Running a cannabis dispensary can be profitable, but you need to maximize your online presence to gain more customers, expand your reach, and improve your sales. Having a well-designed eCommerce website is one way to achieve this. In particular, Shopify is an ideal platform due to its user-friendliness and prominence among many sellers. If you are planning to use it, here are some SEO challenges you may encounter when designing and developing your site:
Getting low rankings for search results of your brand
If you type in your company’s name on search engines and your website is not ranking in the top position, you may be using high-intent, high-revenue keywords. Your rankings are too low, causing you not to get the organic traffic you are aiming for. Worse, your competitor may be outranking you for your own brand name and stealing all those clicks and traffic.
To overcome this SEO challenge, check your Google Ads data and look for branded terms that convert well. You can also use Google Search Console to search for branded keywords if you are not running any Google Ads campaigns. If you are unfamiliar with how to do this, partner with a trusted cannabis digital marketing agency.
Having no control over your robots.txt file on your Shopify website
A robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, informs search engine crawlers which files or pages on your site to crawl and manages crawler traffic to your site. It is mainly used to prevent overloading your website with server requests to avoid slowing your site down and help you ensure a good user experience.
Since Shopify hosts multiple websites on their own server, you cannot edit the robots.txt file. This can create duplicate URLs for products associated with a category page. These are unnecessary and should not be in Google’s index. Fortunately, you can block these same pages from being crawled by Google by adding “disallow directives” in your robots.txt file. You and your dispensary marketing agency can also edit your Shopify theme or customize the section of your layout file to resolve this problem.
Using improper keyword mapping
Another challenge you may face is your website isn’t ranking at all for purchase search queries for cannabis, or your web pages that show in the search results are not the best match to the users’ search intent. If you have these issues, you may have a keyword mapping problem in your SEO strategy.
Your keyword map should contain tags for keywords, including keyword difficulty, information on keyword search volume, additional notes, and other valuable data. To address this issue, develop a content strategy that meets the users’ search intent for the keywords you want to rank for and work with a web design and SEO agency. Your aim should be to get your product pages or category pages to rank for valuable keywords.
Conclusion
Staying ahead of the competition in the cannabis industry is now easier with the power of the Internet. You just have to stay well-informed on how you can utilize this resource to your advantage. One way to do this is to prepare for the challenges listed above and listen to the suggested steps to overcome them. You can also hire professionals for further assistance.
Do you need help with SEO or website design for your cannabis business? You can count on us at CannaBud Marketing. We can drive buyers to your site, establish your authority, and boost your sales. Schedule a free one-on-one consultation today!
