Welcome to the Dispensary SEO Checklist

So, you’re a dispensary owner or marketer just becoming aware of the power of SEO, or maybe you’ve known for a long time but it’s hard to convince others, or maybe this is pre-day 1. Whatever the case, let’s be frank: it’s dumb to sleep on SEO. 

My advice, as an SEO, is to begin with SEO in mind (go figure, huh?). But what does that mean other than – in my view – starting off on the “right foot”? 

That looks a certain way, and the mission of this blog post is to show how that looks, why it is set up the way it is set up, and what’s the overall payout of the features and processes I’m suggesting. 

(Note: a PDF printout will be provided at the bottom of the page.)

So, without further ado, let’s jump into the checklist:

1. Set-Up & Optimize Your GMB for better Local Dispensary SEO

I recently wrote a post outlining 4 critical steps to optimizing your Google My Business for your dispensary business. My instructions on that post were, once you have set up your GMB to the degree that you get a 100% finished profile, come back to these 4 critical steps and add this into the mix you have already established.

Another consideration you will get when reviewing that blog is the necessity of product pages for the efficacy of Google My Business. There is a synergistic power at play when you hook up your Google My Business product pages to the website product pages. Check out that blog and don’t miss out on the power behind GMB.

But let’s move right along.

2. Set-up a website conducive to SEO best practices

Now, there are a few things a dispensary website should have if it were to be really thought up with SEO in mind.

Namely—

• Location-based service pages
• Ease of use / UX is positive
• Product and strain pages
• Schema
• Retargeting capabilities
• Blog (Highly Recommended)
  • Semantic anchor text pointed at product pages
  • Backlinks
  • Shareable on social media

Location-based service pages

For every dispensary location, you will need at least one location-based service/product page.

This page, basically, targets search queries that use generic keywords (like “dispensary” or “smoke shop” or “headshop”) and geo-specific keywords (like “near me” or “San Diego”) in conjunction. All this means is that they want what they want (i.e. “headshop,” “bong store,” “dab rig”) within a vicinity of their location.

Let’s not be too academic here; you will probably benefit simply for optimizing your service pages with 2 keywords:

“Dispensary” + City name

Here’s a quick checklist for optimizing your service page

1. Metatitle / SEO title – Use both the term “dispensary” and the city name in this. Here’s an example: “Dispensary San Diego.”
2. H1 / Page Title – Try to work your term into a natural sounding title: “The Dopest Dispensary in San Diego.”
3. Description – Use both the generic keyword and the city name in your description at least one time, each. Do not exceed 2 mentions of either term.
4. Word count – Put at least 500 words on the page that talks soberly about the topic reflected in the keyword. (Don’t just fill it with piffle)
5. URL – If you have control of the URL parameters, use both your generic keyword and the city name. Note: use a dash between every singular word, as if it were a space
   • Example: “websiteurl.com/dispensary-san-diego/”
   • Another example: “example.com/cannabis-dispensary-san-diego”

Exceeding the amounts of what I’m outlining here might be considered over-optimization.

3. Product Pages & GMB

Here, you’re targeting local product searches.

I outline in “4 SEO Tips for Optimizing Your Google My Business Profile for Your Smoke Shop or Dispensary Business” the power of connecting your product pages to your GMB product listings. In that post, I also outline some really convincing statistics about why you should be, at least, doing these 4 things. You should read that entire blog post because it’s , but, at minimum, read the section and add it to what you’re doing.

(Also, there is a bonus list in the first section that tells you how to optimize your website product pages. Peep that.)

4. Use Schema Markup to Enhance Exposure in Google

Before moving onto the next thing, I want to emphasize the importance of using schema – also known as semantic vocabulary – and why it is a must for Dispensary Seo.

Real quick – schema is an enhanced description of your web entity through a language (markup or coding) that is more conducive to Google’s understanding. It provides clarity to Googlebot, and it can help you be better placed in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Here are some benefits it provides (list credit: Ondyr.com):

1. It makes you eligible for Rich Results which can lead to better click through rate.
2. It can help you build your brand presence on Google by helping fill-up your Knowledge Graph.
3. You become more likely to show up for voice search.
4. You can show up for Google product carousels.
5. And much more that is not directly related to marketing your dispensary (but fun to know).

My recommendation is to check out RankMath and start to use its schema capabilities.

5. Ease of Use: Up Your UX Game

This next piece of advice is more about user experience (UX) that reflects its influence in SEO and SEO results.

Put simply, you want your website to be easy to use so that people, once they land on one of your pages, can find information they need. They need to easily find answers to their questions so that they can use you instead of one of your competitors.

UX Checklist

• Navigation should make it easy for users to find important pages on your website
• Calls to Action should be easy to find and understand
• Use categories and tags for better UX
• Use jump menus for long or complex content
• In prose, use smaller sentences, and break up conventional paragraphs into smaller chunks. Big paragraphs and walls of text can intimidate readers, as people don’t often read blog posts the same way they would read a book – though some might. They often scan or skim for information they want to know, and once they find it, they read that portion of the page.
• Use headers strategically and with user in mind.
• Use bulleted and numbered lists like it’s your job. This makes your content more “scannable” or “skimmable.”
• Bold and underline strategically.

