What is Dispensary SEO?
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search engine optimization. Dispensary SEO is the process of driving organic traffic to your dispensary’s website through searches on search engines.
Why do I need SEO for my dispensary?
SEO is a powerful way to increase visibility of your marijuana dispensary. The goal of SEO is to increase the rankings of your website on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
In general, the higher you rank in search engines, the more traffic you will get to your website.
Search engines are the primary way in which people find dispensaries. If you are not visible in search engines, then your customers won’t find you.
SEO enables your dispensary to be found by people searching for you. Improving your search visibility will drive more paying customers into your dispensary.
Below are four quick tips on where to spend your time to boost your dispensary’s website in search engine results.
1. Claim Your Business On Google (Local SEO)
Google’s “Google My Business” listing is a snippet of the most useful information about your business. It features your photos, website, address, phone number and more. Make sure you add these. Your dispensary’s full business listing will show up in Google’s search results when people search for your brand.
A partial listing of your business may show up in Google’s local listings for people who search for dispensaries near you.
Claiming your Google My Business listing will greatly improve your local dispensary SEO.
It is important to make your business information as accurate and as descriptive as possible.
2. Claim Business Listings In Local Directories & Industry Directories
Whether you are a medical dispensary or a recreational dispensary, it’s important to claim all possible business listings. Google crawls and analyzes these listings which send cues to their algorithm about your location and business type. That is why it is very important to maintain a consistent NAP (name, address and phone number) across all directories and your website.
3. Optimize On-Page Content For Localized Dispensary Keywords
Write keyword optimized title tags for each page.
At the very least, make sure to include “Marijuana Dispensary”, your location and the name of your dispensary in your home page title tag.
Also, be sure to write a click-through-rate optimized meta description. This is your chance to entice a searcher to click on your title tag. Tell them what they will learn or gain from visiting your website. End will a call-to-action to really that tells the user to visit your site.
Your H1 heading should target the same keywords as your title tag. When a user clicks on a title tag they expect to see a similar headline. This reassures the user they are in the right place.
Add alt-text to your images. Search engines cannot see images on your website. Alt-text gives you the opportunity to search engines what your images are. Be as descriptive as possible when writing alt-text. This opens the opportunity for you to rank in image searches as well. Want to learn more about image SEO? Check out Moz’s tips on how to optimize your images for search engines.
Lastly, you need to support your keyword targets with valuable, informational or entertaining content. You need to provide an experience on your website that keeps users engaged. The longer users stay on your site the more search engines will view you as a valuable source of information. And if your content truly is valuable, people will share it!
Plus, creating sharable content will increase the amount of organic inbound links pointing to your site. Backlinks are a major ranking factor for your dispensary’s SEO success.
4. Optimize Your Dispensary’s Website for Mobile Usability
Google recently rolled out their mobile first indexing. That means their website crawlers are analyzing the mobile responsiveness of your website before they consider how your website looks on a desktop computer.
This is very important for dispensaries because most searches for dispensary related keywords come from mobile devices. If your website does not have a fast and clean mobile experience, users will bounce off your site quickly. This sends signals to Google that you have a bad user experience and Google wants to promote what is best for the user. If you cannot provide the optimal experience, your rankings will drop.
Dispensary SEO Summary
If you want to drive more customers to your marijuana dispensary, people need to be able to find you on search engines. After they find you, you need to delight them with a seamless website experience and convince them to visit your location. These four simple tips will help you reach those goals.
Once those customers show up at your door, it’s up to the budtenders. Providing an amazing in-store experience will help you retain the customers you’ve attracted from SEO.
Interested in learning more about dispensary SEO? Let’s chat.
I liked your suggestion for making your dispensary website mobile friendly. I know that I tend to look things up on my phone more than my computer. Also, it might be smart to have directions to where the dispensary is on the website as well.
I liked that you explained that you need to make sure that you register your business on Google. That does seem like a very good thing to do for a Dispensary. After all, you want to make sure that people can find your location alright. It could be smart to have a good map to your store as well.