Optimizing Your Cannabis Dispensary For Voice Search

What’s going on, you guys back at it again with another video. This one is gonna be how you can optimize for voice search so that whenever somebody goes to Alexa or Google in Siri and says, whereas the nearest dispensary, you guys will pop up first. So without further ado, here we go. Awesome. So this is the guide to optimizing for voice search.

Like I said, the overview is gonna touch on these five main points. It’s going to be what is voice search two, the main voice platforms. Three, why voice four, how to get on each platform, and then five, how to then optimize for voice. So first things first, what is voice search? So just like when you have a question online and you type it in on Google, people are increasingly doing the same thing, but with their devices, right? So instead of with written word, you’re going to do it with your voice, right? And currently Google Rating Supreme in the world of online search, with written word.

But when it comes to people using their voice, there’s a little bit more competition with all the different platforms out there. So the main voice platforms are Apple, which uses Siri, Amazon, which then uses Alexa, Google, which uses Google Assistant and Microsoft, which uses Cortana. So this is the breakdown from the local marketing institute showing you the breakdown of, how many people use each of these, search platforms.

So Google Assistant, you can see they use 36%. Apple Siri uses 36%. Amazon Alexa uses 25, and then Cortana uses 19%. So if you have, set up these four things, you’re pretty much gonna be set for 99% of the platforms out there that do leverage voice search. So now why voice? So according to Bright Local, 58% of the consumers in the US have searched for local business using voice technology.

So that’s more than half the use consumers, that have performed some sort of voice search to find a location near them. So this is general local businesses, so whether it’s a hair salon or a restaurant, but this will also apply for your dispensary, right? And it’s, pretty much free. You don’t have to do anything else other than set up these platforms, and then you start showing up for voice.

So it’s just another platform that you can unlock so that you can get more customers coming into your dispensary. So now how do you get on each platform? So each of the platforms pull data from different resources, and you’re gonna need to register for the following. So if you want to register for Apple, and I encourage you to register for all of them, apple uses Siri, which then uses Apple Maps, right? Alexa uses Yelp, Google Assistant uses Google Business places, and then Cortana uses Bing Places.

So remember, you must create an account for each of your locations. So if you own four locations, you’ll be verifying four accounts per platform. So you’ll be verifying 16 accounts in total because you wanna make sure that all of your locations show up on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, or Sir Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana.

Now, I’m not gonna go into too much detail, but if you want to go ahead and register your business, just go to register.apple.com/places on maps. I’ll put this in the YouTube description so that you can go ahead and do it. All you need to do is search by the place, and then if you don’t have a place, you can add the missing, missing place there.

Once you go ahead, you accurately enter all your business information, address hours, phone number, social media accounts, all of those things, and make sure that they’re all up to date. So the main problem with a lot of these platforms is that, you know, your business hours may change. you may remember to update one and not update the other, but in terms of voice, and then also in terms of ranking on Google, it’s very important that you ensure that all of the contact information on each of these platforms are all up to date and are all the same.

So this can be a handful, so you can get us to, to manage this stuff for you. but just it’s, it’s very important that you have this up to date because you don’t want somebody searching for your dispensary and then them having the wrong hours, and then Siri or Alexa or Google gets mad because you know your hours aren’t correct.

And then a customer, record, reports your account, so on and so forth. You don’t want any of that to happen. So just make sure that all of this information is up to date and correct. So same thing in here. Make sure the phone numbers, the same address is gonna be the same. It’s the hours that tend to be tricky.

So you wanna make sure that all of those, all that information is up to date. What will then happen is an Apple will then call your business to give you a verification code, or you can just choose to verify later. So it’s gonna call, what’s gonna happen is that you’re gonna receive a code, boom, boom, boom, put the code in on the back end, and then you’re good to go.

That’s how you set up your Apple Map profile. For the Yelp profile, you go to bis.yelp.com/claim, and it’s pretty much the same thing and to your business name, if you can’t find it on Yelp, you can add it to Yelp for free. go ahead and create a free business user account. so there’s two, and this is kind of tricky.

On Yelp side, there’s I think, two accounts that you can set up. You can set up like a customer account, like if you want to go into specific businesses and write reviews, but then there’s like a business account that you can also create as well. So same thing, to your email address. And then you can get set up here.

