Dispensary Marketing Guide

As I’m sure you’re well aware. Cannabis comes with a plethora of restrictions and problems when it comes to marketing and advertising. This is why we use SEO or search engine optimization strategies to get your website ranking higher on Google.

This is not to be mistaken for paid advertisements. These strategies are purely organic, meaning we use different tactics to get our website ranked higher on Google.

For example, if someone is searching for a “dispensary near me” we want to make sure your business is the one that pops up first.

The next sections will show you exactly how we go about doing that.

Essentially we’ll be using the SEO principles and best practices to rank our website to the top of Google and get you more clients.

Off-Page SEO: is anything you do to optimize the web pages off your site. This mainly includes:

– How many other websites link back to your website (AKA a backlink)

– The quality of the websites that link back to your website

– If local, how close you are to the person that’s searching

– Reviews

– Other brand mentions such as press releases

1) Optimize Your URLs

One of the easiest things you can do is change your URLs to contain your relevant keywords. This is only relevant for your sub-pages and not your home page.

Go to your website and change your URL pages to the main keyword you’re trying to rank for. For example, if you own multiple dispensaries you must have the city name in your URL for their respective city. 

example.com/{City 1}, example.com/{City 2} 

This is also relevant for categories. So if you have an edibles category on your website your URL should be something along the lines of: example.com/edibles

2) Organizing Your Site Architecture

To follow along with the first rule. You must have realized that we can’t just stuff a bunch of keywords into the URL and expect it to rank.

This is where having a proper site architecture comes in.

Each category & location page must have it’s own page so you can properly rank for your keywords.

So, (in general) you’ll want to have one page associated with one keyword and other relevant phrases.

If you have 3 categories: Pre-Rolls, Edibles, Drinks

You should have a minimum amount of 4 pages created (1 homepage + 3 category pages).

3) Optimize Your Page Titles

The page title is the title that’s either found directly on Google when you see the search or in the tab that you’re in.

Consider this to be the main thing you want to rank for on each page.

Example Page Title: Shop Cannabis Edibles | (Insert Brand Name)

4) Optimize Your H1 Tags

Example H1 Tag: Best Cannabis Dispensary in {Insert City}

5) Optimize Your H2 Tags

H2 Tags will be used to organize the overall topic from the H1 Tag. Think chapters in a novel. They help organize the structure of the page. Unlike H1 tags you can have multiple H2 tags.

Example H2 Tags: What Makes {Insert Business} Great, What People Say About Us

6) Optimize Your Written Content

Back in the day, it used to be as simple as making sure your keywords were included in your paragraphs. Now, Google is a bit smaller and if you stuff too many keywords into your content you can actually get penalized.

The best thing I can tell you is to write genuine content that you think people will read and engage with. Think of this guide as an example. I’m not stuffing any keywords into this page. I’m trying to provide high value and engaging content.

The average page on the first page of Google is around 1500 words. Create content that your audience will find valuable. Ignore how many keywords you need to insert and just write content your audience will like.

That being said there are some awesome tools on the market such as Surfer. This tool helps both with keyword research and content creation.

However, if you’re just a brick & mortar. Keep it simple and provide value to your local community.

7) Optimize Your Images & Alt-Text

Upload images to your website and give them a name.
When you take pictures, the default file should be changed to something that would relate to the image.

Example: img_12394 change to Cannabis_Hoodie_Merch

Following this, you would also change the alt-text of your images.

Alt-text is what is used to describe the image if someone can’t see the image. Typically an impaired person would rely on alt text to understand the image.

In the image settings change it to something descriptive.

Example: i.e “New Brand CBD Drink”

8) Interlinking Between Pages

We’re going to touch on the power of links in the next section. However, what you need to do is make sure that any authority of your individual pages is shared with your “weaker” pages.

What we mean by this is whenever you create your category or location pages. They should link to one another. So that any “link juice” can be pushed to your other pages.

This also improves the indexability of your website and makes it easier for Google to crawl your website.

The bulk of Off-Page SEO strategy is trying to do what is referred to as backlinking. Which is getting high-quality websites to point a hyperlink on their website back to your website.

A great analogy is that you should think of links as “votes” from others around the internet. The more votes you get the higher likelihood your website is authoritative. However, it’s not just about the quantity. It’s also about quality. Having “bad” votes or links can result in negative effects on your Google ranking.

This is as you can imagine is hard to do. But if it was easy, then everybody would be ranking on the top of Google. Here are some backlinking & off-page strategies.

1) Build High Quality Content

According to this content study, long-form content gets an average of 77% more backlinks than short-form content. This is probably because longer form content comes across a more valuable to your readers.

