Marijuana Dispensary SEO Strategy Case Study: How to Get 10,000 Visits and a 4% Conversion Rate in 90 Days
If you own a retail marijuana dispensary or online mail-order marijuana business, you already know that implementing a marijuana dispensary SEO strategy is the most effective and compliant dispensary marketing tactic for your long-term success.
I bet you’ve also heard that SEO is a process. A long-term process that can take from 6-12 months to see significant ROI.
While that statement is 100% accurate, what would you think about achieving a 4% e-commerce conversion rate from a marijuana SEO & email marketing stratgey?
And remember, these conversions are online sales only. This does not include the walk-in traffic/retail sales you achieve in the same time period.
What I’m asking you is, would you like to have a 4% e-commerce conversion rate for your brand new dispensary website and marijuana retail store in the first 3-months?
If the answer is yes, below you’ll find a 2021 marijuana dispensary SEO case study showing how we achieved ~10,000 new visitors, a lower than average bounce rate of 32%, and a 4% e-commerce conversion rate in 90-days.
This dispensary SEO case study outlines exactly what you can expect from a customized local dispensary SEO & keyword strategy designed, implemented, and managed by my team and I at coladigital.ca.
Marijuana Dispensary SEO Overview: Your Main Marketing Challenge
Our client is a licensed retail cannabis company, currently with two dispensaries in East Toronto. They plan on opening a third and fourth location before Q4 2021 starts.
Needless to say, this retail marijuana dispensary has a ton of competition with existing licensed retail stores and legacy market businesses, who each have their own dispensary SEO strategy. Not to mention all the new retail dispensaries that will be opening soon in their geo-territory (Greate Toronto Area).
Our client reached out to us requesting our expertise with cannabis marketing, specifically our custom dispensary SEO strategy.
They completely understood that local SEO is the most effective and compliant long-term digital marketing strategy for their chain of dispensaries, and they needed proven tactics in order to get an edge over the competing dispensaries in organic search.
We suggested and implemented the following:
1. Implementation of an initial SEO & keyword strategy on their new website.
2. Ongoing SEO updates, local SEO/Google My Business optimizations, and a customized blog content marketing strategy.
3. Email marketing newsletters & drip campaigns.
Our marijuana dispensary SEO strategy began in mid-January 2021. The case study below is for the time period February 1 – April 30, 2021.
Our Goals For This Customized Dispensary SEO Strategy
1. Increase the online visibility in organic search results for our client.
2. Establish & increase the search engine rankings for our client for a targeted set of keywords.
3. Increase the amount of high-quality traffic from organic search as well as direct referrals (i.e. the user types in the dispensary’s URL directly in their browser or clicks on a bookmarked link).
4. Increase website engagement (click-through, time spent on the site, etc) from all users.
5. Increase revenue/online sales for all sources.
As you’ll see from the data below, our dispensary SEO strategy has successfully achieved all 5-goals above within the first 3-months!
Results From Our Marijuana Dispensary SEO Strategy – First 90 Days
Data from Google Ads & Google Analytics From February 1 – April 30, 2021.
Marijuana SEO Key Performance Indicators:
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Total Website Visits: 9,877
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Total Sessions/Engaged Users: 15,583
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Total Pages/Session: 3.72
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Bounce Rate: 31.59
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Average Time on Site: 3:03
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Total E-commerce Conversion Rate (Online Sales): 3.9%
The top 2 sources of traffic are direct referrals (users who typed in the url directly in the browser) and Google organic search.
Many of these direct referrals are coming to the site directly because our SEO strategy has created awareness and branding for our clients so that customers already know their URL. Our SEO strategy has directly contributed to this direct traffic.
Something interesting to note is that our email newsletter campaigns are the #3 source of traffic to the website.
This means that our total work over 3-months has generated the most traffic and the most revenue to the website which results in a 4% online e-commerce conversion rate, in just the first 90-days.
Our Client’s Online Visibility & Keyword Rankings
Online Visibility Increases:
The Visibility index is based on click-through rate (CTR) that shows a website’s progress in Google’s top 100 for keywords from the current tracking campaign. A zero-percent visibility means that the domain isn’t ranking in Google’s top 100 results for any of these keywords; and a 100-percent visibility means that the domain keeps the first position in the SERP for all of these keywords.
