Cannabis e-Commerce SEO: How Dispensaries Can Drive Organic Traffic

{}Introduction

Host: Ciao everyone, welcome to the Cannabis Marketing Live podcast, where we cover the latest marketing trends and strategies that are most effective in growing your cannabis dispensary, delivery service, or brand. This podcast is sponsored by MediaJel — MediaJel is a cannabis marketing company that helps cannabis brands advertise through SEO, paid search, and programmatic advertising to increase revenue, with a compliant ad network of 75,000 publishers, including mainstream news sites, meme sites, dating, gaming, and music streaming apps, and they all welcome cannabis ads. I'm your host, and today we're discussing how cannabis retailers can take advantage of SEO with a self-hosted e-commerce menu. I'm super excited to introduce Jeremy Johnson — Jeremy is a cannabis thought leader and business development manager at Dispense. Welcome to the podcast today.

Jeremy Johnson: Thank you, nice to be here, thanks for having me on.

Host: Of course, of course — how's everything at Dispense, how's everything with you?

Jeremy Johnson: It's good, it's good, summer in the Midwest is always a beautiful time, and Dispense is cruising along, bringing on lots of new clients right now, and full force with our SEO efforts throughout our entire client list.

Host: Awesome, well, good to hear, and we're going to dive in deep into SEO today.

How Consumers Actually Search for Dispensaries

Host: So let's talk about the data behind SEO — to kick it off, what percentage of cannabis consumers find a dispensary through, let's say, a Google brand search, versus a "dispensary near me" type search term?

Jeremy Johnson: Well, I think the most important thing is to bring it back one step — what percentage of consumers find a dispensary through Google search, and it's a lot of them, right, anytime in today's day and age when you're looking for something, you're going to Google first and foremost on your phone, that's number one. From there, right now, we're still seeing the majority of clicks coming from either "dispensary near me" terms, or branded dispensary terms — if somebody's looking for a specific retailer, they'll type in that retailer's name plus "dispensary" or "cannabis" or "near me," that's how most dispensaries are found through Google. But there's a growing amount of searches for brand, product, and strain-related terms that consumers are looking for nowadays.

Host: Yeah, we were just looking at some data before we hopped on, I was looking at about a year and a half of data from Google Search Console for one of our retailers, and about 60 percent of their searches were branded terms, people who already knew their dispensary name, 30 percent was "dispensary near me" terms, and the remaining 10 percent was strains, brands, products, etc.

Jeremy Johnson: So that lines up — about a year ago, in early 2021, Leafly published a report saying 40 percent of the traffic to Leafly.com was from brand, product, and strain-related searches, so that just shows the power those queries have.

Host: Yeah, and one differentiator between Leafly and Weedmaps is that Leafly is heavily focused on product information and reviews, so they typically rank number one, or above Weedmaps across the board, for a lot of those brand and strain searches, because they were created with that in mind, they wanted to provide deep insights into actual strain and product information, the effects on your body — that's a clear differentiator between those two platforms.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, there's no shortage of those marketplace platforms nowadays — if you Google any brand, product, or strain-related search, you're going to see everything from Weedmaps and Leafly, to AllBud, IheartJane, Dutchie, Jane, it runs the gamut before you even see a retailer search result, for the most part.

Native Menus vs. Third-Party iFrame Menus

Host: Well, let's talk about e-commerce, because this is one core element of SEO — what are the benefits of using a cannabis e-commerce menu platform, a native platform, is that what you're asking about there?

Jeremy Johnson: Let's talk about what's the difference between a native platform and a third-party platform, let's start there.

