Running an SEO Campaign for your CBD Business or Marijuana Dispensary

Over the last 10 years, there has been a dramatic increase in businesses that have been engaging in selling marijuana based products.This is likely because of the increasing popularity of medical marijuana and cutting edge research that shows benefits of regular consumption of CBD resulting in lax legal parameters.
While it does look like the United States is moving towards becoming a country that tolerates the consumption of legal marijuana – it’s highly important to note that there are extremely significant legal ramifications to operating a marijuana based business and consuming marijuana. Something important to point out is that Google does not allow businesses selling marijuana or marijuana related products to use Google Ads – some social media platforms have restrictions as well.
If you landed on the blog post, I’m sure you’re already familiar with these legal ramifications and are more concerned about how you can actually market your marijuana or cbd dispensary or business online.
While there are many approaches to marketing your business, this blog post focuses on marketing your marijuana dispensary or CBD business through Search Engine Optimization and how you can take action today on attracting new customers to your doorstep.
Why Search Engine Optimization? Let’s look at the data, there is a MASSIVE amount of people searching for marijuana dispensaries near me per month. Just look at this screenshot from SEMRush. If you have thousands of customers yelling in the middle of the street “someone sell me CBD!” – wouldn’t you want your dispensary to be RIGHT THERE?

The potential here is BIG and very real. The advice I give in this article stems directly from my experience ranking all sorts of businesses on Google, namely Marijuana dispensaries and CBD businesses.
First things first – you need a website. Don’t have one check out Shopify or BigCommerce.
Implement the following platforms – I will write content about this in the future explaining the importance of each and how to set each of them up.
Tools to track local SEO performance:

• Google Analytics.
• Google Search Console.
• Google My Business for Marijuana Dispensaries

First things first – if you are a dispensary in a specific locale or if your delivery business is confined to a specific region – Local SEO is going to be extremely important for you. Let’s pause this article for a second, go to Google, and type in “marijuana dispensary near me” – analyze what you see.

You will likely see a map of all of the local marijuana dispensaries. If you click on the actual listing, you will see more details about that specific dispensary – this is actually powered through something called “Google My Business” – funny enough, you can set up your business through Google My Business, but you are significantly limited in its features. While this is important, I will circle back and create more content around this in the future.
Anyway – think about it – when you go to Google for this search – don’t you think this is a great place to have your business? Right in front of the person looking for your products? I’d say so!

Go get your Google My Business Set up right away – if you need any help – reach out to TechHouse Agency. Here’s what you’ll want to do.
Claim and Verify Your GBP Listing: Step-by-step instructions for CBD businesses.

• Add Complete and Accurate Information:
• Business name, address, phone number (NAP).
• Business hours, services, and photos.
• Leverage Features:
  • Use attributes like “Delivery” or “In-store shopping.”
  • Post regular updates and offers.

 

Local SEO for Marijuana Dispensaries

Now that you have your Google My Business account set up and running, let’s get into actually optimizing your website – let’s get your website listing on more real estate on Google’s SERP.

To begin – you’re going to want to consider what your customer is searching for. Why did they open Google? How does your business fit in with what they want? Do you want to educate your customer about marijuana (maybe, education is very important!) or do you want them to stop by your marijuana dispensary and make a purchase? Probably the latter.

Enter “keyword research.” I think that HubSpot does a great job at explaining what Keyword Research is. See below:

“Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.”
So if we’re doing keyword research, we’d find that we really wouldn’t want to rank for ‘dispensary near me’ – that’s far too broad… Imagine if you’re a customer in Florida and you’re seeing results for dispensaries in California? You’d just keep scrolling and would probably be a little confused.
So, as the business owner, that should be good intel for you – you’re going to want to make sure that your website is optimized to rank for your location. If you’re a medical marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles, you might consider targeting “Medical Marijuana Dispensary in Los Angeles” as your primary keyword. When someone in Los Angeles googles “Medical Marijuana Dispensary near me”, Google will pick up their location and will display dispensaries near them – if your site is properly optimized, your website might show up!