Then you go ahead, verify your account, entering the verification code, then you’ll get an email, or you can call, the number that’s listed on the page, and then you go ahead and verify your account for Bing. Pretty much the same thing. The cool thing with Bing is it actually syncs with Google Business places.

So you go to bing places.com and then you can add, you’re listing to Bing as well. So there’s two ways you can do it. You can import from Google My Business, or then you can claim your business manually. So if you have your Google My Business account set up, you can then just click a button, it integrates with your business account, and it automatically updates with all the settings that you have.

It makes it super simple to do. If not, then you can go ahead and just do the Google bi, the, you can just register everything on Bing. And then same thing as before you receive a phone call and then a pin a pin, and then you’re good to go. Now Google, this is google.com slash english ca business. Again, I’ll put all these links in the description.

But in order to, verify the Google My Business one, this one’s a little bit different. there are a few ways that you can actually verify your account. I’m gonna touch on that in a second. But just go to the Google Business Places account. go to the Google account and then go and fill in your information and verify your profile.

Now, one thing before I forget, Google Business Places is the new name, and the old name was Google My Business. So if you ever see their interchanging between the two words, Google My Business and Google Business Places are actually the same thing. so for here, this will be Google Business Places or Google My Business, right? Sign in with your Google account.

And then there’s a few ways that you can verify your profile. Now, when you go ahead and verify your profile, it may or may not give you all of the methods or only one of the methods. So the most popular method is via postcard. They will send a postcard to your address. It’ll take, I don’t know, about 10 business days.

In the verification, in the the postcard, you’ll see a verification number where you would then go in the back end of Google and then enter in the code that you have. But there’s other ways that you can do it. You can do phone or text, email, video recording, or also a live video call as well. So there’s different ways that you can verify your account.

You may have all of them, you may have some of them. So just follow the instructions once you fill in, your account. Now, now that we’ve touched on those things, so we’ve touched on the Google business places, Bing, Yelp, and then also Apple Maps. So if you, register for those four, you typically should be covered for all the, you know, for all of the voice searches.

And this will also help for General SEO as well. Now onto the optimization of the voice. So, there’s this really awesome study by backlinko.com and they did a full voice search SEO study to show you how you can optimize for your website. So you can show it first. So just like with seo, how you can do a few things on your website to help optimize the chance that you’re gonna show up higher on Google Maps and on regular Google rankings, you can do the exact same thing, albeit to a lesser extent, but also for voice.

So there’s a full, full study here. I’ll also put this link in the description, but I’m gonna touch on some of the main points and then go through a summary quickly, and then you can see exactly what’s going on. So down here, https secured websites dominate Google Voice. So if you don’t know what this is, it’s that when you, look at a website on the top left corner, there’s usually a lock.

And most websites have this and your website probably has this, but just in case it doesn’t, this is something that you want to check and you’ll see if the website is secured or unsecured. If the website is not secured, then for the, like most part, you probably won’t show up on Google Voice, nor will you show up on regular SEO searches because your website isn’t secure.

So you wanna make sure, that your website is https secured. You can talk with your host or your domain provider to make sure it’s activated, if it’s, or to ask them how to activate it if it’s not activated. If you wanna check it out, look at the top left right next to, to your, to your url, and then you’ll be able to see if your website is secure or not.

Cause we can see here that 70% of the, websites that show up in voice search, are showing up in voice search, and then 50% actually show up for desktop results. So either way, this is something super important. voice search results tend to be short and concise. So the average voice search answer is 29 words.

So for the most part, you will want to ensure that the FAQs and the information that you you provide, and I’ll touch on the FAQ importance in a second, are concise and to the point. Don’t go trying to increase the words, just because you want to increase the paragraphs, no, you wanna make sure it’s short and concise.

Using schema, dot org markup may not help your voice search ranking. So if you go around and you Google how do you optimize for voice, there’s gonna be a bunch of websites that say to do this, and there’s gonna be a bunch of websites that don’t. The reason why that I’m leaning towards this is because, these guys actually did a study and looked at the different websites, whereas I think a lot of the other websites are purely anecdotal.

They just look at a website, see if they have sche and don’t do actual any testing. I think they actually look through thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of websites to see what the percentage of schema markup resulted in having voice search rankings. Cuz we can see here there’s not a significant difference.

We have a 36.4% voice search results and a 31.3% average webpage for, the across the internet. Now with that being said, I do think overall schema does help in general. So it’s nothing that you have to pay for, but it’s something that you should implement on the back end of your website. And I think this is something that is super important for you to have.

