If your cannabis brand relies on selling wholesale to dispensaries rather than directly to consumers, you need to make sure you’re generating enough demand for your product.
Any brand can get into a dispensary if they have a great-looking, great-quality and unique product. But many struggle to stay in retail stores because their products don’t generate consistent sales. This means that to be successful over the long term, your cannabis brand needs a marketing system that:
- Puts you in front of people who are interested in a product like yours
- Allows you to target people who live near your dispensary partners
Unfortunately, online marketing is rife with roadblocks for cannabis companies.
Issues With Online Marketing
If you distribute to retail stores, online marketing is the best way to reach your target audience. It not only allows you to target those who are interested in your products, but it can also target people located nearby to your partners.
It also allows you to measure brand interest in exact figures (e.g. number of visits to your website, number of people who search your brand name every month) that you can then use as proof when seeking additional retail clients. However, paid ads – the traditional route to growth – are largely off-limits to cannabis brands. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, doesn’t allow cannabis ads of any kind. And neither does Google.
And while you can get ads live with some crafty techniques, they aren’t always worth it from an ROI standpoint. This is why paid media can work best in order to target past website visitors.
SEO: The Magic Bullet or Not?
SEO allows your cannabis brand to rank for search queries that indicate someone is a potential customer: either they’re looking for products like yours or they’re looking for information related to these products.
Traditionally, SEO for consumer brands involves ranking for product-related search terms. But for cannabis brands who only sell through retail stores, ranking for a search term like “cannabis drinks” or “og kush preroll” isn’t necessarily worth the effort. Only a small portion of shoppers searching these terms will be in your geographic area, so the ranking won’t drive that much revenue.
The traditional local SEO approach doesn’t work, either. City-level queries like “dispensary near me” or “dispensary boston ma” will be dominated by businesses with physical stores in the area.
The Microsite Strategy
Since national product-related terms aren’t very lucrative for distribution-only retail brands and physical businesses tend to dominate city-level terms, the solution is to target state-level product terms in the states where you have dispensary partners.
State-level product-related search terms, like “cannabis drinks minnesota,” are a good fit for distribution-only cannabis businesses for three reasons:
- Product-related terms indicate an interest in purchasing products; the people who search these terms intend to make a purchase.
- Compared to national terms, a greater percentage of the people searching these terms will live near one of your dispensary partners, and can therefore buy from your partner, which ends up helping you.
- State-level terms don’t trigger Google’s local search features, making them far easier to rank for than city-level terms.
And the easiest way to rank for these terms is building microsites – hence, the Microsite Strategy.
How the Microsite Strategy Works
The Microsite Strategy involves creating websites with domains that are exact matches for the main state-level keyword you want to rank for. For example, if you sell cannabis drinks in 15 different Michigan dispensaries, you’ll want to rank for the keyword “thc drinks michigan.” Therefore, you’d purchase the domain thcdrinksmichigan[dot]com and build a website on it.
The reason building a microsite works better than simply creating a page on your site is because Google will think the state-level search term you want to rank for is your brand name. And once you rank for the head, state-level term, you’ll have enough authority to build out additional sub-pages that can compete with brick-and-mortar stores for city-specific terms where you have dispensary partners.
Implementing the Microsite Strategy
With an understanding of the basic premise of the Microsite Strategy, let’s dive into how you can implement this for your business:
1. Do Keyword Research
The first step is to figure out which keywords to target with your microsite. You’ll need to find one state-level product-related term and then a list of city-specific terms.
The state-level term will contain the state where your partners are located as well as the main product you sell in these stores. The city-specific terms will be the cities within that state where you have partners, and therefore want to capture and funnel product demand.
Using the example of a company that sells THC drinks in 15 Michigan dispensaries, the head keyword would be “thc drinks michigan.” Then, the city-specific terms might be:
- “Thc drinks ann arbor”
- “Thc drinks lansing”
- “Thc drinks grand rapids”
- “Thc drinks big rapids”
- “Thc drinks detroit”
All together, these keywords may only be searched 500 to 1,000 times each month, but the people searching these terms have a strong intention to buy products like the ones you sell. This traffic will drive demand to your retail partners, which will result in re-orders for your brand.
