How to Unlock the ROI of Your Dispensary Marijuana SEO Campaign

[ {Full Transcript}

good morning everyone good afternoon if you're joining us from the east coast really exciting content we're going to be sharing with you on today's webinar we're going to be covering how to unlock roi for your seo campaigns now seo happens to be one of the most challenging concepts of digital marketing to explain and in this webinar today we're going to break it down really easily for you with all of the different areas of seo that play a key role in driving profit for your business so we're going to be covering how to get more sales via organic traffic thank you once again for joining us and let's get started so on our agenda for today we're going to be covering the value of a successful seo campaign what you should be tracking and how to get the most from your data once again my name is eduardo silva i will be your host for today i am the vp of sales here at foot traffic and i'm really really excited to be hosting this webinar with you a little bit about foot traffic foot traffic is a digital marketing agency fully focused on the cannabis space we have been in this space for the last five years got our start in the cannabis industry and continue to be fully focused solely in this industry we're really really excited to be working with you to help advance our industry collectively let's take a quick moment to get ourselves ready and prep for today's webinar and i always like to cover some of the housekeeping items uh first and foremost we're gonna be covering so much content so fast so please do silence your phones familiarize yourself with the zoom interface we also have a q a function on the zoom interface which you can engage with any of our panelists at any moment so make sure to stick around as well because we do have a special offer for everybody attending our webinar search engine optimization let's talk about it let's dive right in when customers want to find a dispensary near them they turn to search and google in particular and if you want to show up in those search results then you must have a robust seo strategy and a team that can implement it for you otherwise searchers will just go right to your competitor so make it easier for them to find you is really the model of seo when your seo is working for you you will rank better in google which helps you create brand trust and authority it shows searchers that your site is relevant and may be of use to them plus because searchers are rarely looking past the first page of any search on google your higher ranking will lead to more organic traffic now does this sound great or what but i found that while it's easy to talk about the benefits of seo and there are millions upon millions of articles out there describing the value of it it's often much harder to show the roi in a quantifiable way and that's exactly what we're going to be diving really deep into today so that's what we're going to be focusing our energy on if you want to learn more about the basics of seo check out our previous webinars at foot traffic dot co forward slash webinars and we'll put that on the um chat window here for everybody as well to follow along so the goal of seo is to increase organic traffic to your website and drive sales when done correctly this isn't just any type of traffic it's highly qualified traffic right that means that those people who are finding you are already interested in your products because they're searching for a dispensary perhaps the website visitor wants to learn more about cannabis schedule a consultation or start shopping on your e-commerce menu whatever the case they are interested in your dispensary and they are more likely to convert because of this ultimately seo makes your site easier to find because google is concerned with serving up the best results for queries they value the same thing that search users do this means that working on your seo is also going to make your site more user-friendly very very important let's take a quick side step here to highlight a case study in this case study we explore a medicinal dispensary out of maryland that we've been working with for the last three years we've scaled their organic traffic a whopping 500 percent over the past two years using hyper local seo efforts they are currently investing five thousand dollars per month towards an seo initiative this is a view of their organic traffic and revenue for q2 they're currently using the dutchy menu so we can track all revenue coming from the organic traffic as you can see here the value of organic traffic is undeniable right this is a long-term strategy and it's really important for us to focus on it so a total roi here of 80 per every dollar spent now this is really good returns right let's just highlight that 1.2 million dollars in total revenue and that is terrific so in 2018 as it's pretty easily clear uh clearly made here 6444 total organic traffic is this user count by 2020 that number grew to 37 000 very important to understand that to make the most of your seo strategy you need to track and monitor the performance and make changes based on the information you're gathering what should you be tracking that's what we're going to cover next using the tool like google analytics you should monitor the following metrics number one traffic the use to ensure that your efforts are working you need to track how many visitors come to your website and with google analytics you can see the traffic for all of the pages including your home page your location page and even your online menu page so we track traffic very important bounce rate another very important metric here your bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave your website after visiting only one page if certain pages have a higher bounce rate you may need to reconsider your content or how your page is being organized in other words other pages like the order confirmation page will inevitably have a high bounce rate because users have finished using your website so it's really important to understand the different dynamics of web pages new and repeat visitors of course you want to know how many people are visiting your website you also want to know how many of those individuals have visited your website before and how many are visiting it for the first time it's sessions sessions are synonymous with visitors this tells you how many times users have visited your website in a set period new session percentage this is the tracking of new sessions percentage which lets you see how many new visitors you've drawn to your website in relation to repeat customers average session length this is how long on average people stay on your website and if you have a low session length you may need to look at your website architecture or landing pages to ensure that they are easy to use and that they are helping to convert those visitors page pages per session pages per session is the number of pages a visitor engages with during their session now we're going to be sharing a lot of these metrics with you but it's important to understand that this is exactly what our team looks at when we're designing a customized hyper local seo strategy for your dispensary right and it's very important because we track all of these metrics for you and educate you along the way now to the real fun stuff right in addition to tracking website visitors it's beyond crucial that you track how how these visitors are interacting with your online menu after all your web presence is your online store and that is the purpose of it is not only to educate but also to convert and transactions is the number of total transactions that are attributed to the organic search traffic revenue self-explanatory