How to Optimize The Content of Your Cannabis Website?
The number of legal cannabis dispensaries in America has been on the rise year after year, thanks in most part to changes in leglislation. As new players emerge in this budding industry, competition has begun heating up. Now in 2022, legal cannabis dispensaries will need to fight for their share of the cannabis pie.
When trying to attract new customers to your dispensary, your personal website will prove to be a powerful marketing tool. Your website influences how new and existing customers see your brand, it allows you to craft a unique brand image, and acts as a means of communication between you and your growing consumerbase.
If you’re wondering how to optimize the content of your website, we have all the information you’ll ever need, right here.
Connecting With Your Customers
First and foremost, your dispensary website must be easy for customers to find and engage with online. With so many options of legal cannabis dispensaries in America, consumers can be fickle. What this means is that if engaging with your brand and your services is inconvenient, they’ll quickly lose patience and go find other legal cannabis dispensaries to do business with.
More than likely, when someone decides to buy cannabis online, the first thing they’ll do is go looking for cannabis dispensaries online. If your website isn’t the very first one they see when they check google, chances are you’ve missed out on a potential customer.
Keeping Customers Informed
The modern customer values information, they want to be well-educated before spending their hard earned money. Your dispensary website should act as an information hub for visitors, and answer any question that might make or break whether or not they do business with your brand. The information you provide potential customers on your dispensary website should be educational, and convincing. Use the opportunity to prove to potential customers why your dispensary is the one they should do business with.
The legal cannabis market is still new, and growing. Many of the people that will come to your dispensary website probably haven’t had cannabis before. These people are going to have tons of questions, and how you answer them can convert them into life-long loyal customers.
Building Your own Dispensary Website Vs. Hiring a Pro?
When deciding to set up your own dispsenary website, you have one of two options. You can either invest in hiring a professional web developer. This may cost more, but you’ll have a website that probably looks nicer and functions better. The more affordable option is to simply do it yourself. Today, there are services like WordPress and Squarespace that can help you create your own dispensary website. Weigh your options and take the time to decide which one is right for you and your business.
Basic Dispensery Website Design Tips
Here are a few simple design tips you should try to follow, either on your own or when working with a professional website builder.
Keep it Simple
Simplicity is the key to providing the potential customers that visit your website a seamless user experience. Your website should be easy to look at, easy to read, and especially easy to navigate. The most important information about your business and the products you offer should be easy to access. Most importantly, it should be easy to buy your products on your website.
Be Mobile-Friendly
Today, people’s primary mode of surfing the internet happens to be on their smartphones. That’s why your dispensary website must be optimized to be mobile friendly. Mobile-friendliness means using clear headers, buttons that fit a smaller screen, small chunks of text, and graphics that are optimized for mobile.
Optimize Your SEO
With so many legal cannabis dispensaries in America vying for attention on the internet, it’s cruicial that you practice the best search engine optimization possible. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a technical skill to master, but one that will prove to be a powerful weapon when competing in the legal cannabis marketplace.
Planning The Content of Your Dispensary Website
When deciding on the content and features your dispensary website should include, try to put yourself into your customers’ shoes. What kind of content would they want from your website? What kind of content would make their user experience better? What kind of content would compel them to buy your products over another business’s? These are all important questions to answer.
Easy Navigation
Your website must be easy to navigate, if you want to maintain a low bounce rate. Your website’s bounce rate is essentially how quickly a visitor on your website loses interest and ‘bounces’ onto a different one.
Variety
Don’t waste time and money filling your website with unnecessary pages that visitors aren’t interested in. Think about what pages are most vital to the user experience on your website, and plan accordingly. For example, you might want a menu page that shows off all your cannabis products and their prices. You might want a location page that directs visitors to your business’s physical location on Google Maps. Consider a Contact Us page to give your visitors another way to engage more closely with your business.
Informative Content
We already talked about how the modern customer likes to stay well-informed. The cannabis industry is still full of so many unknowns. There’s new research and information on the benefits of cannabis being dicovered everyday. As a digital storefront that sells cannabis-related products, you can use your platform to keep your customers educated about cannabis, by featurinng blogs and external articles about cannabis research, the ever-changing legal status of cannabis in America, and the broader cannabis industry.
Adapt and Evolve
The American Cannabis Indsutry is ever-changing. Every year new leglislation opens up more opportunities for cannabis dispsenaries and other cannabis-related businesses. As more suppliers and consumers enter the growing market, your business will have to constantly compete to survive. This can be daunting, but it can also be an excellent opprtunity to try new things, and constantly reinvent your brand to be better than ever.