Host: Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Johnson: I'd say most cannabis retailers are on what I call third-party platforms — they're kind of a hybrid of a marketplace, but they offer a solution for your menu, so, again, IheartJane, Leafly, Dutchie, Jane, they're marketplaces, but they do offer a solution for retailers to list on their website, and most often that solution is through an iframe. The big drawback of the iframe is that none of that content within it is being counted toward your URL and domain, it's counted toward the host — so if you're listing with a Dutchie iframe or a Weedmaps iframe on your website, all that content is being appointed to Weedmaps.com, for example, so you're losing out on tons of content you could be leveraging to increase your domain authority and rank higher, not just for those terms, but overall, especially for things like "dispensary near me." On the flip side, a dedicated platform — there's only a handful in cannabis right now, us at Dispense, and a couple other platforms, like Olla and Tymber, in the United States, doing this kind of stuff — the real difference is that all the content from those platforms is part of the site itself, no iframe, it's actually there, hosted on it, attributed to your website, and, on top of it, you get full insight into the analytics and user journey. iFrames are very difficult to track through Google Analytics, for example, and when you have everything broken out into specific product pages, you can track that user journey a lot better, and understand what customers are doing on your website, and where there might be drop-offs.

Host: Yeah, you have a more robust view into the actual customer journey, not just how they interact with your website but also your e-commerce menu, how many people are abandoning cart, how many are leaving because they're not seeing the right product catalog — we'll dive deeper into that on the Google Analytics side, but there's a lot of value that can be leveraged from actually owning that data from a self-hosted menu.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, and one thing is, I know Jane and Dutchie both have a headless approach, so you do have the ability to build the same thing, but you'll have to build it custom within those platforms, which may take an investment from one of your developers, a lot of upfront cost — whereas if you pay for something like Dispense or Tymber, you pay a flat monthly fee. So there's a difference — one, you pay a flat fee, you own it in-house, the alternative, you pay for a subscription to use.

Host: Yes, for those more familiar with the wider world of e-commerce, like Magento versus Shopify — Magento is great, has a ton of benefits, but a lot of custom work and upkeep, additional overhead and cost, and having something that works out of the box, more of a managed service, has advantages, especially for smaller retailers who might not have that bandwidth, budget, or resources.

Native vs. Third-Party: A Cost and Ownership Comparison

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, and you need the time, right, it's going to take a long time to actually build out the e-commerce menu, it could take 90 days to get something like that off the ground, so just be aware of that going through this process.

The Value of Owning Your First-Party Data

Host: Well, let's circle back to first-party data — how valuable is the first-party data you're gathering from a self-hosted menu?

Jeremy Johnson: That's another big sticking point versus these third-party providers — if you're hosting your menu with a Weedmaps or Leafly, you get access to that data, but you're limited in what they're willing to show you, and, on top of that, those providers also get access to that data. The point of a marketplace like Weedmaps or Leafly is to sell cannabis to consumers, regardless of what storefront it's through, so you have to think about that when listing with one of these platforms — do you want these marketplaces to have access to your customers' data, how much they're spending, what brands they like? That first-party data is really valuable for everyone, everybody wants to know what brands people prefer, how much they're spending on average, what brands they're leaving in their carts — for a retailer, taking ownership of that data, and being able to analyze it, there's no limit to the value there, there's so much you can gain from that knowledge.

Host: Agreed.

Indexability: A Real Keyword-Count Comparison

Host: As far as the difference between a menu that's indexed versus, say, an iframe, how much does this impact the indexability of your website?

Jeremy Johnson: That's a pretty good question — right before this I was doing some comparisons. When talking about indexability, there's a lot of metrics we could go by, but one is the amount of ranking keywords your website has — for example, I pulled up the data for Ascend Wellness, one of our largest clients at Dispense, and they rank for about 16,000 different keywords right now. Then I pulled up the data for Sweet Flower, one of the largest retailers in California, they're running on a Jane iframe, and they only rank for about 2,500 keywords right now. Skymint in Michigan, one of the largest retailers there — Lume might go back and forth with them for that title — either way, on Dutchie's iframe, they're only ranking for about 3,500 keywords right now. So you can really see the difference between that iframe and a more native menu platform — a client of yours, Haven, in California, uses a more native platform, and they rank for about 5,000 keywords, almost two to three times more than that iframe platform.

Host: And what are you using as the source of this data, is that SEMrush or another platform?

Jeremy Johnson: I'm just looking at Ahrefs — this is all public data, if you're interested, SEMrush is my preferred source too, you can sign up for an account and get data across a whole bunch of different retailers to analyze.

