Episode 63: Mastering SEO and Brand Reputation in Cannabis

Emily Wells  00:11

Hey there cannabis marketing community. I’m Emily Wells the Membership Manager here at Cannabis Marketing Association, and you’re tuned in to another exciting episode of Party like a marketer. Today’s guest is Stella Morrison. Stella is the founder and content strategist at CannaContent, an award winning cannabis centric digital marketing firm established in 2017 she is an award winning former journalist and content marketing expert with more than 15 years of editorial experience. Her specialties are in content writing for SEO organic search strategy, editorial and content strategy, brand, voice development and thought leadership development. She received first place recognition from the Content Marketing Institute in 2023 and 2024 for her work in SEO content. She also speaks about and develops and delivers workshops on cannabis marketing for trade shows and conferences across the US. Prior to opening CannaContent, Stella worked in newspaper journalism, where she landed her first staff writing job at 18 years old. Her journalism work earned her first place accolades from the New Jersey Press Association and widespread recognition for local and regional news coverage, particularly during Superstorm Sandy, working with a diverse set of subjects and learning quickly to write about them on an expert level, set the stage for a ruthless pursuit of quality and thoroughness that shapes her content marketing work today, with local journalism’s future uncertain, Stella hung up her press credentials and joined the licensing industry as a Brand Manager on the manufacturing side. In this role, Stella worked closely with multiple internationally recognized brands in consumer electronics, lighting and home products to build and market brand compliant product lines. She also played a role in developing private label brands that are sold in the largest retailers in the US. Stella is proudly from New Jersey and currently splits her time between New Jersey and Cleveland, after spending several years in California and New York City. Stella also owns award winning SEO content writing agency, the Stellastra Effect, and was the 2023/2024 content marketing editor for the American Marketing Association – San Francisco chapter. Stella, thank you so much for being here today. We can’t wait to learn from you.

Lisa Buffo  02:24

Hello. Welcome everybody to today’s episode of Party Like a Marketer, the podcast dedicated to cannabis marketing, public relations and authentic storytelling. I’m your host, Lisa Buffo, and today’s guest is Stella Morrison, the Founder and Content Strategist of CannaContent. Stella, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Stella Morrison  02:44

It’s my pleasure, Lisa, thank you so much for having me today. We’ve been a member of Cannabis Marketing Association pretty much since the beginning, and it’s always a pleasure to come home. So thank you.

Lisa Buffo  02:55

Yes, thank you. I was going to shout you out for your support. You guys at CannaContent have been so supportive of us from the early days, and we’ve I’ve gotten to know you, I’ve gotten to know your team. I’ve gotten to see the work that you do, and you do a lot of really great work for the industry. So I’m excited to talk about it. We’ve had you on our stages at the summit. We’ve learned a lot from your team, personally, ourselves and the members have too. So I’m excited to bring this to the podcast and talk more about content marketing, SEO, and everything you have learned in that space from both inside the cannabis industry and outside. So if you could just start and introduce yourself to the audience, just let them know who you are, what you do. Tell us about CannaContent, and we’ll start there.

Stella Morrison  03:37

Sure. I’m the Founder and Content Strategist here at CannaContent, we opened our agency in 2017, me and my Co-Founder, Adam Uzialko, met in the newsroom. We were both journalists — former journalists now — He was reporting on the cannabis space, and he was getting all these different calls and inquiries from people, asking for help on writing or marketing, whatever it was. At the time, I had just opened my non cannabis agency, the Stellastra Effect, and he called me and just said, Hey, you know, what do I – what should I do with this? What are your recommendations? And by the end of the conversation, it was clear it was a business. He introduced us to our third co founder, Brie Brewer, who’s our Chief Creative Officer, and we hit the ground running.

From there, the goal, really, of opening  in 2017, it was right before Phil Murphy was elected the governor of New Jersey. And I’m a Jersey girl forever and ever. The perceived timeline then was 100 days after election, that adult use was going to be passed. Took a lot longer than that, but we wanted to be ready for it. We wanted to be part of the communities in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania. We really want to grow with the East Coast. So we made a decision to kind of go, you know, open up and grow with the communities here.  work with companies who are based here, and we all the better for it to really know the communities that we we work in. So we specialize in East Coast, we specialize in emerging markets, we specialize in restrictive markets.

We do a lot of work in five core services: SEO and content strategy, which really go together. We try not to do one without the other. Website design and development, social media management and brand design development. So that’s all components that — we’re big believers in foundations and making sure that your foundations are incredibly strong.

And a bit about my own background. So we are, it’s actually probably good to mention we are actually award winning as of this week, just heard that some of our work in the cannabis industry is receiving first place accolades for the content marketing work that we do, from the Content Marketing Institute and NJ ad club and a couple of others. So that’s very exciting to be able to share here, sort of publicly for the first time. This is very, very new news for us.

