TikTok. Instagram Reels. Your blog, website, and email list. All these aspects of cannabis digital marketing matter, but without search engine optimization (SEO) tying them all together, you won’t reach nearly as many prospective customers as is necessary to sustain and grow your business. You might not even reach your existing customers!
If social media, website design, and content are the many parts of a car, then SEO is the steering wheel. It’s how you direct all your content where it’s intended to go — as in, to your soon-to-be customers and your most loyal shoppers alike.
1. SEO offers an excellent return on investment (ROI).
When you put your resources toward cannabis SEO best practices, you get the thing that matters the most: results. A properly optimized website, from its homepage to its blog posts to its menu listings, appears more often and more highly on search engine result pages (SERPs). That means you get more organic traffic, which means more website visitors and more opportunities to sell.
This increase in traffic yields our clients, on average, an increase of 20% to 30% in online sales in their first six months of dedicated SEO efforts. For one of our clients, their 28% increase in online sales during their first six months meant they grew their sales volume from $4 million to $5.2 million. That kind of investment in cannabis marketing SEO services pays for itself many, many, many times over.
2. No state laws prevent people from Googling about cannabis.
Every state in which there’s a legal cannabis market has its own rules and regulations about how cannabis companies can advertise themselves. When Instagram shadowbans you or state laws disallow your billboard, you’ll always have search engines to share information about your cannabis company. Even if you’re limited on what you can say and how you say it, there are very, very few states that do not allow the creation of a company website altogether.
This makes SEO especially powerful for cannabis marketing. If someone in your state searches for, say, “Wyld edibles,” and you run a dispensary that’s published a Wyld product review, your content could appear first in their search. That’s a pretty big deal when all the other dispensaries around you are probably stocking Wyld gummies. It’s an even bigger deal when you supply information people want about the experience they can expect when they try a cannabis product.
3. SEO is more reliable than social media.
In cannabis SEO, your website and its content get as elevated as you might be on weekends (or, heck, at work if you’re behind a screen or interacting with customers). Getting these assets out in front is exactly the point — blog posts, landing pages, images, and other copy and media stored on your website are your safest content. Web hosting services and some content management systems generally don’t remove content, whereas social platforms…well, you know the drill.
SEO is the art, science, and perseverance of influencing search engine algorithms, which is an entirely different process than managing your potentially tenuous social media presence. Think of SEO as a long-term game that keeps you not just afloat but thriving in the ocean of competitor websites that could also answer your audience’s questions. Your social media profiles, on the other hand, can be snatched away from you, and your audience disappears along with it.
4. Search engines are your first avenue of exposure.
What do you do when you need an answer to something? If it’s not something that a friend, loved one, or smoking buddy (or a new friend you just puff-puff-passed to for the first time) can answer, chances are you’re asking Google. Or maybe Bing, Duck Duck Go, or an AI search engine is more your thing. In any case, search engines are the first place most people will discover your business, especially when searching for solutions to a problem.
Maybe someone is searching “dispensary near me” to solve the problem of not knowing where to get high-quality bud. Maybe they’re searching “sleep gummies” to solve the problem of tossing and turning every night. If your dispensary’s content educates the latter searcher on what sleep gummies are, why they work, and which ones you recommend, that’s a boon for brand exposure. If your online presence is optimized for local searches, then the former searcher will find you quickly and potentially make a purchase — an obvious win.
5. SEO is an open door to education.
Your target audience will inevitably have questions about buying cannabis, and about cannabis in general. Cannabis newcomers might ask: What products are best for first-timers? Connoisseurs might ask: Where can I find craft cannabis near me? Creating educational blog posts addressing these questions and more increases your chances of appearing in front of these customers. It also positions you as a long-term resource for answering these customers’ other questions.
As for figuring out what your target audience is actually asking, that’s where your cannabis SEO agency comes into play. After all, your passion is the plant and connecting people with it, so it’s totally understandable if you don’t know how to figure out which questions are being asked and which competitors are asking them. That’s also way easier said than done, but it’s the cannabis SEO experts’ job to figure out what people are asking IRL and translate that to how they search the internet for answers.
6. SEO shapes what your target audience learns about you.
No matter how a soon-to-be customer discovers your brand — Google, social media, walking down your street — they’ll turn to search engines (or answer engines) to confirm that what they’ve learned about your brand is true. With a robust SEO strategy, searches about your brand will surface content that you’ve created first, meaning that the information you want the customer to see comes up before anything else.
This matters big-time in our world full of user-generated content — social media posts, Google and Yelp reviews, you name it. Although this content matters, it should reinforce the information you’re putting out there about your brand instead of taking the lead. Your original content, hosted on your website, is how you tell your story, and cannabis marketing SEO services maximize the chances that it gets seen before anything else.
7. SEO amplifies your other marketing efforts.
This is worth being a broken record about: When people encounter your brand on social media or anywhere else, they Google it to learn more. That “more” could be your hours, location, and so many other things that convert prospective customers to real-life shoppers. It all lives on your website and other key areas like Google Business Profile, and with SEO, your website pops up first in searches for your brand.
Even if someone is already in your audience, you need SEO to keep them there. Remember: your customers don’t think about your business or brand 24/7 the way you do. Your target audience needs reminders that you’re open and available. SEO is one of those touchpoints as folks figure out that dispensary in the next town over they went to one time and they really enjoyed.
8. Good SEO is good user experience.
A fast-loading, easily navigable site is a major positive signal to search engines. Understandably so: current and prospective customers are more likely to stick around if they find the information they need quickly and easily. After all, if a form is hard to find and even harder to fill out, prospective clients are more likely to get frustrated and give up.
How do you know your site is offering a good user experience? We look for a few things:
- Are people spending more than a few seconds on your website?
- Are visitors simply viewing a single page on your website, then leaving? (This is called your bounce rate.)
- Are people taking the action you want them to take? Are they completing checkout, downloading a freebie, or contacting your sales team?
In short, you’re highly visible and you’re making good on that visibility. You’re making existing and potential customers happy. What’s more of a win-win than that?
Build your cannabis brand's foundation with CannaContent
Without SEO, top-quality content — thoroughly researched and thrillingly written blogs, gorgeous bespoke images that infuse your branding into your digital presence — has nowhere to go. When you choose CannaContent for your cannabis digital marketing, you get SEO services and content writing and editing, branding identity and graphic design, web design and development, social media marketing and management, and plenty more. Book a no-obligation consultation to learn how our custom strategies elevate your brand!