The evolution of Cannabis marketing

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign, I gotta add myself. What's up, everyone? Max Yuhas here and today we are. [00:00:21] Speaker B: Going to talk about what you need. [00:00:24] Speaker A: To do to rank your dispensary or Cannabis brand in 2026. All right, so I'm going to present. [00:00:33] Speaker B: I'm gonna upload the slide. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Anyway, I hope you've all been having a phenomenal 2026 so far. Today's January 4th. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Oh, this is too big. [00:00:48] Speaker A: Dam. [00:00:52] Speaker B: How do we do this? [00:00:56] Speaker A: Oh, well, I guess we'll just open it up and share my screen. So we've been doing. So for those of you that don't know who I am or what we do or how it all works, like basically, I'm Max, you has, I'm the founder of Dope SEO, which is a. [00:01:13] Speaker B: Sub under the umbrella of Curious Monkeys. [00:01:17] Speaker A: Pressing Buttons, which is my, which is the parent company that kind of runs everything from Logic E Comm to Dope SEO to Brander. And you know, we've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work for different companies. Dispensaries and you know, whether it's. [00:01:41] Speaker B: Marijuana. [00:01:42] Speaker A: Dispensaries, whether it's cannabis dispensaries, whether it's hemp dispensaries, as well as other like, you know, high risk, gray market area businesses. There we go. We're just going to share screen. So we're going to share the entire screen and with this being the case, Here you go, you're going to get that infinite loop. But we've, we've run into, you know, we've been doing this since 2016 and one of the things that we have found is that basically, you know, cannabis has been statewide legal a lot of states now for quite a while. And in new markets there's still a lot of confusion. And even in older markets, you know what I mean? Because look, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of extra fees and costs tacked on to, you know, running a dispensary and doing all this other stuff. And what we figured out is that like, basically there's a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily need, but there's some stuff that you absolutely do need to kind of rank your dispensary and get it going from there. So this whole presentation and just bear with me on this, because I just bear with me on this. Look, it even says like, slide one. Okay. I put this together just so I can go through it. But basically this is how to, how to future proof your local SEO business, you know, your, your cannabis business for Your brand for your dispensary. This is an actionable playbook designed for dispensaries and brands to compete in a fast changing, regulation heavy local market. Right. So because unless you're an MSO working in multiple states, like odds are, you're working in one state and each state has its own unique, unique kind of regulations. Some states you can do billboards, other states you can't. Sometimes everybody has their own little weird stuff. But what we've been seeing and what we've been tracking is that like in 2026 and beyond, you know, discoverability, credibility and conversions hinge on mastering local SEO, technical excellence and AI informed content. Because AI searches are populating on top of some of the results here. Whereas like for maps listings, Maps listings used to be position zero. Now it's kind of like a combination between position zero as an AI summary or a maps position, or sometimes the combo of both. But basically like how to rank your go back anyway, you know, pretty much like we're going to talk about how to win in the maps pack, how to do this other stuff. Okay. The playbook that we're going to go over is pretty much the SEO fundamentals. You know, how to set your foundational SEO, what technical SEO is and why it's so important. Your maps and geolocation and, and local optimization, schema markup and geo SEO, which is like geolocation, search engine optimization, AI and content evolution. Because AI, whether we want to say it or not, like AI is evolving incredib incredibly, incredibly fast. And while AI searches are still low for specific search results, like it's, it's. [00:05:05] Speaker B: Going to be a thing, okay, Buyer. [00:05:07] Speaker A: Intent optimization and then like Q and A and resources or whatever you're going to have, like, if you take notes on this, like I'm probably going to transcribe this and turn it into a blog post and some sort of downloadable PDF that you can use for yourself. But for right now, basically like we're going to start with, with this and go over the whole thing. Okay, we got some cool little pictures there. Let's talk about why SEO matters more for dispensaries and Cannabis brands in 2026 than it ever did. You know what I mean? Like local cannabis search remains discovery driven. And what that means is like people, while you have like your quote unquote lazy searches like Dispensary Near Me, Google and other search engines, you know, I mean, because most searches now are actually done on a mobile device, not necessarily a desktop. So because of that, like Google, Google Maps, Whatever Apple uses for its cert, you know, I mean like there's so many different search engines but essentially it's all based on your geolocation, like where you are at the time of search, you know. So like if you type, if you're in California and you type in like New Jersey dispensary, you're going to get the gear, you're going to get a different result than if you're standing in Atlantic City, you know what I mean, on a specific street looking for a dispensary near you. Or if you're in Jersey City, New Jersey looking for, looking for a dispensary near you, it's going to be based a lot on where you are located, where you're standing, where