SEO for Dispensaries: Grow Your Business Organically

As more states legalize recreational marijuana and municipalities offer up more licenses, cannabis retailers battle market saturation and are more and more desperate to stand out.

As a part of a comprehensive marijuana marketing strategy, search engine optimization is a smart investment with long-term results.

Marketing in the Cannabis Industry: Why SEO?

Dispensaries face regulatory challenges, financing barriers and substantial marketing restrictions that make sustainable growth difficult.

One of the best avenues to grow your marijuana business online is to focus on marketing channels with minimal restrictions and local-first intent.

So, SEO it is!

Here’s why SEO for dispensaries is key to driving results …

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SEO Is Another Way to Measure Market Value and Consumer Interest!

There’s plenty of interest in marijuana products, and SEO data is both the proof and the key to opportunity. There are several ways to measure the cannabis industry’s size, value and demand. One metric is revenue: US retail and medical marijuana sales reached $33.6 billion in 2023, with a forecast CAGR of 2.9%. Another metric is retail locations: There are more than 12,000 licensed pot shops nationwide.

However, the most actionable measurement is search volume. Let’s use a few keywords for CBD oil as an example:

• cbd oil – 90,500 US-based Google searches per month
• cbd oil for dogs – 12,100
• cbd oil benefits – 9,900
• best cbd oil – 5,400
• cbd oil near me – 5,400

Every month, more than 100,000 Google users search these exact terms, along with thousands of other marijuana and cannabis keywords.

Ranking your web pages for these terms in the search engine results page (SERP) is a huge win for increasing brand awareness, establishing instant credibility and authority (you can call it street cred if you want) and giving your business a leg up on your competition.

That’s the power of SEO. For cannabis companies hamstrung by marketing regulations that prohibit even the mention of words like “marijuana,” search engine marketing is an exceptional opportunity.

Cannabis Search Engine Optimization Basics

If you want your business to rank in the search results, Google has to know three things:

1. Who you are
2. Where you are
3. What you’re offering 

Whether customers are searching for “weed,” “ganja,” “sticky icky,” or “pot,” search engine optimization allows retailers to answer those questions and get in front of highly qualified customers.

Who You Are: Cannabis Branding

As marijuana legalization expands to nearly half of all US states and retailers lean on shared suppliers, cannabis is perilously close to being commoditized. Effective branding for cannabis companies helps attract and retain customers and differentiates products by creating a tangible, coherent identity. Establishing a brand style guide makes it possible for your vendors and everyone on your internal marketing team to use brand assets in a consistent way. It also gives them the guardrails they need to create a coherent, predictable voice and tone for copy, helping every social post and site page offers your potential customers a real, unified personality.

Branding is especially important for your web design strategy. Cannabis companies rely on several digital properties, including local listing sites like Leafly, cannabis delivery services like Eaze and their own websites or proprietary apps. Consistent branding across these platforms makes your company and products immediately recognizable, facilitating brand loyalty on crowded apps and websites.

Where You Are: Local SEO for Dispensaries

When it comes to SEO, your business’s online presence falls into two buckets:

1. Third-party apps and local listings (Google Business Profile, Leafly, etc.)
2. Your website

When someone is looking for a dispensary near them, search engines use all these properties to determine where they should rank your business in the search results. Google and other search engines will use the keywords, user behavior metrics gleaned from billions of searches and real-time data like a user’s physical location to serve them the best possible results.

Local Listings for Dispensaries

The three pillars of local SEO for dispensaries are proximity, prominence and relevance

• Proximity – How close is your business to the person looking for it?
• Prominence – Does your business have the correct information online to stand out?
• Relevance – Does your business sell what the user is looking for?

At Oneupweb, it’s our goal to optimize your business’s online presence to tilt these factors in your favor.

For example, while you can’t change the location of your business (proximity), you can write content to help your location rank for users outside your core service area (prominence). Even if your business is located in the small city of Kalkaska, you can still compete for (and capture) regional users searching for stores in the larger, more widely known Traverse City, which is 33 miles away in the next county.

It’s up to you to make sure these signals are crystal clear for search engines to help you stand out from competitors. While other local listing platforms exist (Bing and Yahoo), your primary focus should be on Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) and dispensary-focused platforms. As of Q1 2024, Google’s global search engine market share was 91.37%, which makes it your SEO priority.

How Do Local Listings Work?

