Budding Success: A Comprehensive Guide to Boosting Revenue with Top Dispensary Marketing Hacks
In search of the most effective dispensary marketing ideas to increase your page speed, and get your website ranked higher on Google?
In this article, we will go over all of our expert cannabis marketing tips to ensure your page speed is as fast as possible, and your online customers stay happy.
Marketing cannabis is hard enough on its own, with all of the regulations, It’s important to stay on top of the technical side of dispensary marketing as well.
The three Core Web Vitals metrics that Google introduced have a massive impact on SEO for cannabis and dispensary marketing.
Not sure how to approach optimizing your Core Web Vitals?
This article offers 10 dispensary marketing ideas on how to approach page speed optimization and what you can do to address some of the most common issues.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #1: Optimize Page Weight
Reducing page weight is crucial element in optimizing your website’s page speed and your cannabis SEO. It should be viewed as a priority in terms of dispensary marketing ideas.
Page weight is a measure of how much data needs to be downloaded to initiate the loading of your website. The heavier the page, the longer the download will take.
There are a couple of ways to reduce the page weight, but it depends on what is contributing the most to the weight of the page.
Images
Most images you will find are either a PNG or a JPEG file, however, these files can use a lot of space.
However, there are two new formats in WebP and Avif that offer much better compression than the traditional PNG and JPEG files.
Text
Text files are downloaded by your browser each time you open a website. As we mentioned before, the CSS and JavaScript files can have a negative impact on your page’s loading speed.
Thankfully, you can use HTTP compression algorithms like Brotli to compress these text files. That way these text files take less bandwidth and the website can load faster.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #2: Test Your Page Speed
The first thing you should do if you’re curious about your page speed is run a page speed test.
Not only for a better understanding of how fast your website is, but how to improve your cannabis marketing.
This test will provide insights into your page speed, with a variety of metrics. You can click on each of these metrics for a deeper understanding of the factors influencing their values.
The first thing you will find after looking deeper into each metric is the Request Waterfall. This is a list that shows you when each resource is loaded upon opening the page.
They also provide you with a filmstrip view of what your page viewers are seeing as each element of the website loads.
Under the “Web Vitals” tab, you can see data collected from real Chrome users. This is the page speed data that Google takes into account when ranking your website.
It’s important to keep in mind that only the best 75% of data is reported. This means 25% of users will have a worse experience than shown by the data provided.
Lastly, if you scroll down to the bottom, you can find a list of simple recommendations to improve your page load speed.
Your page speed does have an impact on your Dispensary SEO. Here’s a pro dispensary marketing tip: We recommend having a cannabis SEO agency, such as ColaDigital, on your team.
We can ensure your page speed is the quickest it can be, and provide you with the latest dispensary marketing ideas!
This will make your users happy, and even get your website ranked higher, resulting in more traffic.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #3: Use Google Search Console To See How Your Page Speed Is Impacting Your SEO
Google Search Console is one of the free services that Google offers business owners and dispensary marketing & SEO professionals.
It provides insight into search traffic, shows you the pages that rank on Google, and which page’s speeds are impacting your Dispensary’s SEO.
Check out the Core Web Vitals report for an overview of which pages might need to be optimized to improve page speed.
This data is derived from the experience of real Chrome users, providing a tangible view of your page speed.
You can find a more in depth report of the 3 Core Web Vitals in the “Why URLs aren’t good” section.
The 3 Core Web Vitals are:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) issues
- How quickly the page content renders.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) issues
- How stable the page layout is. (Does the content move after it loads?)
- FID (First Input Delay) issues
- How quickly the page can respond to user input.
Find a more in-depth report here.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #4: Watch Your Website Load Frame By Frame
If you want to exhibit professional dispensary marketing, your website has to load in the correct order.
The most challenging aspect of making edits to your page’s load speed is the fact that everything loads in just a couple of seconds.
It’s essential that you slow everything down and watch everything load frame by frame so that you know everything is loading in the most optimal way possible.
Thankfully, Chrome DevTools allows us to weaken our connection using “Network Throttling”.
This tool allows us to watch the content load as slowly as we need to understand the loading process.
It’s simple to activate! Simply,
- Right-click on the website you’d like to throttle.
- Open the “Network” tab on the top right.
- Open the “No throttling” dropdown.
This dropdown will lead to a few options so you can use a variety of speeds.
- Fast 3G (recommended) adds 560 milliseconds of latency and reduces bandwidth to 1.44 Mbps.
- Slow 3G adds 2 seconds of request latency and reduces the bandwidth to 400 Kbps.
- Offline shows you no internet connection.
- Custom allows you to input your own network configurations.
Once you have your preferred settings, reload the page and watch it load in slow motion!
Now you can optimize your page speed effectively, and improve your Dispensary SEO!
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #5: Prioritize Your Core Web Vitals Over Your Lighthouse Score
Google’s Lighthouse tool is a free tool that analyzes your website and provides dispensary marketing ideas to improve your page.
The tool is very easy to use, and it does provide quality recommendations to improve your website, however, it has no impact on SEO for cannabis.
Google only looks at the three Core Web Vitals when they are calculating your ranking. As long as your website is doing well across all three metrics, there will be no negative impact on your dispensary SEO.
Lighthouse is a great tool for evaluating your website when there is no actual user data available. However, the true measure of success lies in how the users perceive and interact with your website.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #6: Gain Insight Into Network Request Chains
It’s important to have a rough understanding of network request chains, so that you can ensure the important resources start loading as early as possible.
To do this, you need to reference this with preload hints in the HTML document. These preload hints tell the browser that these resources need to load with priority, before the browser starts to render the website.
Dispensary Marketing Tip #7: Set The Right Priority For Image Loading
Due to the limited bandwidth available on the server it’s vital that you let the browser know which images need to be loaded right away, and which images can wait a couple of seconds before loading.