you're sitting, where your phone is pinging. Okay? And like says dispensary near me is still king. But modifiers like open now delivery, best prices, deals, sales, whatever are always going to be like an add on that you can help optimize for to get easy wins your regulations in your competitive markets like advertising limitations can spend your shift towards SEO and Google business profile optimization. Meaning that while there are companies out there that can do good solid programmatic ads and some retargeting and some remarketing, the fact that fact is is that like you still can't really optimize ads for Facebook, you know what I mean? For, for cannabis dispensaries you, you know, press is going to be a little bit more, you know, costly because of the cannabis thing. You know, there are certain social media profiles that just absolutely do not, you know, regardless, like every month I've seen people like oh my business, you know, my Facebook or my Instagram or my T or my whatever got shut down because we're talking about cannabis. And like that's what you got to realize. Like cannabis is still not social media friendly unless it's like Twitter. [00:07:54] Speaker B: But who really uses Twitter anymore, right? [00:07:57] Speaker A: Google's evolving algorithms, you know, the E A T. Signals okay entity understanding in real world, real world prominence matter more meaning like are you a real, are you trusted? Are you an expert? You know what I mean? Do you have authority and do you know what you're talking about versus just asking ChatGPT to write you blog posts. Your digital reputation and discoverability reviews, photos and content quality shape both rankings and conversions. You know, I've been saying this since COVID but like Covid threw a whole different mix and understanding into what ecom was and how people shopped online, you know, you know there was there was never like the, the prominence of in store shoppers or like food delivery or liquor delivery or any sort of delivery like there was during COVID you know what I mean? And now that's like a career thing to where it's like oh I'm a, you know ubereats and whatever or a instacart or all this other stuff, you know what I mean? But like people also, you know, because people just started shopping online so much. People learn to read reviews, people learn to read other other stuff and look at photo, you see everything else. So like making sure that your brand is represented the right way, your business is represented the right way, that you have like accurate photos, logos, content, up to date products, everything else makes a big difference. Investing in strong local, you know, SEO. Like whether it's nap which we'll go into citations, localized content, product level depth, like unique descriptions. Don't just copy and paste stuff from leafly or somebody else's website for your product descriptions and reputation, you know what I mean? Like how often do you respond what's your reputation online? You know, because I could tell you this like it's really hard to have a five star review as a business, as a service business, but I could tell you this, the one with 4.8 is definitely going to get more than you know, 3.6 or 2.4 on, on their reviews for, on their maps listing technical performance, core web vitals. Basically like how quickly your website loads do the scripts run is it, can Google read it? You know what I mean? And the other thing is this like the opportunity size even in saturated areas, you know because there are states where there's still a limited amount of space. Like we work in markets where you know there's 20, 30 dispensaries in a, you know, 2, 3, 4 square mile radius. And then we've got other ones to where it's like you know, two or three per city and then there's other ones that you work with where it's like yeah, there's only two in the whole city and like as long as you rank above them, you know there's, there's a win there. But some of the best wins you're going to go for initially, you know to get this all started is going for what's called long tail keywords, you know what I mean? Like you know, dispensary near me that's open late, dispensary near me that you know, on sale, you know, best deals, whatever. And sometimes this means like creating hyper local content like neighborhood guides, first time buyer FAQs, compliance education, and then basically updating your FAQs and your FAQ schema. So that. Because we'll go into this. But AI, as much as we want to think like AI, super smart AI, like literally just crawls websites and what they actually call is website schema. So if you have your proper schema written into your website, odds are and you know, and it's relevant and people see it and there's nuance, there's different things that you do technically, but you're going to get better with better AI schema. [00:11:47] Speaker B: You know what I mean? [00:11:48] Speaker A: And. Or better schema because AI crawl schema. Okay, on page SEO. Let's go into it. SEO fundamentals. The on page layer ensures that your pages are understandable to both users and search engines. In 2026. You want to align with user intent, entity clarity and accessibility. Every key page, meaning your homepage, your about us page, your location page category, product, service education should follow these conventions to scale, relevance and conversions. Right? Keyword research, what customers search for. Include proximity modifiers. You know, not beyond near me, but it's also like city, state, you know, by your neighborhood near this location, near the hotel, they're staying near the park, that they're eating near the restaurant. Okay. Brand versus generic product terms and compliance. And compliance. Friendly phrasing, proper title tags. Meta descriptions including city and neighborhood lead with core intent and they append brand and unique value. Okay. Header