Case Study – Indigrow

The Challenge

Indigrow’s proposition is genuinely different. Every product on their shelf has been personally studied and tested before it reaches a customer. In a market full of dispensaries carrying the same vendor catalogue, that’s a meaningful edge — the kind of thing that builds loyalty and justifies a customer driving past a closer competitor.

The problem was that nobody outside of Muskegon’s existing word-of-mouth circuit knew this. Indigrow had worked with multiple agencies — including some of the biggest names in cannabis marketing — and none of them moved the needle. Revenue had stalled. Online presence was effectively zero.

When the Indigrow team came to Cannabud, they weren’t looking to be impressed by another pitch. They needed a team that could actually diagnose what was broken, fix it, and show them the numbers to prove it.

The Solution

Three moves. The first was about brand. The second was a technical fix hiding in plain sight. The third extended the reach beyond Google.

The existing site was several years out of date and didn’t represent what Indigrow actually was: a small-batch, personally curated cannabis retailer with a standard no large MSO can replicate. We rebuilt it from the ground up — not just to modernise the look, but to put the brand’s core differentiator front and centre. A customer landing on Indigrow’s site needed to immediately understand why this store was different from every other dispensary in Michigan.

Brand clarity drives conversion — and it gives Google more content to index and rank.

This was the highest-leverage fix in the entire engagement. Indigrow’s product menu was hosted on a separate subdomain — a common setup that feels harmless but is an SEO dead end. Product pages sitting on a subdomain don’t pass authority to the main domain, and more importantly, Google treats them as a separate site. All of Indigrow’s product content — every strain, every SKU, every category page — was effectively invisible in search. Moving the menu under the main domain and getting it properly indexed by Google was a fast win that had an outsized impact on rankings almost immediately.

Low-hanging fruit. Most dispensaries don’t know this problem exists until someone looks for it.

With the technical foundation in place, we ran full local SEO optimisation across both Google Business Profile and Apple Maps. Most dispensaries focus on Google and ignore Apple Maps entirely — a significant miss given iPhone’s market share. Covering both platforms expanded Indigrow’s discovery footprint to capture every local search, regardless of device or default map app.

Ranking on Apple Maps is the coverage gap most competitors haven’t closed yet.

The Outcome