🔦 S...E...OOOOOOOO!

SEO, or ‘search engine optimization’ for my acronymophobic readers, is the most widely-used and least-understood concept in cannabis retail.

There is also a wild, raging, uproarious debate about SEO in the deepest nether regions of cannabis tech circles - a debate that won’t be solved here, but one that I sure as hell will outline.

But first, an education:

🤨 What is SEO?

Let’s turn to two of our friends: Wikipedia and Neil Patel.

Wikipedia says:

Neil says:

I like Neil’s last line there. Very clear. SEO is essentially “optimizing your online content” so Google’s webcrawlers will tell people your site is valuable and relevant for certain keywords.

💸 Why does it matter?

Why do we care where we rank on search engine results pages?

(By the way, since Google handles 90% of the world’s online queries, let’s just assume we’re talking about Google result pages)

As a cannabis retailer, you need customers to spend money at your store to survive. In order for them to spend money, they need to find you. They can find you via word-of-mouth, paid digital media, promotions, trade shows, print ads, OOH (mostly billboards) - and Google. And SEO happens to offer the best bang for your buck (e.g. getting direct access to a customer’s eyeballs with relatively little money).

Easier to find you = more likely to spend money with you

⚙️ Some key words on keywords

How does SEO really work, though? What do you actually do to rank higher?

Most of the time, when cannabis retailers talk about SEO, they’re talking about keywords. They want to hammer out as many pages with as many rich, relevant keywords that they have determined their core audience will search for. A few blog posts, some headers with nonsensical “dispensary near me cannabis near me buy cannabis near me blue dream dabs dabs dabs” and we’re golden, yes??

No!

The real drivers of SEO are plentiful, and secret. Google doesn’t share exactly how their search algorithm prioritizes websites, because that’d take all the fun out of it. However, many smart people have run many smart tests - building websites in a specific way, then measuring results on the SERPs (sorry again, acronymophobes, that stands for ‘search engine results pages’). We have collectively discerned that SEO is much, much more complicated than just keywords.

Presenting - the periodic table of SEO:

As you can see, there are a lot more variables than you might’ve thought, organized by two distinct categories: on-the-page and off-the-page.

On-the-page SEO

• Content (quality and keywords)

• Depth (I like this one - is the content shallow or does it have some meat to it)

• Architecture (how your pages are set up for crawlers, including how quickly your pages load)

• Is your site mobile optimized?

• Do your HTML headers have good keywords?

• Etc.

Off-the-page SEO

• Trust (do people bounce quickly, do site attributes indicate that you are a useful resource?)

• Links (how many high-authority sites link to your site)

• Are you spammy, and what is your reputation like?

Optimizing for keywords has become…a little more complicated.

Btw, Neil Patel taught me that there are different paths toward SEO: white hat and black hat. “Black hat” SEO is a quick way to architect a site to trick Google so that a site ranks well, without regard for human visitors. This is a short-term play, and often results in banned pages.

“White hat” SEO is the opposite - building something valuable over the long haul, brick by brick, and continually cultivating it. That’s why many cannabis retailers end up outsourcing this service to web dev or marketing firms - it’s hard.

🛍 Subdomains vs. iframes

How about eCommerce, you ask?

Cannabis retailers (usually) provide some kind of ordering experience online. If they don’t, they should.

Historically, that menu experience was delivered via “iframes,” which are components of an HTML document that allow you to embed an interactive experience in another page (in this case, a menu on a menu page). You can embed a Jane menu via an iframe, for example, and those are most common for us.

The issue with iframes is that Google’s crawlers treat them as black boxes - they can’t “see” inside an iframe, so all of that juicy product content is essentially invisible.

For that reason, there has been a push toward subdomains of late, including at Jane - subdomains are separate pages that are extensions of your main domain - they can load menus natively, and - guess what! - Google’s crawlers can read their content (namely product details), so your menus pages may rank higher.

FWIW - we have seen many, many retailers deploy via iframes (fast load times, engaging content, low bounce rates, easy to plop anywhere on the site - but a black box to crawlers) and be wildly successful. Which brings me to…

🤓 The Great Nerd Debate

How do people actually begin the cannabis shopping journey?

Do they pull out their phone and Google “blue dream flower near me?” The subdomain argument - that a crawlable page rich with product content - kinda hinges on this behavior.

For me, personally - and for some SEO professionals that work in cannabis - this seems like a fishy assumption. More likely is that folks will initiate a query based on local search - e.g. “dispensary near me.” From there, they will find whatever nearby dispensary site (or platform like Leafly or Weedmaps) with the best SEO for local search terms. Within this context, the iframe vs. subdomain point would be moot, because you don’t really have to rank for product-based keywords (just ones related to local search).

So which side wins? Product-based keywords or local search?

The definitive answer here is likely not definitive at all - in other words, it’s probably a little of both, heavily leaning toward local search. Subdomains with rich product details probably help, but it’s vital to build your entire website optimized for local search regardless.

My big takeaways for the must-have’s: well-architected pages with relevant keywords (including local search), subdomain menu deployment, mobile-first structure, engaging content to increase time spent on site and reduce bounce rates, fast load times - and, more than anything, a company to outsource all of this to.

📚 tl;dr

• SEO is essentially “optimizing your online content” so Google’s webcrawlers will tell people your site is valuable and relevant for certain keywords

• SEO matters for cannabis retailers because it lets shoppers find them easily - and, hopefully, place orders

• For menus: iframes are not crawlable, but are fast and flexible - subdomains are crawlable, but people don’t really shop product-first on Google

• There are lots of healthy and very niche nerd debates happening

• It is Thursday