Host: Good to know, good to know. So, kind of adding to that, by using a menu that's indexable by Google, you're going to allow your product pages, product categories, brand pages, all to be indexed — meaning Google's crawlers will find that page on your website and give you credit for it, associate that page with related keywords, and then those keywords will potentially show up when people are searching for those products on Google.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, it's pretty much making sure your website is being read properly by Google, and you can do that if you're using a self-hosted menu, and by doing that, you get access to all these different individuals searching for a product, brand, category, etc.

Host: One of my favorite concrete examples, for anybody still a little confused, is one of the most popular brands in the country right now, Jeeter, they make really high-quality, consistent pre-rolls, and nationally they see somewhere around 30 to 40,000 searches per month. So, if you're a retailer on an iframe menu, and somebody searches "where do I get your pre-rolls," your website is not going to show up for that, but Weedmaps, Dutchie, Leafly, etc., will. But if you're on a native, hosted menu, and you own that content, when somebody searches "where do I get Jeeter near me," you're going to show up on that search, and hopefully even in the Google Maps three-pack — that's the benefit, you show up immediately, and customers can find you and either purchase online or get directions to your store.

Live Demo: How a Native Menu Wins the Search Result

Host: Now, this is awesome, I'm going to share my screen so people can see some of this. So this is Ahrefs, I just put in myhavenstores.com, and Ahrefs, this is my preferred tool, and they have 5,300 keywords being indexed for that domain.

Jeremy Johnson: And you're using SEMrush too, right, you'll find something similar there.

Host: Yeah, this is SEMrush, and you'll see something similar, 5,200 keywords they're being indexed for at that domain. So this is where you'd go, type in any domain name — let's look at, is there another one you said, Ascend?

Jeremy Johnson: Yep, LetsAscend.com.

Host: All right, so you can type in any website and see what their coverage is — yeah, they have 20,700, so a lot of organic traffic coming to their website, that's fantastic. And by adding — so here's another thing, if you don't have a self-hosted menu, that's fine, continue to build up your authority and trust of your website, continue to build backlinks, invest in on-page SEO, and then, once you're ready to transition to a self-hosted menu, by already investing in SEO beforehand, this is just going to piggyback off what you've already done. The way SEO works is you're building your trust and authority at the top of your entire domain name, and as that increases authority, any new content you create will rank as well — there's a lot of benefit to investing in SEO in general to rank for "dispensary near me" keywords and brand keywords, but also keeping in mind there's always opportunities. So, as you launch your self-hosted menu, you'll start to see the benefits of brand, product, and category searches come in, and, if you can't wait, maybe just choose a couple of your top-selling brands and write a blog post about it in the interim.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, and once you launch your menu, you can just copy that content over to that brand page and you'll be all set. There's a great example, I'm in Michigan, if you're in Detroit and Google "Jeeter pre-rolls" — let's do that right now, and search for your Jeeter pre-rolls in Detroit — I can share my screen too, if I have it pulled up.

Host: All right, there you go, this is what I'm seeing.

Jeremy Johnson: So we've got a couple stores in the three-pack right there, which is great — one trick is, if you have a top brand you're selling in your store, you should definitely ask a customer to mention it in a review, that's going to help big time in ranking on the local level for that.

Host: That's a trick to get to the top rankings, but go ahead, Jeremy.

Jeremy Johnson: You can actually see, if you scroll back up to the top, the reason Jars is showing up is because of that review that Jars was mentioned in — Jars is on an iframe menu, and otherwise probably wouldn't show up in that three-pack if somebody hadn't mentioned that review, that's a major point right there. But as you scroll down, you can see Jeeter.com shows up, some news articles, and then we'll get into the Dutchie menu, a Weedmaps menu, my results are a little different.

Host: You want to show me yours?

