Cities that need local SEO
In Canada, doing granular local SEO for dispensaries requires knowing what kind of city your business is located in and then optimizing for where it is. Canadian dispensaries situated in large cities like Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, and Brampton must optimize for their locations.
The answer to ‘which cities need SEO?’ is — all of them! Well, within reason.
You do not have to be limited to doing Ottawa dispensary local SEO alone. As it turns out, you can do local SEO optimization in more than one city.
A dispensary Brampton locals frequent can optimize to rank as high or even higher than a Toronto dispensary, even with the distance separating them.
How? By using city landing pages/SEO city pages. The idea is to target multiple locations with content optimized for the area. For instance, a dispensary Vancouver residents use could be designed to fit in with the themes of the city, its people, its culture and familiar aspects that are most relevant to the area.
Business owners have to know that this is not as easy as duplicating pages and changing the city names. There are some other augmentations needed.
- On-page optimization — The pages need to be optimized for the areas they target with proper tagging, a meta description specific to the city, keyword research and location used in an H1 heading, featuring the location and top keyword in the URL, and linking with your other relevant pages to offer richer content.
- Offer unique content — Create content unique to the people of each city, so they feel right at home on your site.
- Use trust signals — Trust signals are elements displayed on the page to ensure people perceive its trustworthiness. They can include logos of associations or bodies whose regulations you adhere to or whose approval you have. It helps when you can find some from the place you target.
- Contact information — Where can the people reach your business, where are you located, what is the name, do you have photos, collaborate with or sponsor local programs, have an event coming up soon, and what time do you close or open? Your business has to exhaustively answer all of these questions in your contact information in the local directories, so locals feel how close you are to their city.
The best way to rank in multiple cities is to optimize for each one, adapting the pages to have relevance to each city’s residents.
Why is local SEO important for my cannabis business?
Local SEO is your most significant opportunity to differentiate your business, expose it to more people and stand out in an increasingly crowded eCommerce space. Even if you do not have a website or content with high-quality links, the basics of local SEO tactics alone are enough to ensure that when people near you search for a cannabis outlet, the search results include you.
A business is always on the lookout for more leads, and in the age of internet shopping (with its streamlined shipping and logistics), more traffic is no problem since businesses can scale up. However, before a company can dream big, it has to dream local, depending on the resources and goals in mind.
Local SEO ensures that a local business can build a good reputation with high ratings by serving its local community well and making new customers. None of this happens if they can’t find you, hence applying local SEO’s best practices.
