Produce High-Quality Content
One of the most reliable ways to improve your dispensary website’s Google ranking is by featuring valuable, authoritative, and high-quality content.
It’s impossible for your audience to find you if there is nothing to find! Your dispensary website should feature engaging content that appeals to your target audience. Producing a variety of content (written, images, videos) will not only help you to attract organic traffic but also keep it around. And since ‘dwell time’ and time spent on page directly contribute to your website’s SEO, keeping it around is important.
Take care to structure your content for maximum readability and entertainment. Using headers and images to break up text can make it more appealing to the eye and more attractive to read. For instance, infographics are 30 times more likely to be read in their entirety than blog posts.
High-quality content is also more likely to be shared on social media, boosting your organic traffic and social SEO signals. Furthermore, content can also be a great tool for developing and positioning your brand.
Create In-Depth Skyscraper Content
It’s been shown that Google loves in-depth content. That’s because search engines prioritize the user experience by showing the most useful and authoritative content at the top of their search results. The more in-depth, valuable, and engaging your content is, the more likely it is to rank well.
Your content strategy should focus on creating a mix of content, including skyscraper content. The skyscraper technique works by identifying a well-ranking piece of content, creating an even better (and usually longer) version of it, and promoting it to the people who are most likely to share it and link to it. Skyscraper content is not just a way to build great content but also an excellent link strategy that can provide you with valuable inbound links.
Not every skyscraper needs to be built from the ground up! take some time to go back and extend the length of your shorter content. Adding more content to established articles and promoting them again can be a great way to squeeze even more value out of your content.
Implement A Solid Keyword Strategy
Expanding your keyword strategy to take advantage of more long-tail keywords and LSI keywords can help you capture more organic traffic from search engines. While long-tail keywords get less traffic, they can often have a higher conversion value since they are so specific in what they are searching for.
Additionally, your content should also include a healthy amount of latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. LSI keywords are keywords that are semantically related to the main keywords that you are targeting. LSI keywords give your content more depth and context, making it more appealing to both search users and search engines.
Improve Your Site Speed
Site speed is very important to keeping visitors on your site and keeping your bounce rate low. Websites that are slow, non-functional, or otherwise frustrating will encourage visitors to click away quickly, hurting your SEO in the process.
Various online tools can be used to test the speed of your site. Typically, a load speed of under 3 seconds is considered to be good, however, 2 seconds is ideal, especially for e-commerce sites.
If your dispensary website’s load times are longer than that, you should consider doing a site-wide inspection for on-page elements that can be optimized to improve speed. For instance, oversized images have been known to significantly slow down a site, as have poorly built or implemented javascript.
Include More Outbound And Inbound Links
A website’s link profile is still one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO success.
Including more inbound and outbound links in your website’s content can give it a serious push-up Google’s rankings. Try to make sure that your website’s outbound links are pointing to recent pages from high-authority sites. If your links point to low-quality or outdated content, they may be doing more harm than good. Additionally, ensure that your content also contains a healthy amount of inbound links pointing back to your own site. This can increase the visibility of certain pages and can work wonders for pushing leads down the purchase/marketing funnel towards converting.
And last but not least, take some time to inspect your website for broken links. Broken links can confuse Google’s web crawlers and make your site more difficult to navigate for visitors. If inspecting all of your links by hand seems like it will take too long, you can use any number of online backlink checker tools like Moz or Ahrefs to speed things up.
Optimize Your Site For Mobile
More people than ever before are browsing the web on their phones and tablets. Over 3 billion people worldwide now have access to smartphones and, in 2019, over 53% of worldwide web traffic came from mobile users. As such, it’s never been more important to ensure that your dispensary website is optimized for easy mobile browsing.
Google began prioritizing websites that were optimized for mobile in 2015 with their ‘Mobilegeddon’ update. Since then, mobile-optimized websites have been rewarded with higher rankings and more visibility. Take some time to review your website’s mobile performance and to make any changes that may be necessary to improve it.
Encourage Social Media Sharing
Make sure that all of your content has social media links prominently displayed on the page where visitors can easily share it with their social network.
Social media activity related to your website and your content will directly contribute to your site’s ability to rank. Cannabis Business Social Network shares improve your content reach by making it more visible and driving more traffic to your website. Having content that is actively being shared on social media will directly result in a boost in organic traffic.
In addition, your social media pages can show up in Google’s search results as well, making it easier for people to find your dispensary when they perform branded searches.
Write Good Meta Descriptions And URL Tags
Make sure to employ best practices when it comes to writing your meta descriptions and structuring your URL tags. Google has made optimizing your meta descriptions easy by providing some guidelines for writing great meta descriptions. The perfect meta description should be short (under 160 characters), unique (different from your other pages), descriptive (who, what, where, why, how), and should be front-loaded with keywords.
Furthermore, take some time to inspect and optimize your page’s URL tags. Be careful not to overload your URL tags. While your meta descriptions should be descriptive, your URL tags should not. Keep it short and sweet, and remember to include your keyword(s).
Manage Your Customer Reviews
Customer reviews across the web can directly influence your website’s search ranking. Having a wealth of positive customer reviews will not only build trust and credibility with potential customers but also with search engines. Positive reviews can be a valuable SEO tool, so it’s important to encourage your customers to share their positive experiences with others online.
However, it’s not enough to just encourage customer reviews, you also have to manage them. Not every review will be positive because not every interaction between a customer and your business can be positive. That’s just a fact of life.
As such, it’s important to take the time to respond to customer reviews, both positive and negative. If customers see that your dispensary is taking the time to respond to negative reviews and make things right when they go wrong, they are less likely to hold a negative review against you. Develop a proactive strategy of review management where you spend some time each week or each month scanning the web for reviews and responding to them.
Don’t underestimate the value of customer reviews. Recent research found that 93% of customers read reviews of local businesses to determine their quality and that 72% of customers won’t take any kind of buying action until they have read relevant reviews.
Update Your Google-My-Business Page
Google-My-Business (GMB) is crucial to local SEO success. Your GMB profile will appear alongside branded search results to provide people with more information about your business. Having an optimized GMB page will make it easier for potential customers to learn more about you, get in contact with you, and do business with you.
Make sure that your GMB page is fully filled out with any and all information that may be relevant to a customer’s shopping experience. Misinformation or a lack of information can easily lead to bad customer experiences. An active and up-to-date GMB page will give your brand credibility and keep you at the top of the rankings for branded search results. After your website, your dispensary’s GMB page is the second most important tool you have for establishing an online presence and connecting with potential customers.
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