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, here we go — so, this is a little trick too, you can either search for "Jeeter pre-rolls in Detroit," or, if you go into the URL, you can insert your search query and put "near=Detroit," and Google will automatically show you localized results for that city — that's another little trick I use to get those localized search results. So this is literally what somebody would see if they were in Detroit searching for Jeeter pre-rolls, and you'll notice, we've got IheartJane, Dutchie, a Metro Detroit article, Leafly, and then, at the very bottom, you see Higher Path, which is actually a dispensary in California.

Host: Yeah, it's because we do SEO for them, that's why they're ranking.

Jeremy Johnson: And when you click on it, the link goes to a blog article about Jeeters, it doesn't even go to the product page, it goes to the blog article.

Host: Good job, Jeremy made that happen.

Jeremy Johnson: That shows the power of those blog articles — if you can't put the time and energy into a native menu right off the bat, maybe you're just using a free Weedmaps listing for the time being, you can write an article and rank, as you can see, you've got somebody ranking in California for a local Detroit search there, that's a powerful tool, blog alone.

On-Page Optimization: Location Pages and Schema

Host: All right, let's start talking about SEO — I definitely wanted to cover the top ranking factors, starting with on-page optimization. When you're creating your website, you want to make sure you're optimizing the site for search engines — that means creating new, unique content, marking up the right pages with schema and rich snippets, having the right website architecture, but also internal linking to all the different core pages of your website, ensuring your main location pages are being indexed, that your brand pages, categories, and individual products are indexed. You'll definitely want to set this up with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, two platforms you should set up to get true visibility into how your SEO rankings are progressing.

Let me show you some of these core elements — let's pull up Mission, it's easier to show than tell. For example, number one, every location, if you're an MSO, should have its own individual page, even if you have multiple locations per city. You can see the URL has "dispensaries" in it, and I have the city name or state, the city name in there — there's a reason we have this, we want to make sure "Ann Arbor marijuana dispensary" is in the title tag and the URL — I'd actually suggest changing this to "Ann Arbor cannabis dispensary" to really maximize this page. A couple things we do — we add the amenities, almost like replicating your Google Business Profile, and we have manual directions in here, all helpful in associating that page and location with the city. Same thing here, Ann Arbor, Michigan, some attractions at University of Michigan, and I'd recommend adding some more SEO content, a content block here, so when someone's searching "Ann Arbor dispensary" in that area, you have everything in place — the hierarchy has an impact, so having this template for URLs is preferred when trying to rank for these terms.

Cannabis vs. Marijuana: Regional Search Terms

Jeremy Johnson: And one note on that — you mentioned "marijuana dispensaries" in there, even your keywords, you have to think local — on the West Coast, I'm not sure how accurate this is, but as an example, people might search for "marijuana" more than "cannabis," but maybe in the Midwest people search for "cannabis" more than "marijuana," so you really need to know your local audience and what they're searching for, using tools like Google Trends.

Host: Let's do that now — marijuana and cannabis, there you go, cannabis is used on the West Coast, and marijuana is used everywhere else.

Jeremy Johnson: I had it backwards.

Host: It's probably because we've been in the adult-use market for so long, and as cannabis professionals on the West Coast, we've been exclusively using "cannabis," because we want to get away from "marijuana," because of the associations with drug policies and racism, but the rest of the country hasn't caught on, they only know "marijuana," it'll take some time for the rest of the country to catch up on that terminology. And one thing to keep in mind with SEO is that they're synonyms — if you type "cannabis dispensary" and "marijuana dispensary," they pretty much show the same results.

Jeremy Johnson: For those watching, I want to give some credit to the Midwest — Michigan just changed from the Marijuana Regulatory Agency to the Cannabis Regulatory Agency, so, one thing at a time, but some credit there. But, like you said, the URL structure is incredibly important, but so is the schema, making sure the page is marked up and pointing Google specifically to certain things — that's something a lot of cannabis retailers don't do much of right now, unless they have the help of an SEO agency, or, in our case, we automatically point Google to that structured data and schema, both on the product level and store level, so you don't even have to set that up.

Host: Yeah, and when you do that, you see some pretty major results.