structure, H1, H2, H3 hierarchy. You want to maintain a logical outline that mirrors user questions. A lot of times, what I've seen with web designers who don't understand SEO, they'll just use H1 and H2 tags wherever they feel like it because they like the bigger bolder text and don't want to actually go in and design it. And that really screws with your SEO. You want to be able to optimize your image. Alt tag, alt text. Okay. Which means to describe the image and include local context where it's natural. Your page URL best practices, short descriptive geoterms. You want to avoid parameters for core content. Basically like you want your URL slug to make sense, you know, and then mobile first design. Because like I was saying before, mobile friendly website, like most searches right now are happening on mobile devices. And if your website is slow load on mobile or isn't designed for mobile, or doesn't have like easy to find buttons or clickability or searchability, your website's not going to rank. Okay. Like building for desktop is kind of dumb. These Days like we actually build mobile first. So the best thing that you could. [00:13:57] Speaker B: Do for this is kind of like. [00:13:58] Speaker A: Map intent, like your primary keywords per page, you know what I mean? And this includes like having FAQs that mirror voice queries what people are searching for. Hey Siri, show me this blah blah blah, you know what I mean? Find a dispensary near me or like find something that carries this brand. Find a store that carries this brand. Internal linking, you know, so that you can basically say like hey, this is, this page is talking about this, this is where you find this information. And you want to ensure consistent naming for strains, categories and compliance. Compliance disclaimers to reinforce entity recognition and then for quality, you know what I mean? Aim for comprehensive original content. Like I said, don't just ask chat GPT to write your product description. You want to include price ranges where permitted availability indicators and clear call that actions, you know, order online, call today, get directions and you want to make accessibility non negotiable. Contrast captions and keyboard navigation to find out where you're going. How to search around your website. Okay, product descriptions and service pages, here we go. Treat each product and service page as a conversion and SEO asset. Okay? Because if somebody's looking for, let's just use cookies as an example. But if I'm looking for cookies, vape carts or if I'm looking for, for cookies all in one cards or a specific, you know, cookies sour, fabulous strain, okay, you want to be able to show up for that because that is actually a buyer intent search. You want to build trust with detail, compliance, clarity, structured data, differentiate with unique copy even for similar items to avoid cannibalization and duplication. Meaning don't just copy and paste product descriptions. Unique, detailed and compliant descriptions. Address, address, customers questions, effects, legality, pricing, internal linking once again, user reviews and rated which is also schema enabled so that you know, like if somebody's asking for like hey we want the best. [00:16:02] Speaker B: Review, you know, the best, whatever, you know what I mean? [00:16:05] Speaker A: Kind of content, you know, you can get that and you want to have an actual content blueprint that starts with a concise, you know, overview, who it's for, what it's for, ad experience, notes, you know, aroma effects, terpene profiles where it's allowed, include usage guidelines. Of course while I'm doing this we're getting slack messages but include usage guidelines and legal disclaimers. You know, surface availability by location, pick up delivery options. Use comparison blocks between strains or formats. Edibles vs. Flowers vs. Vapes to assist decision making. Then your technical enhancements that you want to do is like implement product schema, price, availability, aggregate rating we're permitted use FAQ schema to capture common questions, use canonical tags for variants ensure high quality images with descriptive alt attributes and considered 3D AR where it's available for engagement. Let's keep it moving here, okay? Your nap consistency now nap is something that a lot of SEOs have been always talking about since day one. And what is nap? Your nap is your name, address, phone number. Consistency across the web is a core ranking factor in trust signal to both customers and algorithms. Meaning that if your name is, you know, Mary Jane's dispensary, you don't want to have mary, you know, MJ's dispensary or Mary J's dispensary or Mary J's weed shop, you know, on different listings because that confuses Google. You want to have a some. You want to have it specific. So Mary Jane's dispensary is always going to be Mary Jane's dispensary with the same exact address, the same exact phone number, everything. And then nap is now you know, basically you can expand that to nap, which pretty much which is name, address, phone, website categories, product categories and the hours for complete for completeness meaning nap name, address, phone number uniform across your website, Google Business profile, directory, citations, everything else. Update your hours, contact info and business categories to make sure that you know they are accurate. I've seen a lot of times if somebody doesn't know what they're doing, they'll try to list their dispensary as an alternative health store or something. Whereas like now Google Maps and most of the directories actually allow you to do a cannabis business or cannabis store setting in your Google Business profile. So why not just use that instead of alternative health store? Because people are not going to look for alternative health store versus unless you're cbd. But even that's a whole other conversation. But