It’s crucial that you divide all the images on your website between the hero images, and the smaller, less important images.
Browsers only see the HTML and only realize which images are important after all of the content is loaded.
You can use priority hints to provide the browser with the necessary information. Simply add the fetch priority attribute to the HTML inside of the picture tag.
If you wanted to give an image high priority, the HTML would look something like this:
img src=”image.jpg” fetchpriority=”high”
On the other hand, if you wanted to deprioritize an image, you can tell images to load “lazy”.
Loading lazy means the images won’t start loading until they are about to be viewed, letting your website run much more smoothly.
That HTML would look something like this:
img src=”icon.png” loading=”lazy”
With these methods you can make sure that all of the necessary content loads as fast as possible!
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #8: Integrate Server-Side Rendering For Single-Page Apps
Single-page applications are websites generated by JavaScript code within the browser.
Single-page applications allow users to witness real-time updates without the necessity of waiting for the entire page to refresh.
Server-side rendering (SSR) tackles the performance and search engine optimization concerns associated with single-page JavaScript applications.
Server-side rendering generates a static HTML markup so the browser quickly gets a fully rendered HTML page.
Since the browser doesn’t have to load the HTML (as it’s already loaded), your website will display much quicker.
The browser does still have to process the JavaScript file so it will take a little bit of time before users can interact with the website.
This approach ensures that the page content renders very quickly, before smoothly transitioning to a client-side application.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #9: Optimize Render-Blocking Resources
Render-blocking resources are files typically found in CSS and JavaScript files.
They take priority over your content which makes the website load slower. This has a negative impact on the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) score.
Obviously, this is something we will want to avoid. Here are a couple of ways that you can optimize these render-blocking resources.
Improve Server Response Time
Loading the initial HTML document is the first step for loading a website. The Time to First Byte (TTFB) metric measures how quickly your web server responds to a request for this resource.
Reduce The Number Of Render-Blocking Requests
Optimizing your website’s loading speed is achieved by minimizing the rendering-blocking resources. If a file doesn’t play a crucial role in initiating content rendering, it shouldn’t hinder the rendering process.
For instance, employing the defer and async keywords in the script tag informs the browser that a JavaScript file can load without impeding the initial rendering of the page.
To minimize the duration of rendering blockage, it’s advisable to reduce the size of files that impede rendering, consequently expediting the downloading process.
Accelerating the requests can be achieved by loading these resources from the same website domain as the HTML document, eliminating the need for extra web server connections.
At ColaDigital, we understand that this may be too technical for some dispensary owners.
We are an expert cannabis SEO agency that would be more than happy to take care of everything for you, and offer some dispensary marketing ideas and tricks along the way!
Click here to see how we’ve helped market cannabis for other businesses.
Dispensary Marketing Ideas Tip #10: Continuously Monitor Your Page Speed
In conclusion, there are quite a few ways to improve your page speed, and all of them should be used.
The page speed has a big impact on your cannabis SEO. The biggest dispensary marketing tip we could give you is to continuously monitor your page speed.
Keeping in mind that Google’s Core Web Vitals are collected over a 28-day period, you need to think about how often you are testing your page’s speed.
We recommend that you test your website’s speed every 14 days, at the very least.
This ensures you’re on top of all the potential errors on your website before they have a negative impact on your rankings.
We understand that some of these dispensary marketing ideas can be overwhelming. As we mentioned earlier, we recommend hiring a cannabis SEO agency to handle this for you if you aren’t up to the task.
It’s important to keep an eye on your website’s page speed and stay up to date on the latest dispensary marketing ideas.
Conclusion: Use These Dispensary Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business!
This comprehensive guide has delved into the realm of dispensary marketing and practical dispensary marketing ideas, focusing on optimizing page speed and enhancing your online presence through effective cannabis SEO strategies.
As we’ve explored in he 10 dispensary marketing tips, it’s evident that the intersection of technology and user experience plays a pivotal role in elevating your cannabis business.
From optimizing page weight to prioritizing Core Web Vitals, each tip contributes to a faster, more user-friendly website that not only keeps your customers satisfied but also positively impacts your dispensary’s SEO.
Understanding the importance of page speed in the context of Google’s Core Web Vitals is key.
Regularly testing and monitoring your website’s performance, as suggested in dispensary marketing tip #10, ensures you stay ahead of potential issues that could impact your rankings.
This proactive approach aligns with the ever-changing landscape of search engine algorithms, emphasizing the need for continuous improvement.
Utilizing tools like Google Search Console and Chrome DevTools, as highlighted in dispensary marketing tips #3 and #4, empowers you to gain valuable insights into how your page speed directly influences your SEO.
By staying informed about LCP, CLS, and FID metrics, you can make informed decisions to enhance the user experience, driving higher traffic and ultimately increasing revenue.
The emphasis on technical aspects such as server-side rendering (dispensary marketing tip #8) and optimizing render-blocking resources (dispensary marketing tip #9) can’t be overstated.
These advanced strategies, while technical, are integral for maintaining a seamless online presence, ensuring your website not only loads quickly but also offers an engaging and interactive experience for users.
Remember, your dispensary’s success is not only about selling products but also about creating an online environment that reflects professionalism, reliability, and efficiency.
Employing these dispensary marketing tips can be challenging, but with the right expertise, like that provided by a specialized cannabis SEO agency, such as ColaDigital, you can navigate the complexities effortlessly.
In the ever-expanding cannabis market, where online visibility is a key driver of success, implementing these dispensary marketing tips will undoubtedly position your business for high-performance growth.
Stay agile, adapt to industry changes, and let your dispensary thrive in the digital landscape.
Please contact us for a free 30-minute consultation or to request a quote.
