On top of this, over 80% of Millennials and Gen X—the demographics with the highest disposable income—start their product-buying journey on a search engine, which is basically all you need to know about the importance of SEO right now and probably for the next decade or so.
Social media is great for scrolling and developing modern psychological ailments, and you should definitely have a presence on the most popular ones (X is the best for vape and cannabis, by the way), but just don’t bet your entire strategy on it or allocate huge swathes of your budget towards it. The CTR just isn’t there.