you want to lock your canonical nap on your site footer, contact page, location pages, make sure it matches to all of them. Push to your Google Business Profile and top directories whether it's weedmaps, Leafly, Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, Cannabis specific citations as well as other citation listing sites like you know, Yext or Dexnose or whatever, you know, whatever citation builder you're using. You want to monitor for duplicates and suppress them or merge them. Update special hours for holidays, for events to avoid user frustration and negative signals. You know, you don't want people going to Your store saying what the hell, it says they were open, but you know they're actually closed. And then quality control. You want to be able to track this. Create a spreadsheet for local listings to use to track statuses your last time you updated anything. Ensure the suite numbers, unit numbers and abbreviations are consistent. And if you rebrand or move, plan a 90 day window to update without, you know, update this window without redirects, signage updates and citation refreshes. Okay. Local SEO keys for dispensaries. Local SEO keys for dispensaries. Your Google Business profile is your second homepage. Literally because like if you look on your mobile phone versus your desktop, if you search your dispensary's name or your and this is the whole thing, whether if, if you're a, if you're a brand or a manufacturer and you have a public address and you want someone to find you, you know, to pick up or whatever, you can create a Google Maps listing. But if you're a dispensary, like you're a retail store, people come in and shop with you. You want to have a Google Business page. Okay, your Google Business page should be added with citations, local links, robust specific landing pages to win proximity based searches and convert on the go customers. That also mean means creating like near me lists and how to get here directions. But your Google Business profile should be completed fully and regularly updated. Don't just let it sit there. Your local citations, like we said, like weedmaps, leafly, Yelp, those are literally just citation pages. You don't need to use them for their menus but just get it on there and be like hey, link back to me. Local back, Local backlinks could be local papers, press local newspapers sometimes in some states you can sponsor things from schools or educational things or do fundraisers or whatever. Local links are great, you know, I mean statewide links are great. And then location specific landing pages as long as they're not like just using some, not saying any names but some mass page builder that's just going to basically duplicate the homepage onto every other page and then just change the name of the city. Okay, that's really dumb and that's actually. [00:21:33] Speaker B: Going to hurt you. [00:21:34] Speaker A: You know, you want to have unique location specific landing pages. Google Business Profile tips, you know, add high quality photos weekly, not every six months, you know, I mean weekly, you know, answer Q and A. Proactively publish events if you can, if you can and offers if you can. Okay, Use primary and secondary categories if you secondary categories if you can. For Multi location brands maintain unique photos and descriptions per location, okay? Meaning if you have two locations, you should have different pictures of the business at each store, you know what I mean? Because the outside looks different, the street looks different, you know, the inside should look a little different unless it's exactly the same. But even if it exactly the same, the outside's different and you want unique photos with unique EXIF data, okay? Meaning longitude latitude in the photos, okay? Local authority pursuit partnerships sponsoring neighborhood cleanups, local events and pitch stories to local media about compliance education, community initiatives to earn natural links and mentions. Build landing pages that include neighborhood context, parking info, staff highlights, etc. Etc. This is basics here, but this is some of the stuff that we do for you to make sure that you rank okay. Maps Pack dominance your Maps pack Like I said, your three pack in Google Maps, the top three results in Maps pack will capture the lion's share of local intent clicks. You know, if you type dispensary near me, odds are you're going to see something show up on Google Maps and the top three that show up, that's considered to be the Maps pack. Okay? And you want to make sure that your maps pack is on site to earn local signals to earn and maintain those positions. Fresh new visuals, review velocity and offer messaging to align with user intent. You know, open hours deals, pickup. If you're doing anything for the holidays or whatever, this goes back to the last thing. Optimize your Google Business profile photos Q and A business description encourage customers reviews and reply to them. Post regular contents, updates and offers if you can and use Google posts for promos and events if you can. Okay, Advanced tactics. You want to be able to track topic and star rated distribution of reviews, request reviews with mention to mention products and neighborhoods to reinforce relevance. YouTube use and then if you want to get super technical, you can use UTM parameters on business profile links to keep it measured intact. So you can say like hey where did this come from? This came from, you know, the click to my website came from my Google Business page and you want to keep your categories and attributes accurate. Accessibility pickup options, rotate seasonal photos and event posts to drive repeat discovery. And then also because you know you're going to have some people that just hate life and general and even though you're giving them a really good deal on weed, they're going to complain about it. You want