With mobile search on the rise, prospective customers are looking for businesses like yours online. Make sure your businesses is optimizing it's local search listings to its fullest potential with these 5 tips:
The first step in local search optimization for a dispensary is ensuring you have established a solid foundation from which to begin your outreach. Think of your website as the central hub for all of your other internet marketing activity.
Proper optimization of your website ensures web crawlers will properly identify, categorize and index your online presence. If you haven't already optimized your website, Moz.com provides a number of great resources on on-site optimization and optimizing for local search.
Tip: If you're using WordPress, be sure to check out the Local SEO by Yoast plugin.
Adding your business to the multitude of local search sites is important for driving consistent & verified business signals across the web. When claiming your profile on these websites, be sure your business information (name, address, phone, website, etc) is consistent across all platforms. This is extremely important!
When a user searches locally, Google will display local businesses within a carousel or a list and often exclude common third part directories in favor of Google's local search ecosystem. Because of this, you should consider your Google Business Profile a top priority for optimization.
Google Business: https://www.google.com/business/
Maintaining a positive reputation online with a large number of reviews has been proven to improve rankings at Google. Additionally, 85% of consumers use the Internet for research before making a purchasing decision. (Yelp). With online reviews directly attributing to your sales, it is important to engage your customers and build a loyal following online.
Now that we understand positive reviews are vital to your business, focus on quality, quantity and velocity (how frequently reviews are posted). Consider asking each customer to leave a review, or better yet, include a card with each purchase, asking for reviews on your social media channels.
Responding to your dispensary's reviews (both good and bad) shows potential customers you are responsive and care about their experience.
Bad reviews do happen, and when they do, take a step back and cool off! Respond positively to criticism, apologize for any misdoings and invite the customer back for another try. After all, the world is watching!
Building real, meaningful relationships will benefit your business in customer referrals, but also with powerful connections across the web.
Once you've established these relationships, encourage quality, real links to your business website. This will help establish link authority to your website, thus improving your search and local listing rankings.
Keep in mind, quality far exceeds quantity in terms of links. Avoid spammy, low quality links that may damage your link profile.
While most businesses have a Facebook and Twitter profile these days, whether or not they are leveraging them properly to interact with customers is another story. How do you know what type of content to post? Or how to attract new followers?
In simplest terms, your social media campaign is a worldwide, public conversation with your customers. Build brand loyalty and turn your community of followers into brand ambassadors.
Post engaging content, whether that be in the form of local events or activism, daily specials or plain old trivia. Finding out what interests your customers online will ensure future interactions with your business, both online and offline.