“Local listings” describes any property that lists a business’s information in an online directory. The largest online directories are Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places and Google Business Profile. The cannabis industry, however, has also developed its own local listing platforms (see below), largely to bypass marketing restrictions from the likes of Google and Microsoft.

Dispensaries have three main options for local listings: Google Business Profile (GBP), Leafly and Weedmaps. Each has pros and cons, and we’ll run through a few those to get you thinking!

We recommend claiming your business on Apple Maps, Yelp and Bing Places. Although most of your traffic will come from GBP, Leafly and Weedmaps, it’s best to claim any online presence you can, or you run the risk of search engines claiming it for you and populating it with incorrect information.

Both local listings and local SEO work harmoniously to get your business’s information to the people who need it.

Google Business Profile for Dispensaries

Claiming and optimizing your free GBP listing is the best bang for your buck. It’s free, and it’s the primary tool people use to find things near them, including cannabis. We’ve already covered how to optimize your GBP listing, so we’ll cover dispensary-specific GBP recommendations here. Use the guidelines in the link above to claim, set up, verify and optimize your GBP listing.

Leafly and Weedmaps

These two pay-to-play local listing platforms are unique because they’re dispensary-specific. Leafly’s platform focuses on strain availability at dispensaries, and Weedmaps primarily targets dispensary locations. However, there is some overlap.  

The pricing structure for these platforms is geo-specific. In some cities, a premium spot in these platforms’ search results can cost anywhere from $399 to $10,000 a month. Other variables, such as market, product offerings, competition and others influence how much it will cost to list your dispensary.

Also, the more you pay, the better your listing. If you want your dispensary to appear in the first few spots, plan on paying for it. If you cannot afford to pay their fee, we still recommend setting up a free account with these platforms; don’t plan on competing with other paying dispensaries. (This is another reason why we recommend GBP for local dispensaries that are just starting up.)

Optimizing Your Dispensary’s Leafly and Weedmaps Listings

Search engines love consistency, which is why your business’s information must be the same across each platform. Beyond the name, address, phone number and business hours, there are many other important features to take advantage of within these dispensary-specific platforms.

These platforms have many more features than GBP. Cannabis customers use these platforms to look for deals, prices, menu options and strain availability when shopping. If your Leafly and Weedmaps profiles are up-to-date with the latest information and have photos, videos, menus and special deals, your conversion rate will be high.

Make sure that the links to your website from these platforms are tagged with UTM parameters and are working correctly. UTM parameters help you attribute traffic. Without them, all the traffic coming to your website from local listings will just be placed in the “organic” bucket.” Since data drives your marketing efforts (or should), you want to make sure the effort you’re putting into it is paying off. We made a free, easy-to-use UTM builder to create these custom URLs.  

Also, take time to fill out the About page, and remember to respond to positive and negative reviews as soon as you have the time.

How to Optimize GBP for Dispensaries

Unfortunately, Google turns off certain features for businesses that select “cannabis store” as the main business category. You can’t use GBP posts or provide a list of products or menu offerings. Don’t try to work around this by selecting a different category; Google will remove your listing. However, you should still make sure you have all the necessary information filled out, as well as plenty of photos and even videos.

Select your shopping options, such as pickup, delivery or in-store shopping.

SEO Website Optimization for Dispensaries

Now that you’ve claimed and optimized your local listing accounts, let’s focus on your website.

Each profile on local listing platforms should link back to your website. This means the “Website” button on your GBP listing should link directly to your domain. As mentioned earlier, don’t forget UTM parameters to help you attribute this traffic to the referring platforms in Google Analytics.

This vital connection provides search engines with context, links and authority to help search engines understand who and what you are. Without a website, it can be hard for your business to stand out on local listing platforms.

How to Leverage Marijuana Search Engine Optimization

For most cannabis companies, their website is where customers will learn more about their products, growing practices, how they source their products and the general ethos behind the brand. It should have dedicated landing pages with the appropriate keyword targets and copy to capture organic traffic.

Like local listings, location is a top priority for optimizing your website, especially if you have multiple locations. Create a dedicated, localized landing page for each location on your website and include relevant keyword targets your audience might use in that area.

For example, if you have a dispensary in Cadillac and one in Ann Arbor, you should set up a unique landing page for each location with the following keyword targets:

• dispensaries in cadillac michigan (10 searches per month)
• dispensary in ann arbor (1,900 searches per month)

Websites also facilitate online orders for pickup and delivery, which should certainly be a part of your business plan! We recommend using your website to showcase images and videos of your brand. With so much competition in the industry, this is your chance to distill your brand’s message and differentiate yourself.