Backlinks and Building Domain Authority

Host: The last thing I wanted to bring up regarding SEO is, you can do your on-page optimization, build an amazing website, get it indexed by Google, but until you get backlinks to it, until you build the authority, no one's going to see it. I pulled up LetsAscend, since that's one of your partners, using Ahrefs, and I wanted to showcase a few things people don't understand about the SEO process — it's a long-term process, number one, this is earned media, you're not paying for advertising, you're earning this by building up the trust, authority, and relevancy of your website to what people are searching for, and Google has become so massive because they're the trusted resource for people to find that relevant information. If you really want to build trust and authority, you need backlinks from other domain names to your website — a backlink is essentially a link from one website pointing to another, and you want as many as possible, but it's not necessarily the volume, it's the quality of the domain it's coming from. For Ascend, we have 20,200 backlinks from 764 referring domains, resulting in organic traffic of about 17,800 keywords and over 111,000 visitors from organic traffic, with a domain rating of 40 — that's what investing in SEO really gets you, you have to build that authority long term.

Let's look at a two-year timeframe — you can see when Ascend started back here, referring domains in blue, organic traffic in orange, and I can click on organic traffic value as well, or organic pages — whoo, there's a little uptick there. So organic traffic's in orange, you can see it increasing over time, correlated with the total number of referring domains coming in — as you build your SEO and authority, getting links from other high-authority websites, there's a correlation between organic traffic and the number of referring domains you're getting links from. And their pages was very light, organic pages is only 45, and this is probably when I started with Dispense, that shot up from 50 all the way up to almost 10,000 pages.

Jeremy Johnson: That little bump you see is at the beginning of May, that's when Ascend went from our iframe solution to our native menu solution, and every single product they carry got its own individual page, you can see the effect that had right there, pretty serious. And you can even see, towards the end of July, that effect, the immediate one-month effect right there.

Host: Yeah, you see the immediate effect of getting all that increased organic pages, but then, over time, after a couple months, you start to see the real results — increased impressions on Google, increased clicks through Google, a higher click-through rate because your average position is going up for all those terms, and, of course, that leads to the end goal, increased revenue and more sales.

Live Q&A: How Long Until You See SEO Results

Host: I'm going to pause here, we do have some questions from the audience.

Jeremy Johnson: Cool.

Host: Hannah Page Michaels asked a few questions before — how long does it take to see results from SEO strategies?

Jeremy Johnson: I feel like we kind of just talked about that a little — it comes in waves, you can see the immediate results of adding content and ranking for keywords, but some of the real results, the end goal, like increased revenue, could take anywhere from, I'd say, 30 to 90 days. But you're always — the cool thing about SEO is, it's like the stock market, time in SEO beats timing Google, you can't fight Google, you can't game it, you just have to keep doing it to really get the benefit, the longer you do it, the more benefit you'll see.

Host: And it's a long-term play, right, I look at everything on a quarterly basis, looking to improve organic traffic and keyword rankings quarterly, and that compounds over time — as you build authority, you reach different tiers, so maybe you're a brand-new store with no presence online, you need to first introduce your brand to Google so they start to index you, and maybe they'll put you in these little slots, give you rankings for a bit, see how people react, then drop you down a little, but as you build trust and authority, you'll hold those positions. So, you have to be really patient with SEO — it's by far the best marketing channel you can leverage as a cannabis retailer or delivery service, no other marketing channel even compares to the sheer volume and revenue generated from Google. If you're trying to generate a million dollars from your SEO campaign monthly, you've got to invest to get there, you can't invest five thousand dollars in SEO and expect a million dollars in revenue, that's not how it works, and it's wrong to expect that from SEO — I'd give it six months to 12 months to really see the impact, and be patient, and I'll say straight up, if you're spending less than five thousand dollars a month on SEO, don't expect much, you're probably using an outsourced company somewhere that's not going to build the authority and trust needed, which is all done through building high-quality links from third-party sites — if you're paying a lower rate, you're probably going to receive some fraudulent or spam links, which can hurt your website in the end. You get what you pay for when it comes to SEO.

Live Q&A: Can SEO Be Automated or Outsourced?