the total sales amount for transactions attributed to organic search traffic conversion rate a conversion is the completion of a desired action so you may actually have multiple conversions that you want to track for example you may want to monitor how many emails or sms signups you get how many people filled out a particular form and how many people clicked through your menu e-commerce conversion rate this conversion rate is concerned solely with the percentage of individuals who visited your website and made a purchase average order the average order is the revenue attributed to organic traffic divided by the number of transactions to that thing traffic these numbers help you get a much cleaner overview of how much you are actually making from your organic search traffic they can also help you identify issues on your website so you can better optimize your user experience and score more sales once you have this data right things get really really fun you can now begin to actually uncover the roi on your seo strategy take a look at the revenue from the transaction attributed to your organic traffic and subtract that by your seo cost then divide that by the number of seo costs so for example if you made one thousand dollars in sales from organic traffic after spending 100 on seo efforts you should subtract 100 from 1000 and then divide that number by 100 which is your total spend our example here shows a equal of nine right which means that for every dollar spent on seo we made nine dollars in revenue when attempting to understand the effects of your seo strategy you should also keep an eye out for your google my business profile and your page rankings that's going to be very important so let's get into that google my business is the valuable as it's a very valuable seo tool and resource because most web traffic happens on google so it's crucial that you make the most of your free google my business profile your google my business profile impacts your off-site seo and helps you build your trustworthiness it is also the most important off-site local seo factor so you need to optimize your profile and keep it up to date so that you show up in local searches to measure the effectiveness of your google my business profile you should track these metrics direct search impressions this is the number of times you show up in any search when an individual is inputting your name or address discovery impressions this is the number of times you show up in searches when an individual is trying to find a dispensary near them or a cannabis product branded impressions this is the number of times you show up in any search when an individual searches for your brand or related brands total search impressions is is how many times your dispensary uh google my business profile shows up in any search and then finally total views this is the total number of views your profile has received in any certain period of time not all impressions lead to views so this is the number so this number will be lower than your total impressions if it's much lower though you may actually need to rework your profile to get more people to view it and then one other one here is view on maps this is when someone is actually searching for you via google maps very important because most individuals out there are going to be searching for products while they're on their mobile phone and when i say most i mean nearly 80 of all searches are happening on mobile so keep that in mind total actions this is the number of actions taken from your profile including website visits direction requests and phone calls really really compelling information here as well it tells you exactly how your overall profile is really performing towards converting individuals to take an action website visits this is the number of individuals who click through your website from google my business these individuals want to learn more about your place about you or place an order online direction request google my business allows you to monitor how many people request directions to your address this is a good indicator of how many individuals are actually interested in visiting your dispensary phone calls you can also track how many people click on the phone number to call you which is a great way to get direct action and then so what we're discussing here right it's obviously very compelling data points but it's really important to understand all of them in combination and be able to really make take actionable results from this information that you're getting so what can you do with all this information initially you will want to track your numbers over time and if it seems low you will want to re optimize your profile to ensure that you are painting a positive picture of your dispensary and encouraging encouraging people to click through to your website and get directions by monitoring these metrics over time you can identify challenges to address them quickly you can also measure the effectiveness of your seo by looking at how frequently you come up in search results and what search queries your profile appears on with seo tools like rfs and sem rush you can track and measure the performance of different web pages and keywords over time to determine whether your seo strategy is actually helping you rank higher in search results there are multiple things you can track with these tools so i'm just going to cover a few of these that i find to be most important first page rankings your page ranking rankings are where your web pages show up in search results there are generally 10 organic search results per search page so if you rank number one on the first page you're at the top of organic search results there are many many ways to results can actually help you so like google ads results are a featured snippet but this is the best position to be in the further down you get to the search results the fewer clicks you get and that top result gets just over 31 of all the clicks so according to backlinko the popular seo site if you aren't on the top spot you can increase your clicks by around thirty percent by moving up a rank so seo will definitely get you more clicks as long as you're consistently practicing it and stay on top of all the best practices keyword rankings this lets you identify how well the keywords you rank for are doing over time you may find that some keywords have less traffic over time or that others fare better knowing this can actually help you better optimize your page so that you can keep going and getting more organic traffic and then finally here's a nice trick of the trade competitors page you can actually track how well your competitors website is doing some tools also let you see what they're ranking for and that you can actually ensure that you're optimizing your website for the best keywords these are all factors once again that we take into account when we're providing you a full audit before launching your strategy for seo so sdo has a lot of components plus google's algorithm is a secret sauce and is consistently being changed this means a couple of things one that you need to be consistent when doing seo because changes in the algorithm can affect your ranking over time and two that you won't always know the impact of particular seo activities on your rankings or sales right away for example if you want to spend some time link building and then see an increasing traffic it could be that your link building helped or it could be that the algorithm change that has bumped up your ranking because of seo's efforts in general regardless the value of seo is still very clear and the return on the investment is undeniable if you don't want to drop down in the ranking and have your competitors overtake you then you need to