The Greatest War: Local vs. Product SEO

Well, good morning. Am I a day late? Indeed. Is there an actual schedule? Nope. Please enjoy. 

Search Engine Optimization (or “SEO,” as the cool kids call it), explains itself well. It’s a process by which website content is optimized to be found by search engines.

💡 By “search engines,” I don’t mean AskJeeves or Yahoo. I don’t really even mean Bing. Google handles upwards of 90% of the world’s search traffic. So let’s just call it like it is - SEO is really optimizing for Google searches. 

🍱 Remind me what TOFU is

As you can probably imagine, I spend a lot of time talking about cannabis eCommerce and the pros and cons of various setups. People want to solve for lower-funnel conversion rates (e.g. the # of menu loads that result in a checkout), but they also want to solve for top of funnel action (e.g. getting more menu loads in the first place.)

(This is a sales funnel conversation. Click here and see below for a refresher.)

Here are various setups within cannabis eCommerce:

• iframes (embedded menus): efficient. Fast load times. Look nice. High conversion rates. But, black box to Google for product terms

• Subdomains (menus but on a different URL than the main page): also efficient. Still fast. Look great. High conversion rates. Unclear if SEO impacts the main domain in a material way

• Native (custom menus): not as efficient. Looks depend on design. Conversion rates depend on chops of whoever built it. SEO is excellent if structured correctly

At Jane, we cover the whole spectrum above depending on what our partner is going for. Iframes and subdomains are traditional, and native builds run on top of Jane Roots (our set of APIs that allow for a fully custom front-end).

Other companies tend to focus on one or the other. And some of them do a good job.

🤔 But what to optimize for, as a cannabis retailer?

But…the infrastructure of your website and shopping flow doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you should optimize for.

So…how do people search for cannabis?

Most people will search based on a location near them: 

This kind of search indicates purchasing intent. I’m going to buy something, so I might as well identify a retail location or delivery service and see what they’ve got. In this case, a retailer should optimize for local search.

(“Local search” just describes a search query with a geographical component.)

Optimizing for this kind of query involves beefing up your Google My Business page and collecting as many (hopefully positive) store reviews on Google as possible. And much more, but you get the point.

On the other hand, some operators believe consumers will start a shopping journey with a product-based search:

This kind of search indicates that a consumer is looking to learn about - or buy - a specific product. They will seek out this specific strain, THEN identify a location or delivery service that can fulfill the order.

In this instance, optimizing for search involves creating unique product URLs with clean, structured data and rich content. Tons of work.

🎯 So which one should you choose to optimize? Local search or product-based searches?

Well, probably both (sorry, I know that’s a cop out).

In reality, if you have limited resources, it’s probably a sequential process beginning with local SEO, then moving into high-value product SEO.

Here are what smart people said about the subject when I posted on LI yesterday (shout out Matt and Mitch):

So…both.

📚 tl;dr

• There are a few ways to set up your eComm experience; some are better for SEO

  • iframe (fine for local search, not great for product SEO)

  • Subdomain (fine for local search, maybe fine for product SEO)

  • Native (good for both but a lot of work)

• It is more likely that high-intent shoppers are performing a local search (e.g. “dispensary near me”, so optimize that first (Google My Business, etc.)

• But, some people start with products (e.g. “cookies gsc”), so you may want to dedicate resources to product SEO after you’ve figured out local search

• It is Friday