Okay great – we understand keyword research and what keyword we want to use…. Now what?

Content is King for your CBD Business or Marijuana Dispensary!

You may have seen this phrase ‘Content is King’ – frankly, as someone who’s been in the SEO industry for a decade, I’m just tired of hearing that phrase. I know I was being dramatic, but it certainly holds true today.

When optimizing your content for search engines, it’s crucial to write as if you are the authority on that content. Google likes to know that you are knowledgeable, but if you can demonstrate experience, expertise, and uniqueness through that writing – you’re golden. So how does this look in practice?

When I’m writing optimized blog content for my website and for my customers, I like to write in first person and demonstrate my expertise in the subject as if I’m speaking to a person directly. So instead of writing “This guide will demonstrate how to rank your website”, and give recycled bullet points on general SEO I write: “Here’s how I ranked my website” and give detailed explanations on what I did.

When you’re considering an SEO agency, make sure they know about your industry!

Keyword Usage

When writing the optimized content, ensure that you’re targeting the keyword(s) you identified during your keyword research phase. When writing a blog post over 1000 words, you might want to consider repeating the keyword 4 or 5 times. I know that we are here to talk about writing your content so search engines see it, but just remember that we need to write our content for humans. Humans are reading it at the end of the day after all!

Some more technical content SEO considerations

When writing the content it’s very important to consider the content hierarchy by leveraging tags such as: Title Tag, H1 tag, and the meta description. Let’s start by talking about what each of these are:

• Title Tag: The title tag of your page is essentially the title of the site. When Google is crawling your website, one of the first things it looks at is the title tag. This is a crucial place to have your identified keyword! Try to keep it to 50 – 60 characters as it’ll get truncated on the SERP!
• H1 Tag: The H1 tag the page’s header. Imagine you’re in school and need to write a research paper – this is exactly that. This tells the user and search engine exactly what they’re about to read about. This should also be 50 – 60 characters long.
• H2, H3, H4…: These are subsequent headers. Important areas where you can break up your content into smaller sections (I do that in this blog) – this could be a good place for secondary or tertiary keywords. You guessed it… 50 – 60 characters long.
• Meta Description: The meta description of each page is a brief explanation of what content is on that page. Google has come out and said that they don’t take meta descriptions into ranking consideration – however, I’ve seen evidence of the contrary… I’ll write a whole other blog post about that. Either way, ensure you have your keyword in the meta description! Google directly says this should be 50 – 150 words.

 

Build Backlinks

Building backlinks can be a challenging part of running a Search Engine Optimization campaign for your CBD Business or Marijuana Dispensary. Just when you think you have this whole SEO thing down with onsite content and keyword strategy, backlinking is just another beast to tackle.

Backlinks are an extremely important part of your campaign. When selecting an SEO agency, be sure to consider their plan for creating relevant backlinks for your website. Search engines view backlinks as 3rd parties vouching for the validity of your website. On one hand, you might have well written on site content, but Google wants to know how valid that content is – if other high authority, relevant websites are linking to your website, that’s a sign you have valuable content and Google will improve your rankings accordingly.

Some approaches to backlinks for your CBD Business or Marijuana Dispensary.

• Citation building is an easy first start to generate value back to your website.
• Relevant links in the CBD and marijuana industry.
• Local links to cement you as the local authority for your niche.

Technical SEO

I plan on writing an entire article on how to ensure your site is technically compliant, as this can really be in depth and oftentimes require a developer to safely implement into your site.

At a high level, it’s important to ensure that Google and other search engines can actually see your website. See some high level considerations below:

• Set up Google Search Console.
• Ensure your robots.txt allow search engines to see your site.
• Minimize the amount of 404 pages and ensure redirects are set up correctly.
• Make sure your site is blazing fast.

 

When setting up your CBD business or Marijuana Dispensary, you really want to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success.

If you follow the above tutorial, you will be ranking in no time. This is exactly how I’ve ranked this website and other client’s websites. Contact me to help get your site set up!