to have a template to address negative reviews, whether it's, you know, such and such. Didn't honor my discount codes, you know, somebody didn't let me in the I've seen all sorts of weird reviews to where people get upset about stuff, you know, like they wouldn't serve me and even though I didn't have my id, the guy wouldn't let me in the door even though I was carrying a knife like something stupid. But like some I have seen dumb reviews like that, you know, and then you're gonna have some people that just talk shit. So figure out a way to address those. Don't just let them sit there. You want to address those because people will read your response to a negative review. Okay, Technical SEO. Here we go. Super nerd stuff. Technical strength ensures fast technical SEO checklist. You know, your technical strength ensures fast accessible experience and helps search engines crawl, index and evaluate your content accurately. For cannabis retailers, technical SEO also supports compliance age gates disclaimers without sacrificing performance. That means you want to have fast secure TLS SSL mobile app website crawlability sitemaps, robots TXT files in there. You want to make sure you fix broken links. You don't want to have a ton of 404 pages. You want to make sure that you don't have a ton of duplicate content. You want to structure your URLs and internal linking for crawlability and page hierarchy and all that other fun stuff. And then your ADA accessibility best practices, which is basically your American Disabilities act, to make sure that your website is searchable and readable or viewable or interactable, if that's a word, by people who have some sort of disability. Okay, if you want to go super duper deep on this, you know, implement HTTP H or HTTP 2 and HTTP 3 compress and lazy load media preconnect to critical origins and past core web vitals, use riffling and multilingual markets. Okay, which is basically like you can have multiple languages on your website. You want to render H gate overlays without blocking crawlers. Because some age gates do that. You know, block a whole website so. [00:26:47] Speaker B: That Google or whatever is crawling. [00:26:49] Speaker A: It actually thinks that your entire website is just the age gate tanks your website's SEO. You want to ensure server side rendering. You want to run monthly audits, at least monthly audits. You know, we do it weekly, sometimes daily, depending on the size of the site. With screaming fraub recycled track issues in a backlog and establish SLA fixes version control schema and redirects monitor crawl stats and index coverage and search console to watch regressions. Watch regressions early. What that means is that basically you'll see when something starts dropping and you can get ahead of it before it tanks completely. Schema Markup and GEO SEO Schema markup is basically structured data that clarifies entities and relationships for search engines. It's pretty much the language that was written for search engines to crawl and read and understand. Okay, and these are all different schema markup codes like local business, you know, business category, product schema, address hours, menus, events, reviews, rich results, geotagging images. What is a geotag? It means adding your longitude latitude to your photo along with business information for enhanced local discovery. JSON LD and this is why you hire an SEO, not just a web. [00:28:14] Speaker B: Developer to do this stuff for you. [00:28:16] Speaker A: Someone that actually understands this. You can populate your CMAZ profiles, Google business page, weed maps, leafly social for multi location use, distinct IDs and embed coordinates. Add an FAQ page schema for buyer intent. Educational pages validate with rich snippet tests and monitor enhancements. And then your geo details exif geotags on original images, not stock photos. I mean original photos taken at your location. You know, consistent nap nap which in SCIVA and visible content and embedded maps with driving parking directions details and for service areas clearly defined as a service area for delivery options within schema code for compliance. Oh, let's talk about AI, right? [00:29:08] Speaker B: AI SEO is kind of the AI optimized for AI. Like I said earlier in this AI generated content. You want to have AI generated content. But really the main thing to think. [00:29:22] Speaker A: About when it comes to AI content is that AI. [00:29:25] Speaker B: There was a new study that was released where basically the AI bots are literally crawling Google. [00:29:30] Speaker A: They're literally crawling Google Maps, they're literally. [00:29:32] Speaker B: Crawling schema code on your website. That's, that's where they get their information. You know what I mean? Like the information that AI is coming up with was written by people for generally speaking, for SEO purposes. You do, if you're having a chatbot, if you're, if you're putting together like some sort of like chat guide or something or support chat, you want to make sure that you're understanding compliance. You don't want your chatbot making medical claims or doing anything else. There's a lot of stuff that goes into this. But understanding AI SEO, AISO is like new, you know what I mean? People like it, it's fast, it's quick, you know, it gives you the, the answer. But all that information is based coming from your on page SEO and technical SEO. Just realize that content marketing, okay. [00:30:29] Speaker A: Content. [00:30:30] Speaker B: Marketing in 2026 for dispensaries and for Grants. You know, educational hyperlocal multimedia content builds topical authority and fuels discovery across search, social and local platforms focused on authenticity, community integration and formats that match how customers buy and research and buy. [00:30:46] Speaker A: You know what it means by that. [00:30:48] Speaker B: