We produce content on your website and optimize it so that it shows up in search results and drives traffic & sales for your business. Continue reading.
More Local Foot Traffic
We manage your Google My Business listings; responding to reviews, adding photos, and optimizing the profile to it’s fullest extent.
Engage Your Audience
We write blog posts about products, events & FAQs, and build pages that help you show up for “dispensary near me” and more.
What is SEO?
SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of increasing your website’s visibility in organic search results. By helping search engines understand & trust your website, we help new customers find your dispensary! Ready to let us take your web presence to the next level?
Silver Therapeutics came to us in 2019 with a goal of increasing local website traffic & establishing a national presence.
Year 1: avg. monthly organic web visitors went from ~6,000 to ~15,000.
Year 2: avg. monthly organic web visitors went from ~15,000 to ~40,000.
+566% %
Organic Web Visitors
+556% %
Clicks
+3900 %
Impressions
Trusted by
Dispensary SEO Guide
Search Engine Optimization is a process involving a thorough understanding of Google, the tools needed, and the knowledge to deploy best practices. In a rapidly growing industry, getting your site to garner traffic and search authority takes a consistent and strategized approach carried out by professionals. Here we cover the different aspects of SEO like the difference between optimizing for local traffic vs national traffic.
What is Local SEO?
The goal of any local SEO campaign is to increase the chances of being discovered online “in your backyard”. It’s about attracting customers or site visitors that are currently in your geographical location. Since dispensaries are all physical storefronts, local SEO should be at the heart of any winning SEO strategy.
When customers search “dispensary near me” or “where can I buy edibles” – you want your dispensary to show up. But how? Click “Get Started” below.
Learn more: What is local SEO?
What is National SEO?
If local SEO is trying to get customers near you to purchase your cannabis products, National SEO is about spreading brand awareness and positioning your canna-brand as an expert in the cannabis field. National SEO relies heavily on a strategic content plan. What does this look like?
If your dispensary is located in Boston, but a California resident stumbles onto your website from searching “how much is an eighth of weed,” that would be a great example of a well-executed national SEO strategy.
You may think – why do I care about spreading brand awareness to people who will never purchase a product from me? For SEO value! Generating traffic to your website tells Google that your content is engaging and worth showing off. Blog posts that rank nationally also generate organic backlinks, which is a very important ranking factor.
Learn more: What is national SEO and why is it important?
What is On-Site SEO?
On-site SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for specific keywords in order to boost search visibility and traffic, also referred to as on-page SEO. It entails aligning keywords with page-specific components such as title tags, headings, content, and internal links. There are many factors to consider when discussing on-site SEO, but the most important ones are:
- Content
- Keywords
- Metadata
- Internal Linking
- Page Speed
- Outbound Links
Learn more: What is on-site SEO?
What is Off-Site SEO?
Off-site SEO refers to any actions being taken off of your website in order to improve search rankings. Just like on-site SEO, there are tons of factors that come into play. The amount of off-site SEO work that’s needed in order to rank in search results will largely depend on the competition. How authoritative are the domains you are competing with? Are there lots of high quality websites trying to rank for the same keywords as you? Here are some of the most important factors to consider when developing an off-site SEO plan:
- Backlinks
- Domain Authority
- Social Media
- Reputation & Reviews
Learn more: What is off-site SEO?
What are some helpful SEO tools?
SEO is all about analyzing data and understanding consumer trends in order to offer website visitors exactly what they are looking for. In order to gain this type of insight, SEOs rely on a ton of different tools. Some of them are free and some of them require a monthly subscription, but these tools will certainly help when it comes time to do keyword research and develop a strategy. Keeping an eye on metrics is also the best way to improve user experience. Some of the best SEO tools are:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- SEMrush
- Moz
- Ahrefs
Learn more: What are some helpful SEO tools?
SEO Crash Course: Buzzwords Explained
You’ll commonly hear a bunch of words used by SEO nerds, like us, who forget that normal people may not know their sitelinks from their sitemaps – and that’s okay – let’s review some of the biggies.
- Search engine: An information retrieval program that searches for items in a database that match the request input by the user. Examples: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
- Index: A massive database of content collected by search engine crawlers, collected by crawling each individual page on every website that exists on the internet. Think digital library.