Host: And Hannah asked this next — can SEO be automated or outsourced? I'll answer — it can be outsourced, using a third-party agency, marketing company, or consultant, but there are a lot of scammers out there when it comes to SEO, so, like I said, look at the reputation of these third-party companies before starting a campaign, and I'd set aside at least five thousand dollars, whether you're a small store or a median store, that's really the minimum for SEO to see any lift, because all the effort in building your authority, doing all that technical work, you either pay someone in-house or pay a third party, and engineers aren't cheap. As far as automated, no, there's no way to automatically generate content and automatically build links, so that's a hard no on full automation, but I'd put a caveat in there.

Jeremy Johnson: I'll share my screen really quick, just to give an example — with product data, we're able, at Dispense, to automate a large portion of your SEO by pulling information directly from your POS system. So, if I Google "Adderall pre-roll" — localized to Boston — you'll see the first couple results, marketplace, IheartJane, marketplace, HighPath, and then right below that is Ascend, a Dispense menu, and you'll notice the nice photo in there, because we're using structured data to point Google to that, but all the information on this page is being pulled directly from the POS, so the customer doesn't have to input any of this, even down to when you hover over the page title, it's automatically pulling the product name, brand name, and location of that store, and, anything coming from the POS, even your THC/CBD details and terpenes, would be included in the description. So there are ways to automate it, but that information has to be coming in from somewhere, in this case the POS, but when you get down to the more nitty-gritty stuff, like creating location-based pages, that you actually have to take the time and manually write out.

Host: The caveat to that is, anytime you're using that automated system, there's an advantage, but also a downside — unique content is always key, so, if you have the time to invest to write your own product description, that's going to also help your product page rank better, that's a big undertaking, I know, but if you have the capacity, it gives you a huge leg up on your competition.

Jeremy Johnson: One of the fun things we do on our end, in our SEO settings, is we allow you to set your product description and page description with different variables you can pick from, so you can compose a unique product description including terpene details, brand details, THC details, and we'll automatically pull that information — but somebody else could easily copy that strategy, so it does pay to go full unique description and title.

Host: A hundred percent.

Setting Up E-Commerce Tracking in Google Analytics

Host: Let's switch gears — I definitely want to spend some time talking about e-commerce tracking, another fundamental part of your business you need to set up so you can make clear decisions on what's working. I'm going to pull up Google Analytics — the first thing you'll want to do is set up Google Analytics for your website and for your shopping cart, then connect Google Analytics to the same account for both, and the end result is going to be this — one thing I want to mention, this is the original Google Analytics platform, Google is moving to GA4, I believe starting around this time next year they'll be sunsetting Universal Analytics, so keep that in mind. But, talking about KPIs and what we should be tracking — number one, you need to set up your e-commerce tracking, to get access to three columns in Google Analytics: your e-commerce conversion rate, the number of transactions placed on your website in that time period, and the amount of revenue generated from those channels. For this partner, over the last year, Google organic alone —

Jeremy Johnson: I like what you did there, how'd you do this?

Host: I did Jeeter, and then, in the URL structure, after the "and," like "Jeeter," and delete everything after "near=" and put in the city, Detroit.

Jeremy Johnson: Okay, cool, yeah, I can see that here.

Host: This is an organic result, someone clicks here, goes to the website, and, for this partner, Google organic alone made up 37 percent of their traffic, but 45 percent of their revenue — so when I say this is your top marketing channel, the numbers are here to support that.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, and I often see, for a lot of our clients, that this adds up pretty well — you've got 45 percent of revenue, but I often see Google organic being 60 to 70 percent of traffic and 50 percent of revenue, it's definitely not uncommon in the cannabis industry for it to be that big of a source of income.

Host: Yeah, so this is all organic traffic, 47 percent right there, of the revenue — direct traffic, paid search is about 3 percent, and then there's other. Source/medium actually shows the referring domain or channel, so you can see Google organic, Google CPC, banner ads, this is programmatic advertising, some referrals from Houseplant, the Google Business Profile listing, this is their Springbig campaign, so you can see where the revenue is coming from — but this is where it gets real sexy on the data side, you can start to see how all the channels support each other, the breakup of direct traffic, organic, and email marketing, and how those three channels have supported a sale, how they overlap.