Is like how do people consume information? You know, you're watching this video, but you may be reading this blog post, you may actually be listening to this on an audio on some podcast. You know, people consume information differently now because we have so many different ways to do it. And you want to be able to have your content optimized for how people find you, you know, which means hyper local, hyperlocal blog posts, educational content, long form video and short form. A short form video, you know, like a long YouTube video like this or like a TikTok reel or, or something. [00:31:22] Speaker A: Else that's like 30 seconds that has. [00:31:25] Speaker B: Something in there, you know that that's going to be like oh, I want to learn more. And then you can leverage ugc which is user generated content. Meaning like if somebody writes a video or makes a video about you and says like yo, this place is dope, we love it, the staff is great, you know, you should be able to, you know, that's, that's content that, that helps your business. If you need help, you know, putting together a content marketing plan, you should create like a monthly calendar. Mapping awareness, consideration and decision. Repurpose long form. There's a reason I'm doing this all in one go is because I'm going to repurpose this into shorts and let different reels and turn this one long video probably into 20, 25 different versions of it that are going to feature different pieces. And you know, because not everybody wants to sit through a super long version of this feature. Budtender spotlights community partners. Encourage user generated content with clear guidelines and permissions and then your distribution, you know, you can syndicate to if you can Google business posts, you know, email marketing, local pop ups, social media posts, places like YouTube you can embed on your website. You can use internal linking from your blog to product and location pages. Add schema, you know, how to FAQ video object and then track performance with GA4 content groups, Google Analytics 4 content groups with attribution to order interest. Hopefully that all makes sense. [00:32:57] Speaker A: Now we're going to talk about buyer. [00:32:59] Speaker B: Intent search optimization because buyer intent to me is like one of the things that we have have always focused on. [00:33:05] Speaker A: You know, buyer intent really means like. [00:33:07] Speaker B: I'm looking to buy a specific product here. We're going to, we'll just read off the page Here because why not? You know buyer intent search optimization which basically means to capture high intent searches with pages and components that directly address decision criteria. Align your copy schema and UX your user design user experience with actions like calling, getting directions and placing an order. You want to build pages for high intent queries like buy edibles near Kansas City, best dispensary for flour, you know where to find CBD gummies near me dispensary that delivers late at night, etc. [00:33:45] Speaker A: Etc. [00:33:46] Speaker B: Create decision focused content guides comparing strains, types, pricing pages, FAQs about the shopping experience. Highlight your purchase options, you know, local pickup delivery, curbside shipping policies, etc. That's if you can ship. [00:34:00] Speaker A: Okay. [00:34:01] Speaker B: Answer common local questions. Where do I park? What kind of ID do I need? What's the first time buyer advice? You know, common questions that you're going to get from first time people. And then add structured data schema to enhance your SERPs like use FAQ FAQ schema with a how to markup with and you know, make sure that you add reviews your page anatomy clear H1 with the city, neighborhood, you know, trust badges if you have a license or an age policy, price range and availability per location. You want to have good call to actions. You know, call directions, order online social proof blocks featuring reviews and then you could, you could run AB tests. I don't necessarily think you need to as long as you know what you're doing. Reputation and reviews Reputation and review management. If you, you know, businesses live and die on their reputation and reviews. You know, a bad review, 20 bad reviews in a row is a sign. It's a sign that your staff isn't enjoying what they're doing. It's a staff that the customers aren't having a good experience and it's a sign that people aren't going to shop with you. [00:35:09] Speaker A: You know what I mean? [00:35:09] Speaker B: If you have a really good review, you know, if people are leaving great reviews and they're talking about how great your staff is and how great your product is, it's better if it's, it's actually, it's just as important to have a great staff and a great experience as it is to have great products. You know, there have been a couple of restaurants that I've frequented over the course of my life that didn't necessarily have the best food, but they had the best staff and the best experience. And that's why you go there. And I think that that's a lot of times when people forget, you know, just because you're Selling weed or just because you're selling a product that people want to buy doesn't necessarily mean that you can hire crappy people and be rude to customers. Please remember that because people will leave reviews, okay? You want to build a culture of requesting and responding to feedback and repurpose authentic reviews across channels for social proof, okay? Which means ask people to leave a review. You know, leave us a review on Google, Weed, maps, leafly, whatever, respond professionally, whatever that means to all positive and negative feedback. You know, leverage reviews and content with permission for social proof and then review schema. You know, boost visibility and trust in search results. There should be something in your system