- Crawling: The process by which search engines discover your web pages. GoogleBot is Google’s robot spider that crawls around the web, cataloging each piece of code and text.
- Indexing: The storing and organizing of content found during crawling.
- Ranking: When someone searches something, what number listing are you? First? Second? 100th? Wherever your website appears is it’s ranking for the query that was searched.
- Query: A search phrase or keyword that someone typed into Google.
- Sitemap: A list of URLs on your site that crawlers can use to discover and index your content. You can think of the sitemap like a table of contents for Google.
- Traffic: Visits, sessions, or users coming to a website.
- Backlinks: Or “inbound links” are links from other websites that point to your website
- Meta title: the website or page title that actually appears in search results.
- Meta description: A brief description of the contents of your website or webpage. Google sometimes uses these as the description line in search result snippets, sometimes they don’t.
- N.A.P: Make sure your business’ Name, Address, and Phone number are consistent with your website, your Google My Business profile and all other off-site pages that appear on page 1 of search results (making sure Google has the right info for your business)
- High–value keywords: Keywords or queries that we know are being searched often, and that are highly relative to your business.
- Long–tail keywords: Longer queries/search phrases, typically those containing more than three words. Indicative of their length, they are often more specific than short-tail queries and often come with lower competition.
- Alt text: Alternative text is the text in HTML code that describes the images on web pages. Generally used by the blind to get context for images.
- Header tags: An HTML element used to designate headings on your page. Heading tags help to add organizational context within your content.
- SSL certificate: A “Secure Sockets Layer” is used to encrypt data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher (this comes as part of the CannaPlanners Annual Services Package for all clients!) HTTPS websites will have an SSL certificate while HTTP sites will not.
- Title tag: An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page
- Responsive design: Google’s preferred design pattern for mobile-friendly websites, responsive design allows the website to adapt to fit whatever device it’s being viewed on (all CannaPlanners sites are built to be responsive)
- Link building: While “building” sounds like this activity involves creating links all by yourself, link building actually describes the process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site’s authority in search engines. This can be done through company outreach as well as building directory profiles.
- Referral Traffic: Traffic sent to a website from another website. For example, if your website is receiving visits from people clicking on your site from a link on Facebook, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as “facebook.com / referral” in the Source/Medium report
- Qualified traffic: When traffic is “qualified,” it usually means that the visit is relevant to the intended topic of the page, and therefore the visitor is more likely to find the content useful and convert.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of total visits that did not result in a secondary action on your site. For example, if someone visited your home page and then left before viewing any other pages, that would be a bounced session.
- Click-through rate: The ratio of impressions to clicks on your URLs.
- Conversion rate: The ratio of visits to conversions. Conversion rate answers how many of my website visitors are filling out my forms, calling, or buying my products?
- UTM code: An urchin tracking module (UTM) is a simple code that you can append to the end of your URL to track additional details about the click, such as its source, medium, and campaign name
- Google Search Console: A free program provided by Google that allows site owners to monitor how their site is doing in search.
- Google My Business listing: A free listing available to local businesses (not ecommerce businesses – read more about Google My Business
There are many more words used, but these are the ones you’ll hear the most. In addition to understanding the lingo, there’s a whole other side of things when it comes to execution.
Here’s why dispensaries are relying on SEO
Improving your dispensary website's SEO
Improving your dispensary website’s SEO requires a thoughtful and effective keyword-targeting strategy and high quality content built around those keywords. Forming a strategy involves researching the words or queries that people are searching to find your website or your competitors’ website.
How Google Search Works
Now that you’ve launched your beautiful new CannaPlanners website, what’s next? How do you make sure that people find you? How do search engines even work? Optimizing your site is a never ending process.
It comes down to 2 big factors...
The reason SEO is so important for the cannabis industry
SEO for dispensaries is incredibly important, and is arguably more important in the cannabis industry than other business categories. Why? Cannabis businesses are prohibited from using many traditional forms of advertising like social media and PPC ads. This makes attracting new visitors from search results a lot more important. Luckily for cannabis companies, optimizing your dispensary’s website for search is really no different from optimizing other types of websites. The same best practices apply; things like:
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