Understanding Assisted Conversions and the Customer Journey

Host: And then you can look at assisted conversions — of all the traffic to your website, you can see how many came in through last-click conversions, meaning someone clicks on this result, goes to your website, and makes a purchase in that same session, that's called last click.

Jeremy Johnson: Even though they might have been hit with an email or SMS previous to that.

Host: Yep, yep, so, in addition to that 47 percent of revenue, they're also getting a lot of assisted conversions, meaning organic search was part of the customer journey. This is the top conversion path — the top customer journeys people made to actually make a purchase, the top one is two direct visits, the second is organic search, they find us through organic search and then directly come to the website — you can see the breakup of all these, it can get pretty in-depth, but direct traffic and organic are the top two by far, then referral, email. You get full visibility into everything here, you can also look at time lag in days, the days between each conversion and the visitor actually making a purchase — this is all really valuable information you should have access to as a cannabis retailer.

Jeremy Johnson: On that note, you lose a lot of that access, especially the e-commerce access, if you're working with an iframe-based menu, it doesn't come through quite as much.

Host: I'll correct you on that — on certain iframe menus, you can layer on, if they have the ability to integrate with Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics, some marketplaces allow that, others don't. One thing to keep in mind, you never want to send anyone to a third-party website to check out, because then you'll never get to see this full experience.

Jeremy Johnson: I guess I should have put a caveat in there, it depends which one you're using, but if they have that GTM integration, you can get some of that data back that you wouldn't normally get.

Top KPIs for E-Commerce SEO Performance

Host: Well, let's talk about KPIs, because, as a marketing professional, this is our true north, the information reported to the C-level — what are the top KPIs to measure for your e-commerce SEO performance?

Jeremy Johnson: I think everybody's going to have a different answer here, but, for me, it's how many impressions you're getting on Google, what that's amounting to in clicks, what's the click-through rate, and the ending one, what revenue is being generated from organic search — those are the core ones I pay attention to. But there are other KPIs too, like how optimized is your Google Business Profile, how complete is your structured data, are you missing reviews from product data, or missing location from your business-level data — everybody's going to want to pay attention to different stuff, but within each of those, on-page or off-page optimization, there are good KPIs to pay attention to.

Host: Agreed, great — and I'd add conversion rate, organic revenue and transactions, total number of organic conversions, lifetime value — we never talked about that, LTV for users originating from organic, new versus returning customers, those are all valuable. Let me pull up Google Search Console — this is where you can see impressions, let's say the last three months, this is the number of impressions received from Google, you can see this in your search console.

Jeremy Johnson: One we didn't mention is your average position too — the higher your average position for keywords, the more impressions, the higher click-through rate, and that results in more traffic and revenue, especially for those big keywords like "dispensary near me," you want to be within the top 10 for average position.

Host: Agreed, let me show that again — comparing to the previous period, over the last three months we received 1.27 million impressions, before that 1.1 million, and clicks, 6,960 this period versus 6,790 before, so you can see the uptick quarter over quarter — and the average click-through rate, that's people who see your brand in search results and then click, 5.5 percent over the last three months, before it was 6.2, a slight drop, and the average position dropped a little too, we were at 22 before, now 25.8. This is all stuff you want to measure long term, SEO is a triathlon, not a marathon, there's a lot of legs to it — you might have started ranking for more keywords, getting more impressions, but some of those new ranking keywords probably had a lower average position, which is why click-through rate went down, even though you're still getting more impressions and clicks overall. So, it's not always a bad thing if your click-through rate goes down, it could just be because you're ranking for new keywords and have to build up that average position — your graph might look flat for a bit, then you get a nice bump, then flat again, that's all part of the stages of growth.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, for example, if you started ranking on the first page just for "dispensary," and that gets 10,000 impressions a month, maybe the first month you're at the bottom, not getting many clicks, but as you increase position, your click-through rate improves, with the goal of getting to the number one position, which yields the most clicks — there are studies showing it's upwards of 70 percent of all clicks on the first link, about 10 percent on the second, trickling down from there, so if you have the power to really own that first-position ranking, you're going to get the most traffic by far.