So, developing a robust content strategy can significantly help you increase the links to your website.

2) Boosting Social Shares With Influencers

Similarly to how influencers are used to create strategic marketing campaigns. They can also be used to help generate off-page traction. By partnering with the right people they can help become a catalyst for a viral piece of content that will help increase rankings.

3) Engaging With & Effectively Using Social Media

Social media can no longer be ignored when it comes to SEO. Social media drives valuable traffic to your website that further boosts website authority and user engagement. All of these things positively benefit the ranking of your website.

4) Sponsoring Events

When you sponsor events you can get a link back from the sponsor’s webpage. This is a very effective way to not only generate some extra traffic, but to leverage your sponsors site as a backlink to your own.

5) Community Engagements & Charity Work

Since you own a brick & mortar, engaging with your community should be part of your marketing strategy already. Use that engagement to work with local charities or do work with the community. These are also great ways to generate links to your website and also grow on social media too.

6) Guest Blogging & Interviews

Bloggers, interviewers & podcasters are often looking for content to have on their website.

As a dispensary owner, you definitely have some insights and value that can be added to cannabis bloggers. Engaging with your online community and writing guest posts or participating in interviews can get you some free promo and great backlinks.

7) Launch an Event & Tell Your Local Reporters

Similarly to bloggers. Reports & journalists are always looking for the next thing to write about.

If you live in a smaller city, any type of launch would be big enough for them to write an article on the local website newspaper.

Even better you’ll have more eyes on your dispensary.

8) Create Tier 2 Links To Increase Indexability

Tier 2 links are essentially links that are created to manually improve how well links can be indexed.

If your high authority backlink isn’t even crawled by Google then it doesn’t matter if you received that link in the first place.

You can create free links on high authority websites such as Weebly, WordPress & Tumblr that can link to your high authority links. These don’t pass any link juice, but they create a network that can improve the rate at which your links get indexed.

Local SEO mainly refers to strategies put in place to help you rank your Google My Business Listing (GMB) within what’s called the three-pack. The three-pack consists of the top three listings for a local service or brick & mortar. Many people also know this as a Google Maps listing. You can see an example of this below.

For example, if someone types in “Dispensary near me” you want to show up within this three-pack.

It’s incredibly important to rank here as well because approximately 33% of all clicks go towards this pack. We’ll uncover different strategies we can use to rank your Google My Business Listing (GMB).

As credited to the team over at Local Viking. There are 3 things that go into ranking your Google My Business listing (GMB). These are:

1) Distance – The distance your physical location is to the person that is searching for specific keywords.

2) Relevance – How relevant your content is to the person that is searching for those specific keywords.

3) Prominence – How signals are built towards your GMB profile that boost it’s authority in a local setting.

This is self-explanatory. The closer your location is to the user that is searching, the higher chance you will have to show up in their search. This is the reason why if you’re looking for a dispensary in Colorado another location in California wouldn’t pop up.

This is also why it’s important to create multiple GMB locations for each store you open up. While there’s not much we can do with this ranking factor. The other two factors we have much more control over.

1) Content
Similarly to how we adjust our on-page content to have the right keyword structure. We must do the same on our GMB profile. This means having content on your website that’s relevant to your chosen keywords.

You have a few sections in your GMB profile that you can edit. This mostly includes your posts. Within your posts, you can write descriptions. Google uses these to determine if your content is relevant to the search intent of a user.

2) Choosing The Appropriate Category
If you have a brick & mortar dispensary your category should be “Cannabis Store.”

3) Location Page Optimization
If you own multiple brick & mortars you will want to create separate location pages on your website to help establish relevance based on region.

1) Social Media
Social media plays a huge part in business these days whether you like it or not. Google knows this as well. How many well-established businesses do you know that don’t have social media accounts? Not many.

In order to increase your GMB authority creating social media accounts are now more important than ever. You should strive to create profiles for the big networks + any cannabis-related platforms if possible.

2) Building Out Citations
Citations are simply a reference of your business’ name, address & phone number online. However, when we mention citations it mostly refers to business listings and directories that we can submit our business to.

Examples of this are Yelp, Yellow Pages, Better Business Bureau etc.

The reason why citations are powerful for ranking locally is that they essentially reinforce that your business exists. By having a consistent NAP Google perceives this as a higher chance your business is legitimate.

3) Collecting Reviews
Reviews are a really great source of social proof. In the eyes of a customer they would rather buy from a place that has 50 5-star reviews instead of 50-4 star reviews.

Similarly, Google understands the power of these reviews and factors that into their ranking algorithm.

However, it should be noted that having more reviews than another competitor doesn’t necessarily mean you will be ranking higher.