The Challenge

Jon Levine had been through the agency cycle more than once. Each time, the pitch was confident and the promises were clear. The execution was something else. Agencies that didn’t understand how cannabis marketing actually worked, that went quiet when results didn’t materialise, or that simply couldn’t move the needle for a business operating at the scale of a 16-location MSO.

The operational reality of running 16 stores across Colorado and New Mexico made this worse. Each location had its own market, its own competitive landscape, and its own Google presence that needed to perform. A single generic strategy wasn’t going to work — and that’s exactly what previous vendors had tried to apply.

By the time Rocky Mountain came to Cannabud, the underlying problem wasn’t just bad marketing. The website itself had been built poorly by prior agencies, with loading times that were killing both user experience and rankings. The foundation was broken before any marketing strategy could take hold.

The Solution

Three moves, executed in sequence. Each one dependent on the last.

The existing site was the product of multiple agency handoffs — slow to load, hard to update, and built on an unstable technical foundation. Rather than patch it, we rebuilt from the ground up. A slow website doesn’t just frustrate customers: it actively suppresses Google rankings. Getting the foundation right first was the only way any subsequent SEO work would stick.

With a clean platform in place, we built a location-specific SEO strategy for each of the 16 stores across Colorado and New Mexico. Each location operates in a different market with different competitors and different search behaviour — a single blanket strategy would have failed the same way previous agencies failed. Google traffic is the highest-intent traffic a dispensary can capture: customers already looking to buy. For a 16-location MSO, getting all 16 onto page one was the single highest-revenue activity we could execute.

Traffic without conversion is just a number. Once the ranking improvements were driving consistent visitors to the site, we ran a full analysis of how customers were actually moving through the purchase journey — where they dropped off, what they engaged with, what they ignored. The changes we made based on that analysis doubled their online order conversion rate, driving a significant uplift in revenue without spending an additional dollar on marketing.

The Outcome