that will automate post purchase review requests, you know, so it's like, hey, how was your experience? Blah, blah, leave us a review. If you don't have that, train your sales staff to, you know, to basically say like, hey, leave us a review. And you can have, you know, whether you're doing it by email, sms, text message, push notifications, whatever, you know what I mean? Like have something that creates a response template to personalize the details and you make sure, you want to make sure that nobody's making medical claims. You want to track review velocity, average rating, topic, sentiment. Like if somebody's always talking about like hey, you know Bob the bot center is amazing, you know, then like, all right, ask Bob what he's doing and be like, all right, cool. Can you teach everybody else how to be this friendly or helpful or whatever. Review carousels. You want to make sure that your reviews are showing up on your website for both your location for, for your business and then if you have enough of them on your product pages, you know, use user generated content in social with permission and you could always highlight staff shout outs to build community connection. You know, it's very simple, perform. We're almost through this guys, just bear with me. I'm losing my voice. I know I am. Performance analytics, okay? How you track everything, you know, it's one thing to say like hey, things are great, but it's another thing to actually look at the numbers. We're very data driven and I like to be able to look at numbers and be like, hey, this is working, this isn't working. This is where we need to tighten up whatever. But performance analytics, what gets measured and what gets improved, you know, you want to tie your visibility to revenue through robust tracking through Google business profile, web and online ordering systems. If you can integrate with your point of sale for like how people found you, even better. Dispensary is a little weird. Especially if you're doing cash only. Like, you can't track actual sale, but you can track calls, clicks, map directions, et cetera, et cetera. Ask a survey in the store, hey, how'd you. How'd you find about us? And nine times out of 10, what you're going to find out because you can't run, you know, ads like other places, or you can't, you know, depending on the state. You know, whether it's a bill, whether you can or can't do billboards, whether you can or can't do certain types of marketing. You know, you're. This is why SEO is so important. You know, if you're showing up for a buyer intent term or a, you know, conversion intent term or a local search intent term. [00:38:57] Speaker A: And people read the. [00:38:58] Speaker B: Reviews to go, hey, I want to go check that place out. It looks cool. Conversion tracking, meaning calls, messages, direction, clicks, online orders, and then user insights. Okay? Like it says, UTM parameters, Google, you know, GA4 funnels to order flows, track store level. I keep clicking around this and then like, you know, do a weekly reporting update to see how things are going. All right, here we go on the performance analytics, compliance and legal considerations. This is where a lot of people screw it up. And this is where, like, if you don't hire someone that actually understands the industry, you could get really, okay, compliance and legal considerations. There are certain things that you may want to put on your website that. [00:39:43] Speaker A: Someone that with experience may say, that's a bad idea. You know, I know when hemp, CBD and everything else were first coming on, like, a lot of people were like. [00:39:51] Speaker B: Oh, I want to talk about the great medical benefits that you can get. [00:39:56] Speaker A: And the fact is, is, like, unless you're a doctor who's like a doctor in that specific industry, you can't make medical claims. Okay. Even if you're a nurse, you can't. Like, it's very hard for you to say, like, hey, like, CBD will cure your glaucoma, CBD or cannabis will help with this. Okay? You cannot make medical claims. So don't put it, you know, don't rank for those terms. But essentially, like you. Let's just go into the bare bones basics of this SEO best practices, local, state cannabis advertising laws. [00:40:31] Speaker B: You want to make sure that you're. [00:40:32] Speaker A: Staying in the loop. You want to make sure that you're not breaking any laws. You want to make sure that you're not getting your. If you're an agency watching this, you want to make sure that you're not Me writing content or making statements or doing something sloppy like forgetting to put an age gate on a cannabis website. That can get your clients in trouble. [00:40:49] Speaker B: But you also don't want to make. [00:40:50] Speaker A: Claims or write content. You're like, yo, this is dope. No, like you want to make sure that you understand the laws and you discuss the laws, you know, on the website. Okay. If you don't have the option for paid search, focus your efforts on organic and map strategies. Like I said, avoid medical claims, use age gates. There's a lot of other stuff that goes into this. You want to maintain the compliance review checklist. You know, make sure that your age gate doesn't block crawlers. Avoid health claims, stick to experience and education. Ensure that your disclaimers are visible. Make sure that you have a dosing guide or something on there for first time users. You know, train staff on what not to say and what to say. Okay, Just, just make sure that you're keeping track of everything. There's a lot of tools and resources out there. Okay. If you're going to be doing it in house, you know, you can sign up for something like Semrush Hrefs Moz White Spark for Citation Screaming Frog. There's so many there, so many different rank trackers. [00:41:58] Speaker B: Now. [00:42:01] Speaker A: You know, there's tools