Additionally, SEO tools tend to underestimate the search volume of product-related terms; there’s more opportunity than meets the eye with these types of keywords.
2. Buy an Exact-Match Domain
Now it’s time to purchase a domain that contains an exact match of your main head keyword. Ideally, the domain is (per its name) a true exact match. So if you want to rank for “thc drinks michigan,” your domain should be “thcdrinksmichigan[dot]com.”
However, close matches can work well, too. In this example, “thcdrinksmi[dot]com” or “michiganthcdrinks[dot]com” are also viable options.
3. Build a Site on Your Domain
With a domain secured, you need to build a small e-commerce website on it (even though you’re not actually going to be selling anything directly). The purpose of this site is to capture traffic, educate consumers about your products and funnel them toward your dispensary partners’ locations.
You’ll want to build the following pages:
- Homepage: Your homepage should introduce people to your company and splash them into different parts of your website, such as your product pages, store locator and about page.
- Product pages: You should have a page for each of your products. These need to include all the information someone would reasonably want when purchasing a product, such as a product image, strain or effect details, product size and strength details, and links to lab tests. However, instead of including an add-to-cart button, your product page will have a button that goes to your store locator page.
- Store locator: This page should include a list of your dispensary partners that carry your products within the state you’re trying to rank the microsite in. Be sure to include names, addresses and phone numbers of each.
- About page: Your about page should briefly tell visitors your story and include information on how your company started and what makes you different.
- Blog: This section will house written content, which you might need to develop in order to build authority and rank your site (see step 5).
4. Build Backlinks
With your microsite built, you’ll need to engage in authority-building activities to help it rank higher in search, faster. The best way to do this is to build backlinks. In addition to linking to your microsite from your main site, you can use the following strategies to build backlinks:
- PR. Using platforms like Source of Sources, Qwoted and SourceBottle, you can respond to journalists and bloggers seeking sources with information they need. If they accept your pitch, you might get a backlink.
- Bloggers. Reaching out to cannabis-focused bloggers and offering something in exchange for a backlink (e.g. a guest post) is an effective strategy.
- Partnerships. Offering something to a company in the cannabis niche that isn’t a direct competitor is another way to get highly-relevant and valuable backlinks.
Ongoing link building takes quite a bit of work, but that won’t be necessary here. If you can land 2-10 high-quality backlinks for your microsite, you’ll be able to rank.
5. Write SEO-Focused Blog Content
While many microsites can rank without this step, investing in high-quality blog content builds topical authority for your microsite. Topical authority is authority on specific topics and Google prefers to rank pages for a topic from websites that are an authority on that topic.
To build topical authority, write 5-20 blog posts covering your product category from various angles. Using the Michigan THC drinks example from above, you might target keywords like:
- THC drinks vs edibles
- How long do THC drinks last
- How long do THC drinks take to kick in
- Do THC drinks get you high
- How many THC drinks can you have per day
While you don’t have to write blog content if you’re just starting out, it’s definitely an added plus in helping to rank your site.
Using the Microsite Strategy for Other Cannabis Businesses
The Microsite Strategy was developed as a way to help cannabis brands that don’t sell direct-to-consumer funnel product demand into their dispensary partners. However, this same exact playbook can be adapted for cannabis delivery businesses and hemp e-commerce businesses, as well.
The difference is that you’d be driving users toward making a purchase on your site rather than finding your product at a partner store through a store locator page.
Hemp brands can leverage this strategy to rank for location-specific terms (e.g. “cbd gummies california”) and get more orders from various states instead of trying to rank for general terms such as “cbd gummies,” which are more competitive.
Cannabis delivery businesses can harness this strategy to rank more easily within the areas they serve. Instead of, or in addition to, using their main domain to rank, delivery businesses can buy exact-match city domains that help them funnel a greater amount of the city’s search demand into their service.
Wells Westmoreland is the founder of Aperture, an agency that helps cannabis and hemp brands grow their revenue with SEO. When he’s not helping his clients dominate the cannabis search landscape, he’s reading, playing pick-up basketball, and hanging out with family.