Our Client’s Online Visibility has gone from 0 to 4.88% in 90 days. They currently lead all their main competitors in terms of online visibility.
To put this in perspective, our client’s closest competitor in terms of our targeted keywords has a visibility score of 2.08% as of April 30, 2021. The third top competitor has a visibility score of 0.1%.
Here is a visual representation of our client’s increasing online visibility in organic search engines thanks to our customized dispensary SEO strategy. Note the blue line.
Website Traffic Increases:
Estimated traffic is based on CTR (Click-Through Rate that shows a probability that the user will click on a domain’s search result depending on this domain’s position in the SERP), multiplied by the keyword’s Volume and divided by 30 (number of days in a month). This is a sum of estimated traffic for all our targeted keywords for this client’s campaign.
Our marijuana dispensary SEO strategy has increased our client’s website traffic from 0 to 9.53 in just 90 days.
For context, the top competition dispensary’s estimated traffic score is 3.55. The third-place competitor has a score of 2.28.
You can clearly see how our cannabis SEO strategy can help your business get an edge over competitors by increasing your dispensary’s visibility in organic search engines and boosting the amount of organic traffic to your website.
Increases in Keyword Ranking/Search Position:
Let’s take a look at what keywords are driving traffic to our client’s website. They may not be the terms & phrases you’re thinking of.
Our marijuana dispensary SEO strategy doesn’t always go after the most popular keywords. In highly competitive industries, namely cannabis dispensaries in Toronto and the GTA, we find success in optimizing for relevant long-tail keywords that may be less popular but are also less competitive.
We’re tracking 100 targeted keywords in this dispensary SEO campaign.
In the first 90-days of our SEO strategy, we have:
- 26 targeted keywords in the Top 100 on Google search
- 9 keywords in the Top 20 (page 2 on Google)
- 8 keywords in the Top 10 (page 1 on Google)
- 4 keywords in the Top 3 (page 1 on Google)
Over 90-days, we’ve had 22 keywords improve in positions and we’ve had ZERO decline in position!
This chart shows the increase in search rankings for our targeted keywords from Feb 1 to April 30, 2021.
Marijuana Dispensary Keyword Rankings Over 90 Days
Below you can see the top 11 keywords our client is ranking for as of April 20, 2021 as compared to their top 3 local competitors with dispensaries in the same geo-territory as our client.
Keyword Rankings For Our Client – April 21, 2021
We have selected 100 target keywords to focus on for our client’s customized local SEO strategy for retail marijuana dispensaries. The final list came from extensive keyword research, competitor analysis, and our knowledge of the consumer demographic.
Here are the keywords our client’s ranks on PAGE 1 for within 90 days of our marijuana dispensary SEO strategy:
1. best weed strains in Scarborough: #1
2. weed strains in Scarborough: #1
3. * their brand name *: #1
4. best indica strains in scarborough: #1
5. bets sativa strains in scarborough: #4
6. buy legal weed in scarborough: #8
KEYWORD RANKINGS UPDATE:
Just FYI, as of June 2, 2021, our client’s positions have increased to the following 12 keywords ranking on Page 1 – and outranking their top competitors!
1. best weed strains in scarborough: #1 (with featured snippet!)
2. * their brand name *: #1 on local map
3. where to buy hash: #1 on local map
4. best indica strains in scarborough: #1
5. weed strains in scarborough: #4 (outranks all competitors)
6. best sativa strains in scarborough: #4 (outranks all competitors)
7. where to buy hash in scarborough: #4 (outranks all!)
8. where to buy hash in toronto: #4 (outranks all!)
9. where to buy edibles online in scarborough: #4 (outranks all competitors)
10. buy legal weed in scarborough: #7 (outranks all competitors)
11. where to buy legal weed in scarborough: #7 (outranks all competitors)
12. buy legal weed toronto: #11 (outranks all competitors)
We Can Help You Get An Edge Over The Competition In Your Geo Area!
As you can see from the marijuana dispensary SEO strategy and case study above, SEO is a process – a process that works!
If you own a retail cannabis dispensary, a local SEO strategy, implemented by a dispensary SEO company that knows what they are doing, should be on the top of your list of marketing tactics.
Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation or email us to request a quote for a customized local SEO and content marketing strategy for your retail marijuana dispensary.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!