that you can. [00:42:02] Speaker B: Use like Google My Business Bright Local. [00:42:05] Speaker A: For, for Google Business Profile management. And then if you want to have. [00:42:10] Speaker B: AI content, you know, there's Jasper, there's. [00:42:13] Speaker A: Claude, there's Surfer SEO, there's Chat GPT which you should never use without the right prompts. [00:42:21] Speaker B: You know, but AI does make life I, AI does make life. [00:42:25] Speaker A: Easier but you just have to read. [00:42:26] Speaker B: It, make sure it's not saying the wrong stuff. [00:42:30] Speaker A: And then there's tools out there that can do like schema generator. Then you can use Google's rich snippet test results page to test your page to see if it's actually showing up and being crawled. For rich snippets, schema and AI results. Okay, most cost effective thing to do would be like choose one rank tracker, choose one code crawler and choose one listings manager to avoid duplication. Standardize your dashboards. You know, we have, because we're an agency, we actually use multiple tools because. [00:43:02] Speaker B: We don't trust any one of them wholeheartedly. But we're an agency and you're not. [00:43:08] Speaker A: So like you should spend the thousands of dollars that we're spending as a business if you plan to do all this yourself. [00:43:16] Speaker B: Okay, here's a super duper quick start Action plan. [00:43:19] Speaker A: If you want to rank your dispensary. [00:43:21] Speaker B: For your Cannabis business in 2026, you. [00:43:24] Speaker A: Can do this all basically in a two week sprint. [00:43:27] Speaker B: Prioritize the updates and whatever you want to audit. Your name, address, phone number, your nap which and your listings for consistency. You know, you want to organize your business page with photos, categories, up to date info, rewrite expand product and service pages with a local focus. You want to check your site speed and mobile performance. You want to add and revise your schema markup site wide, make sure it's there, okay. And you want to start a local content calendar for blog and social posts, you know, and then this if you're a business owner, you know, you got to understand like there are different departments, you know, marketing should own your Google business page and your content. Your development team, your web dev team should own the site speed and integrations and e comm and product descriptions, you know, schema deployment, the fixed list. Your operations team should handle the review requests and in store signage, you know, and then have like clear cut success metrics, you know, whether it's direction, clicks, you know, calls, organic sessions, how many people are hitting the website, etc. And then you know, do daily standups during Sprint and a week readout 30 day KPI review to set the next quarter's roadmap. Because like I said, we're doing this. It's fourth. This is going to be a, this is going to be an interesting year. You know, some people are still waiting for the reschedule. Some people are thinking it's going to get descheduled. [00:44:51] Speaker A: Other people are thinking it's all going. [00:44:53] Speaker B: To go to big Pharma. Either which way your business is still your business and you should be running your business like a business. And once again it all just breaks down to SEO. Okay, so we're going to talk about the future of canvas SEO. You want to prepare a strategy that involves prioritize structured data like schema conversational clarity and trust at every touch point. Voice search, conversational AI SGE ready answers. Okay. Hyper localized personalization video search and discovery AI powered customer experiences, social say that. [00:45:35] Speaker A: 6 times fast social search and reputation signals. [00:45:39] Speaker B: Okay. We predict that possibly entity first indexing and generative summaries will reward brands with clean schema. If you focus on your brand you know and not something else you know, be consistent with your facts, clear helpful answers. That's what people want. People want clarity, people want good information and the more the better. Your information is like generally speaking the person that has the best information on their website. Not all the time, not what you think is the best, but actually like most helpful in Google's eyes will get you ranking higher and get more clicks to your website. [00:46:14] Speaker A: Okay. [00:46:14] Speaker B: And local differentiation will come from genuine community presence and superior customer experience, reflecting in reviews and content. Okay. You want to build a schema design system, invest in short form video. Okay. Train teams on conversational writing. Not just like what is cbd, what is thc? You know, but like actual things that people are searching for and formalize a first party data strategy. Strategy that respects privacy and enhances personalization. Such big college words on this. Okay, so if you've gotten this far and you're looking for help, okay. We love to talk strategy on all this stuff. Generally speaking, this was written sort of like as a webinar, but I'm not doing it as a webinar because I don't want to schedule a webinar. I just want to make the video. [00:47:05] Speaker A: But if you've made it this far. [00:47:07] Speaker B: You know, you're still reading this. Basically like if you have questions or if you're, you know, we're not offering free consultation, but basically like if you made it this far and you want to talk like, hit us up, go to dope. SEO.com we are here to help. Once again, if you're looking to rank your cannabis dispensary or your cannabis brand 2026, we are here to help you reach out to [email protected] okay? Thank you so much for watching and. [00:47:38] Speaker A: I do believe that I am going. [00:47:39] Speaker B: To end this video now. [00:47:42] Speaker A: Peace.