Talking Cannabis: Content Marketing Opportunities for Dispensaries

Without content on your website, there’s nowhere for keywords to live. We recommend outlining a few topics, doing keyword research, and writing well-informed content for your audience (and Google).

Don’t know where to start? Some quick keyword research can identify a few local SEO opportunities:

• what is a dispensary (1,900)
• how to open a dispensary (880)
• are dispensary carts safe (480)
• do dispensaries take insurance (320)

The numbers in parentheses indicate how many people in the US search for that term on Google each month. The higher the number, the more opportunity and competition. Localize keywords whenever possible, and don’t forget to include important keyword variations. Little differences can have big differences in SEO. For medical marijuana shops, include “medical” in keyword phrases to accurately describe your services and contrast with retailers.

Do’s and Don’ts of Content Creation

There’s more to content marketing than just stuffing a bunch of marijuana keywords onto a page and crossing your fingers.

Follow these do’s and don’ts to align with Google’s best practices:

Do

• Write content that would be useful for someone using that keyword phrase.
• Place keywords in the H1 and title, two of the most valuable locations for keywords.
• Keep it relevant. If the landing page’s keyword target is “traverse city dispensary,” the page copy should contain your business name, address and phone number (with local schema markup), not a few paragraphs about your favorite strain.
• Write title and alt text for every image that goes with your content.

Don’t

• Just plop these keywords onto the home page and call it a day. Be strategic. Your keyword strategy needs to be balanced and intentional.
• Stuff keywords in the business name field on GBP. (They’ll penalize you).
• Use the same keyword twice on two different pages (known as cannibalization) since search engines won’t know which page to serve over the other. 
• Forget about your audience, especially those fresh to the scene. Since this market is so new to certain areas, don’t assume people know the lingo.

Find Your Niche and Write About It

Perhaps your shop carries really good CBD treats for dogs (cbd dog treats near me, 390). Maybe your pre-rolls dipped in oil and dusted with kief are legendary (pre-rolls near me, 260). Or maybe all your products are organic (organic dispensary near me, 390). Without content and keywords on your site about your products, search engines and customers will never know!

Try to speak the language of your customers and understand their search habits. Does your website have the right keyword targets and engaging content so Google knows when to serve your store in the local listings? Pot search engine marketing is all about finding your niche, building a presence and growing from there!

Social Media Marketing for Dispensaries

It’s also important that your website is connected to all your business’s social media accounts. With so many options these days, focus on quality over quantity. If you’re unsure where to invest time and energy, get expert eyes on your social media efforts. When in doubt, start Facebook and Instagram, and evaluate your results on those platforms before jumping to a new site.

Paid Ads for Dispensaries

Paid advertising is a great compliment to your SEO strategy, especially when you’re starting out. Unfortunately, compliance is complicated. Google currently labels cannabis as a “dangerous product” and disallows directly advertising its sale or consumption.

Facebook and Instagram do not allow cannabis advertising. Stackadapt is one of the few paid ad vendors that has ad options for the cannabis industry, but there are strict rules regarding what and how you can advertise.

The goal for paid ads for dispensaries should be brand awareness, not selling or promoting cannabis. It’s not impossible to run paid ads, but we need a lot more time to explain why and how to do it. If you have questions, our in-house paid advertising experts can help.

Cannabis Dispensary Email Marketing

Until quite recently, the largest email marketing platforms refused cannabis customers out of liability fears. Most of those companies, including Mailchimp and Constant Contact, have opened up to the cannabis industry. Platforms like Klaviyo have developed specific tools to help pot shops stay compliant while still accessing top-notch email automation and user segmentation.

There are plenty of levers for marijuana marketers to pull, but few have the time or resources to maximize the impact of several marketing channels simultaneously. Working with a professional marketing vendor like Oneupweb is a low-risk, high-reward option – let’s chat.

The Cannabis Industry Has Grown Up. So Should Your Marketing.

Setting up local listing profiles, creating effective landing pages and establishing your brand identity is just the beginning. Marketing is a non-stop effort that constantly presents new challenges and opportunities, but you don’t have to go it alone. Oneupweb wants to be your marketing department. From SEO strategy to media production to detailed reporting, we’re your vertically integrated digital marketing partner.

Give us a call at (231) 922-9977 or reach out to us online and let’s get rolling!