Picture this: you’re hungry and you want to find a good burger place. So, you whip out your phone and search for burger joints in your local area. Now imagine you find two joints, one five minutes away and the other ten.
You open the first website but are met with a basic webpage without any menu options or even reviews. On the other hand, the restaurant ten minutes away does have a menu, plenty of good reviews, and a way to order ahead of arrival.
Which one would you choose?
Yes, a cannabis dispensary is not a restaurant, but that does not mean that it can’t benefit from an online menu and ordering system.
In the above example, if you switch out “burger joint” with “cannabis dispensary,” you will probably end up making the same choice and decide to go to the dispensary further away simply because you know that they have in stock what you want. And for added convenience, you can prepay ahead of time so that you can quickly drop in and out.
Digital menus don’t just help convert; they also help with SEO. Think of the customer journey. Customers don’t search for the name of a dispensary nor do they likely know the name of your specific dispensary.
However, customers do search for products. Someone searching for edibles near them is going to be brought to the most relevant results. If your shop is located close by and you have a digital menu with edibles on it, then the search engine will more likely show your shop over a competitor who does not have a digital menu.
This, in turn, leads to greater traffic, which leads to better rankings in the search engine, and more customers.
To really hit it out of the park, if customers are searching for “edibles near me,” clicking on your site, and then ordering from you, that will communicate to the search engine that what you are offering is fulfilling that search query.
Online ordering also gives dispensaries an easy way to rack up reviews. After all, would you be more likely to leave an online review after a physical visit only or right after purchasing a product online?
Good reviews tell the search engine that what you are offering is “working” and is credible, which will also help boost your ranking.
An online menu and checkout are good for business on their own, but they also help with SEO. Ultimately, the search algorithms aim to deliver the most relevant and useful resource to the searcher. As such, when doing anything SEO related, the searcher’s intent must be understood.
In this case, dispensaries can increase their online presence simply by sharing what the customer is likely to search for. And a digital menu does just that.
When it comes to online ordering, this may seem out of reach for dispensaries, considering the regulations surrounding consumer purchasing in the industry. However, some cannabis-specific POS systems offer debit processing for a cashless and compliant payment method.
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