Dispensary owners have a lot on their plate when it comes to doing day-to-day jobs and they often overlook their online marketing presence. If you invest a little money and a bit of time, you can increase your traffic from local customers to others running geographical searches by mastering Local SEO.
If you run a mom and pop pot shop, then local SEO is one of the most useful techniques available to help you rank higher in local searches by geographical area.
For example, with a quality local SEO campaign in place, you can try and rank for keywords such as “Denver dispensary” or “Portland dispensary”
But what exactly is involved with local SEO?
There are a lot of working parts included in local SEO that you’ll need to change or add to your website to adhere to the latest best practices:
Local On-Page SEO
To optimize your website for local seo, you need to use keywords that relate to your geographical area. For example, you should always make sure that you’ve added your business name, address, and phone number to the footer of your website so it appears on all of your pages. You should also include your city and state in heading tags, meta tags, and alt tags. The city name should also be used in your website’s URLs. Be sure to add local business structured data to any other relevant structured data that will teach search engines about your business and your website.
Structured Data
Structured data on your site will help the search engines, such as google or bing, to better parse your website and figure out its purpose and what it’s content is about. You can implement structured data using a format like JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDF-a. Additionally, there are a ton of structured data generator tools that will help you create the correct code for your website.
Local NAPW Citations
N – Name
A- Address
P- Phone
W- Website
NAPW is an extremely important part of ranking higher in local search engines. Building citations in local dispensary directories and aggregators will help boost your dispensary’s website to a higher rank in your city. Adding your website to places like City Data, Local news sites, niche directories, or yellow pages will help you move up in your city AND state when people search for your products or services.
Make sure all of your NAP citations are EXACTLY the same across the web. Your business name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere it’s listed so that search engines don’t have a hard time figuring out which data is correct and should be displayed.
Local Backlinks
Just like traditional SEO, local SEO requires that you have quality backlinks to your website. The difference is that with Local SEO, you want backlinks from OTHER sources. Try to be listed with local news stations, local directories, local events, and other local businesses. When you have a variety of other resources linking to your website, you can boost your site ranking in your city.
Business Signals
Google My Business is your best friend in regards to local SEO. You must verify your business in their ‘my business; area, or else it’ll be unlikely that your website will ever get found at all.
Adding the business to Google My Business will include your business in a local google search as well as help you increase your search rank in your area. To add your business, check out Google My Business and go through their set up process. They’ll send you a card in the mail with a confirmation code so that Google can verify your businesses address.
When you finish verifying, you’ll be able to show up in local searches AND on Google Places and Google Maps.
Local Reviews
If you want to rank well locally, you have to have great reviews from local people! As you probably already know, when you search for a local business, you often see the highest rated businesses first.
Getting more reviews for your dispensary is actually not as complicated as it sounds. Just offer a nice deal, coupon, or freebie in exchange for some feedback or ask your past customers about their experience. You’d be surprised how many people want to express their opinion when asked. Additionally, you can link your review sites to your website, so that people who land on your site can figure out how and where to review your business.
Overall
If you adhere to the techniques and principles mentioned above, you’ll continue to see traffic increase from customers in your local market. Make sure to keep your NAPW citations exactly the same throughout the web so that you stay consistent. It’s of the utmost importance to have good on-page techniques. Still need some help? The cannabis marketing experts at Team Maryjane are itching for a good SEO campaign. Consultations are always free, so what are you waiting for?