Conversion Rates: Menu-Only vs. Whole-Site

Host: Last question here — what do conversion rates look like for menus, self-hosted versus iframe?

Jeremy Johnson: That's an interesting one — you'll see a lot of dispensaries say they have conversion rates of 20 to 30 percent, that's not always accurate, though, because that's usually just for the menu itself, not counting, say, if somebody hit LetsAscend.com, just counting if they hit LetsAscend.com/menu/location. So you'll see that number thrown around a lot in cannabis, "our conversion rate is 20 to 30 percent, we're killing it," not totally accurate — I think more accurately, in cannabis, your conversion rate is probably somewhere between 10 to maybe 20 percent on the high end, which is still way better than most e-commerce.

Host: Most e-commerce, way better.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, most e-commerce is like a 3 percent conversion rate on average, but, turns out, if you're searching for cannabis, you want to buy it, so you see pretty awesome conversion rates in the cannabis world, but you have to be mindful of how those conversion rates are being calculated, it's not really a true representation if you're just looking at the menu versus the website as a whole.

Host: Yeah, and I'd shoot for 10 percent, that's pretty standard, I've seen that across stores doing a great job, and there are some factors that influence conversion rate — I've worked with partners in Michigan that didn't do well, had like a 1 percent conversion rate, because of two main things, their product catalog, the number of SKUs available per category, was like 25 percent of their competitors, and, second, they were charging 15 percent more for the same products. Those two factors alone, an incomplete product catalog or non-competitive pricing, will drive down conversion rate significantly — if I'm in Detroit, I can type "Detroit cannabis dispensary" and find 10 dispensaries, pull up all the menus next to each other, and do my own price comparison, and people do that.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, I have friends who work at menu companies like yourself, and customers in Tacoma, Washington, will look at our partner Clear Choice up there, but then look at everyone else's in Tacoma to see who has the best deal, not just in general but for that day, daily deals — it's definitely a factor to keep in mind working on your SEO strategy.

Host: Yeah, your menu could be amazing, you could be getting people to click through, but if you don't have the selection people are looking for, or the prices to compete, it's kind of for nothing, unless you differentiate in other ways and build brand loyalty, but that's a whole other topic. And one thing I've seen that helps with conversion rates is adding live chat to your menu — if you have a bud tender available, maybe you have 300 to 500 people come in to place orders a day, maybe 5 to 10 percent of them don't know what they want or have questions, so, to save time on phone calls, you can add live chat and streamline that whole process, and people will check out on the online menu instead of jumping through additional hoops.

Closing Remarks

Host: Cool, well, thank you everyone for joining us today, thank you, Jeremy, this was a great session, we covered a lot of ground about owning your data and the SEO tactics you need to rank your cannabis e-commerce store on Google and Bing and beyond. Jeremy, you're the business development manager at Dispense, can you tell us your social media handle so people can connect with you online?

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, I'll post it in the chat too, LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time, Jeremy Johnson, you might have to search "Jeremy Johnson Dispense" to find me, I don't think I have a slug for my LinkedIn — but that's where you can find me, super easy, and I post a lot about SEO and how to optimize.

Host: Cool, I just posted that in the live chat, if anyone wants to click on that, there you go, perfect. And thank you again for joining me on the Cannabis Marketing Live podcast, once again, I'm your host, and this is sponsored by MediaJel — MediaJel is a cannabis marketing company that helps cannabis brands advertise through SEO, paid search, and programmatic and beyond — yes, you can advertise cannabis on mainstream media publications, yes, there are some better alternatives to billboard advertising and all the radio and print advertising people have done in the past, so definitely look into display advertising and programmatic advertising as ways to add to your marketing mix. Thank you again, everyone.

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Host: Thanks, Jeremy, bye.

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