6. Consider Blogging or Vlogging

One solid piece of advice is that you should be blogging or vlogging. What this does is it allows you to compete in various parts of Google for search terms people are using to find things.

This allows you to get in front of your potential customers, and utilizing a Pixel will allow you to stay in front of them by using retargeting ads (which – for you should be simply a ‘like’ campaign with a logo that does not mention or use an image of cannabis). I will dig deeper into this topic later in this blog.

The statistic about how much more exposure you’ll have using vlogging or blogging has been different over the years, but it’s consistently above 400% more.

Don’t sleep on it.

7. Embrace the Backlink Life

One competitive edge I know MOST of you readers will have is that you’ll be aware of the power of backlinks and what role they play in Dispensary SEO.

In fact, the very inception of Google has a lot to do with how they treat backlinks. Their patent basically makes them the only search engine that attributes parasocial value to your website through backlinks, and, in that way, their hierarchy reflects that parasocial aspect.

In plain English, backlinks work like an upvote from one website to another. The website that gets a backlink pointed to it is (sort of) powered up with ranking power because they have backlinks pointed at them.

Think about it like this: you need a chiropractor. There are 2 of them in your near vicinity. You ask a friend who has the same issues as you do which one they go to or would go to, and they reply with a clear upvote for one rather than the other chiro. They are essentially upvoting the chiro they like over the other one, and you are more likely to go with the one that got the upvote. That’s basically how backlinks work.

When Google has to decide who should show up in the results, and in what order, the upvotes (backlinks) help Google make those decisions.

Well, here’s the punchline, you can get backlinks by asking people to link to you or by buying them – meaning you can better rankings and more traffic from these backlinks.

Now, because backlinking is so convoluted and dangerous (if you get caught buying them, you can get a Google penalty), I recommend you buy them from trusted backlinking experts like SirLinksALot. And because it can be a full time job to strategically buy them so they make an impact while still being safe, I recommend SirLinkALot’s managed backlinking service or something similar to make it easy on you.

8. Use A Facebook Pixel to Retarget and Re-engage Your Brand

One way to really capitalize on your organic traffic is by retargeting/remarketing. However, there is one caveat: if you have degraded your credibility with Facebook in terms of your ad usage (meaning: you have been shown to use reference to cannabis, start another Facebook page/account just for remarketing). Also, strip your logo and ad copy of any reference to cannabis). Using a Pixel by Facebook, you can target those that have landed on your website with ads that can get them to do numerous things, like:

Benefits of Remarketing

• Directing traffic back to your website. However, don’t use your websites URLs to do this. Get a non-cannabis website and create 301s back to the relevant pages/posts (using plugins like Redirection or 301 Redirects).
• Use enticing, sale-driven ads for conversion-oriented campaigns (emphasis on sale)
  • Example: “20% OFF MERCH – ALL JUNE” (with your scrubbed logo, using a 301)
• Directing traffic to landing pages (again: using redirects from a website NOT associated with cannabis) where you can use a call-to-action for opt-ins to text messaging and email drip sequences. Again, use redirects to help ensure your ad isn’t shut off.
• Building brand awareness.

All in all, it is safer to say that SEO provides an opportunity for you to reengage potential customers in and through remarketing. If you sleep on the remarketing part, SEO becomes less useful. It is far more potent when you combine it with remarketing. Think Rule of 7. SEO provides the initial encounter/couple encounters, and remarketing provides the rest.

9. Use a Silo’d Structure in Your URL Parameters

Though by far the most nerdiest SEO advice on this list, its implementation can also be the most powerful. What we mean here is that the site structure shows hierarchization of topics in your website, and that helps both humans and the algorithm understand your website better.

This is what a URL with a silo’d structure might look like on a dispensary website:

https://exampledispensary.com/strains/wedding-cake/

Ok, Smart Guy – How Do You Structure URL Parameters Like That?

Simply put, you use custom post types. And there are a number of ways to set those up. One of the ways I do this is by using Custom Post Types UI.

One more thing, silo your Internal Links

Make relevancy all the more obvious to search engines by using an internal linking structure that reflects topical associations. In other words, each page should be representative of a topic or subtopic. Anytime that a subtopic is broached (or brought up) in a blog post, that reference should have a link to the page/post that represents that topic/subtopic.

Conclusion

Though I gave a lot of examples and insights into the 9, there are layers of information I’m leaving out. Things can get complex quite fast, and the use of a professional SEO should be sought to do some of these things correctly. Now, that could be us or someone else (but why not us? ). To really dig into this with us, send us a text, and we can go over some details. However, if you really want thorough analysis, I recommend a consultation.

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