It may not be for search, but just for overall SEO foundational, these are the most common things you should be doing. I would highly encourage you to do this. Websites with a strong link authority tend to rank best invoice search. So the average domain rating for the voice search is 76.8, which is crazy, like if if , if you’re not in the SEO sphere, this is like, insane domain rating, reserved for some of the highest websites on the internet.

But the reason why this is the case is cuz voice needs to ensure that they’re providing the right answer. So if I go and say, Hey, Alexa, answer my question to whatever they have, right? Alexa needs to be confident that the result that they’re providing to me is as up to date, correct and as factual as possible.

Meaning that the domain rating of the website is also linked to high authority, which means that it has a high likelihood chance of being correct. So this is super, super important. So make sure you work on your backlink profile in order to have the highest domain rating so that you can rank and voice search FAQs play an important role.

So we can see here the results, which are FAQ pages. Voice search results are 2.68% and desktop is 1.54. So these FAQs are pretty important because it provides context as to what people are searching. In most cases on voice, people are gonna ask it questions, where’s the nearest dispenser near me? how do I bake brownies? you know, what is the best car for me to buy? Like their actual questions, right? So what you wanna do is set up FAQs that are aligned with the questions that people may ask on voice, and then what’s the voice gonna do? It’s just gonna show the faq.

So it’s super important that you have FAQ pages that will be able to showcase the different content that people would typically ask online. Now, in summary, like I said, I would highly encourage you to go to this full case study, but overall I’ll quickly top, touch on the top 10 points. So one website loads quickly, this is a no-brainer for, both desktop and on voice secured with https has an FAQ page or is an FAQ page.

So this one is interesting because it almost contradicts the other point I said about contains concise answers. So it says here that long form content typically rains supreme. So what this means is that the content of the page itself has about 2300 words, but the conciseness of the answers that voice gives is only 29 words.

So what this tells us is that, long form content gives the Google or whatever, AI crawler the highest chance of finding and squeaking out what the right answer is because all the voice does, it takes your question, it inputs it into whatever, word processing software, and then it spits out what website it thinks will answer your question the best.

So if there’s a website that contains the most amount of words, it provides, these different voice tools, a better opportunity to find the answer that is more correct, right? But at the end of the day, the conciseness of the answer is what, these voice platforms are gonna put forward to whoever’s listening.

This one’s a pretty important one, and I think this is just good marketing in general. So this one says written at a ninth grade reading level or below. So the reason why this is the case is because when you use simple language, it just makes it easier to understand. Sure, you may want to showcase your vocabulary and say how good things are, but this isn’t a novel that you’re writing.

It’s information that people want to get. And if you wanna reduce the friction of the knowledge transaction, you wanna write at a, apparently a ninth grade level, reading level or below, so that people can understand it. you know, affluently, highly shareable. So the content is also shareable on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all of the Pinterest I would assume, it ranks in the Google desktop search.

So it also ranks in the top three search results. So traditional SEO also plays a part in, how voice is going to showcase what is gonna show up. It appears as a featured snippet. And then 10 the pages and authoritative domain with a greater than 70, hfs, domain rating as well. So, there are a few things to do, but in general, what I would say the main takeaway is one, sign up for all these different platforms.

Because if you’re not on the platforms, the voice platforms can’t pull the data. So if you wanna show up on Sierra, you have to sign up for Apple Maps. It doesn’t matter what you do here because it pulls the data about your business and it puts it over there, right? and then you can do some of these small things, but this is typical good SEO foundational work anyways.

So if you go back and look at, at some of my SEO videos, you’re gonna be able to see that, this makes a lot of sense. It’s aligned, right? Because ultimately all it’s doing is just taking information from the internet, transcribing your voice to written word, and then it’s just seeing where it can find the question, right? And in order to ensure that it has accurate UpToDate and concise information, you’re gonna be following SEO best principles anyways.

So overall, this is a summary on how you can optimize for search. and if you found this valuable, you can always schedule a strategy session with us. Just go to canna bud marketing.com, click schedule strategy session. I’ll go through all these things and more, about how we can, improve your business.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a sales call or anything like that. This is just how can we go ahead and improve your business to make sure it’s better, and then we can get rock and and rolling. But that’s it for now. hope you found this valuable and stay tuned for another video. Bye.