How to Boost Your Dispensary Sales, Part One
Value-Driven Tips to Drive More Dispensary Sales
As a business owner, you compete with others like you. This is a competition for eyeballs that will hopefully result in a boost to your bottom line. One of the best ways to achieve this is to drive website traffic with SEO and other online marketing efforts. SEO-based digital strategy is increasingly more crucial for business growth and isn’t showing signs of changing any time soon.
As dispensary owners, proper websites that are optimized for Google are a surprisingly underutilized aspect of sales. The professionals at Clutch are here to help you change that – starting with this very article. In no particular order, here are five value-driven tips to help you boost your dispensary sales with SEO.
1. Optimize for Mobile
More than half of all online purchases are made on smartphones and other mobile devices, according to Business Insider. On top of this, more than half of all internet traffic is from mobile. In 2011, this figure was only about 4% – so you can see where we’re going with this.
Shopping online, accessing social media, and browsing the web are easier than ever. And doing all of the above continues to happen mostly via mobile devices. This trend will only increase, so you’d be a fool to neglect to optimize your dispensary SEO and website for mobile users.
For legal cannabis, there is a reason why big industry players like Leafly and Weedmaps have gone public with multi-billion dollar IPOs. Customers want to know where they can find the kind of cannabis they are looking for, and what other consumers think of it.
Weedmaps and Leafly do it better than anyone else in the game. And guess what? They’re optimized for mobile and have an entire staff dedicated to their SEO strategy. That’s not by accident.
2. Perform an SEO Audit
Performing an honest site audit is vastly underutilized. Not only can simple audits be done in-house, for free, but they can often be done in under 15 minutes! These audits are simple to do, yet far too few do them.
You’d be either amazed, shocked, or both by how many broken links, missing redirects, and other site map errors can be found on the back end of dispensary websites. These are all hurdles to getting eyeballs on your website and improving your dispensary SEO.
After reading this article, you will put this second tip into action, and your dispensary SEO will contain fewer of these hurdles. You’re welcome.
3. Discover and Implement Your “Ideal” User Experience
In the SEO and digital marketing space, two massively hot button topics are user experience (UX), and user interface (UI). The heavy hitters of the world like Amazon and Walmart likely spend millions on improving their UX. According to the NY Times, people now spend more on Amazon than they do at Walmart.
Their ultimate goal of UX and UI? Remove as many digital barriers to entry as possible – so it takes fewer steps to go from “I want that” to “I am buying that.”
The time users spend on your website is massively important to earning and keeping Google’s trust. And this is only continuing to evolve with new search algorithm updates. The importance of bounce rate reduction is at an all-time high.
A key aspect of any website functionality that some digital marketers miss is finding that “ideal” user experience. We put ideas in quotes because what’s “ideal” is different for practically everyone.
As a business owner, you will hopefully define your target demographic. With this target demo in mind, you can focus on local consumers who fit this target demo and want to use your business to buy products. If you’re showing up in their search results, or better yet on Leafly or Weedmaps, you’re on the right track.
4. Create Focused, Value-Driven Content
After you’ve optimized your business website for mobile, performed a dispensary SEO audit, and implemented your ideal UX, you need regular, fresh content. There are plenty of cannabis MSOs delivering great content via blogs, social media, and so on. And this content can lead to the attention of a lot of eyeballs.
But, guess what? Instagram doesn’t cut you a check for having thousands of followers. Twitter doesn’t give you stock options based on the number of hearts you get per Tweet. Hard to believe, we know.
There’s a reason why great content is often a rarity, and the ones you find real value in stick out in your mind. That’s because creating great content is not easy. Creative expression involves expending a unique form of energy that not everyone has.
This is why you, as a business owner, will take your ideal UX and implement that in your social media, blog content, and other online spaces.
Ask yourself what your ideal customer wants to read. Maybe it’s a budtender’s view on a popular cultivar, or maybe it’s simple instructions on the right way to consume your best-selling edible.
Whatever the case, providing value for your customers should be your number one goal. This will boost your dispensary SEO to attract new customers and ensure existing ones return, boosting dispensary sales.
5. Always Be Consistent and Follow Through
This is a tough one, and often difficult for many of us. Without diving too deeply into the psychology behind it (we’ll leave that to the experts), always show up for those who matter. And in the case of dispensary SEO, it’s your customers. Content is key, and consistent, focused content is the backbone of this mantra.
Do what you say you’re going to do. If you commit to something, always follow through. If you tell your readers or followers you’re going to post a blog or social update, do it. Naturally, this is not always the easiest thing to do with consistency, and that’s okay.
That’s why we follow through. Communicate why this is the case, and always work towards improving that.
Bottom Line: Value-Driven Tips to Drive More Dispensary Sales
As cannabis industry professionals, we are in a unique position. And that position means we have the opportunity to help shape this niche into something we can all be proud of. As dispensary owners, one of the ways you can do that is by always offering consistently valuable content. This not only helps educate your customer but will help improve your SEO, and subsequent sales.
While reading this article, did you find yourself wondering where you’ll get the time to act on our valuable dispensary SEO tips? No worries! Clutch is dedicated to helping dispensaries and cannabis brands save time and money by taking care of exactly these things. You can focus on being the awesome cannabis brand you are, and let us handle building and managing your business web presence. Get in touch with Clutch and schedule an intake call today!
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our previous article on How to Attract More Engaged Customers with Google. We have many more dispensary SEO articles coming, sign up for our newsletter so you never miss any!