continue to invest in this strategy i do want to mention that seo is not a quick fix seo is a long term marketing strategy that is a marathon not a sprint it may take three to six months to see the results of your efforts but throughout the process you will be making your website better and improving the user experience for your customers this can include creating educational content improving your site architecture to make it easier to navigate and creating more prominent call to actions to optimize your landing page and encourage more conversions if you are concerned about driving traffic instantly to your website you need to ensure that google ads and geo ads are a part of your overall digital strategy seo will drive more traffic to your website it's just not instant for most of our clients we found that strategy using all three of these services is ideal for creating a pipeline of long lasting leads and increasing sales so now this is a lot of dense information and i kind of prefaced this in the beginning so let's take a quick look at another case study in this case study we'll take a look at the medicinal dispensary out of new york state this is another long-term client of ours that we've worked with for over three years they've invested 5 500 per month to focus on driving organic growth through their content marketing and link building over the course of the last year we've increased their organic significantly and generated over 2.2 million in revenue from august 2019 to july 2020. revenue of over 2.2 million investment 66 000 the roi here using the basic roi calculation that we showed you earlier 32 for every dollar spent now that is concrete numbers that you can hold on to so the metrics i shared today are all valuable but it can be difficult and frustrating to set up a proper analytics tool to track everything at the same time it's crucial that you know what's happening with your website and your google my business profile when you work with foot traffic we do all of this for you we're big believers in marketing analytics and revenue attribution this is our core model we feel our clients deserve to know exactly what they're getting for their marketing investment and i'll be honest most digital marketers out there don't do this either they don't know how to set it up or they don't realize the importance of being able to show how their efforts lead to sales whatever the case we've made it a top priority to create a system that allows us to provide this information to our clients we've changed our entire process to ensure that we can provide revenue attribution whenever possible so our clients can continue to invest in the marketing budgets very very wisely we've pushed all of the dispensary ecommerce companies in our space to include this as part of their out-of-the-box functionality for e-commerce tracking so that you can get more transparency into what marketing campaigns have the best roi and which don't and what's uh and another thing we've seen across the board is that all clients have been able to maximize this data to increase their budgets in a way that directly leads to more sales so rank at the top of the search result for your city and reach your overall peak in sales so today we're going to be offering you one thousand dollars off your first month of seo when you start a three month campaign with us this offer does expire so take advantage of this offer you need to schedule a call with us within the next week we're going to put the link here over to chat but we'll also share this information with you if you're watching this live i'm going to turn it over to the audience for any questions now so please feel free to chime on in here with the q a section and or if you are live you can also use the function there we'll take a quick 30 second here to just gather some more questions all right first question rolling in here how long does it take to see the results so one of the things that we mentioned here throughout our presentation is that this is a marathon this is not a sprint okay so what does this ultimately mean to you uh you have to be invested in it you have to be invested in long-term results in the same way that you would be invested in a long-term result uh for a brick and mortar store anywhere right you have to research you have to do that ground work build the business so the same thing goes with seo normally we see some level of results starting at the three months or six month mark depending on your market depending on the amount of competition you have but overall within the nine month mark you should be seeing some tremendous results already popping up and that's really really awesome right because it's going to pay for all of your investments and then some right away and then beyond that it's just a matter of maintaining and growing right keep growing this is very important now outside of our industry just to highlight this this is common practice if you want to grow any business out there you need to invest in seo right we're just adapting this with our skills and lessons learned right in the cannabis industry which is a highly regulated industry right to ensure that you're compliant and building this business in a very organic fashion as well and by all means uh encourage you to schedule a call with us if you want to learn more about that any other questions here from our attendees so another question here um where do we work in terms of geographical locations with seo so we are coverage model for all of north america we have a lot of clients in canada all over the states in the united states as well every single one of our customers are engaged in a customized digital marketing initiative some of them are engaged in seo practices for a specific market specific city right and others are mainly uh concerned with shorter term strategies such as like a google ads let's get in there let's get some revenue going right before we start investing long term just to make sure we're growing this organically so we cover uh all areas uh great question here uh coming from brady how to how do we measure traffic for people walking in the door like the ones that can't actually uh track be tracked digitally so there's a couple different ways there brady so the first way is through google my business right so google my business actually allows us to track getting directions so that's one great metric to be leveraged there in the process and ensuring that we're actually tracking the amount of people that are actually coming to you right that are getting the directions that's a pretty solid indicator that they're going to be coming in if they're if they're getting the directions to you the second one is actually through geo ads so it's not seo it's more geo ads geo ads actually allows us to pixel an individual and know when they're walking into your store it's amazing technology it's beyond uh proliferated already outside of our industry we've adapted we have an entire network of cannabis friendly websites and mobile apps that allows us to actually compliantly advertise banners for your business and track those individuals if they come to your to your web page so we pixel them track them wherever they are they walk into your store we can give you those metrics as well wonderful great questions from everybody really wonderful to speak to you today if you have any other questions or if you want to speak to us take advantage of an seo practice want to definitely uh open up for any scheduled calls uh that you want to do once again we'll put the link here for scheduling a call with us on the chat window that's foot traffic dot me forward slash call once again thank you so much for your time today really appreciate it have a wonderful rest of your week ]