A bit about my own background. As I mentioned earlier, I come from the world of journalism. Left that world and pretty, pretty early on, when the writing was on the wall. I did my community reporting, got my awards, got out, and then went into the licensing industry, where I worked with some renowned brands from around the world in the consumer electronics space. So I spent a couple of years in the licensing industry, some fascinating, fascinating industry, and then said, I need to go back to writing in some form. This is really where my home is, and what’s it going to be. I opened my first agency in 2015, The Stellastra Effect, specifically to fill a gap in the market that I saw between freelancers who weren’t able to scale and full blown agencies, full blown writing staff, excuse me, and to be able to fill that gap with something scalable without the cost of building out content marketing teams. And that was really the foundation. Really gave me the taste of really understanding what it is to grow with a new sector from the ground up. Because this was 2015, it took, it took some time for folks to realize the importance of content marketing as a standalone strategy [and its relationship to SEO and web design]. It took a little bit, and I was definitely a little early to the game. And that paid off, because we were early to the game in cannabis as well on the East Coast, to be clear, on the east coast, we’re early, but we know how to work with that, right? And I knew from experience how to work with that.

So, you know, it didn’t take long for us to realize that cannabis had, you know, obviously, cannabis had its own needs and, you know, had its own industry sensitivities… So that was sort of the decision to spin this off as a second agency and offer a different set of services aimed at creating those foundations for companies that are going to need them to grow at in what’s basically a quick sand of ever changing circumstances. What’s going to be foundational for you? And that’s going to be who you are as a company. What is your brand? You know? Is your website strong? Are your fundamentals strong? And everything else can be built on and developed from there. So that’s really the, the main purpose for us.

Lisa Buffo  08:19

Okay, that makes sense, and I think you’ve probably answered this, but I was going to just ask, what is your general approach or philosophy around content marketing in and this work, you have a different and interesting and very credible background, having been a journalist and having been on the side where you understand how to report, you understand how to communicate information that is very balanced. What is that reflected in your belief about having a really good foundation is the core of building a business and like, how do you approach someone or a client when you’re first saying, here’s how I think about content marketing. Like, what’s your thought process behind that, or your strategic approach for a better word?

Stella Morrison  09:05

yeah. So there, there’s a couple different layers to this.

So first, we’re big believers in organic growth, because paid and organic are two very different avenues. And the paid is… what we tell people is paid is your pathway to get somewhere quickly; you put up ads and the traffic starts coming in. Organic is your way to get somewhere slowly, but you’re going to be there for a very long time. Because the goal is, no matter what these there’s always shifting circumstances in SEO, and we want to make sure that you’re still appearing on top…, while either complimenting those ad dollars or not putting ad dollars into a strategy altogether.

The organic is important for a few reasons, right? Because it’s people connect with brands whether they realize it or not. Not everybody has to wave a flag about their favorite brand of something. They don’t need to be doing that. But whether they realize it or not, they’re. Is some brand affinity there, and that’s all communicated in the small details that the average person isn’t necessarily, necessarily going to notice. But I think everybody is familiar with the magenta of of T-Mobile or, you know, the orange of Dunkin Donuts, right? Like there it’s, it’s elements like that that really reinforce what you’re trying to do and who you’re trying to be in the universe, and SEO, and specifically content marketing as a part of that is a way to communicate that messaging, right? It’s a way to communicate authority in a subject. It’s a way to showcase both the people and to search engines. Here I am, and I’m the person you should be listening to or with a company that you should be trusting with this information. It’s a way to really communicate with the with the with the audience, without selling to them that there’s an implicit trust here that you can put in us. And to that end, when we’re working with a content marketing strategy, you know, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of different elements to it, but we want to build to that. We want to want to, we really want to build to that. And the second part of this is there’s a big two for one, three for one, deal going on with content marketing. I like to really, I like to position it as double dipping, or triple dipping. I like to position it as you can use this content. And you should be using this content for your social media marketing, for your email marketing, text message marketing in store, right? Can you even put a QR code in store that takes you to a blog? Or we have, we have clients doing this now with our content, and how can we be maximizing value out of this incredibly valuable library that you’re building. It’s not just going to sit and what I like to call marinating on the website. It’s not just going to sit and do that. How else can you extract value out of that? And especially when marketers are budget strapped, I like to look at it as a centering force that you can use to plan everything else, and that’s going to save you time. If you’re time strapped, if you’re the only marketer for the couple of dispensaries, we work with plenty of folks, and they’re the only marketing contact, how do you say, how do we save time? How do we repurpose how do we make this work for you, and stretch that budget dollar as much as possible? So there’s a practical element there. There’s more, there’s a larger brand identity element here. And then there’s the practical SEO component as well, when we look at that. So when you’re dealing with, so there’s, there’s, there’s really, there’s multiple, multiple, multiple factors that go into SEO. It’s not just one or two things that you do and then you’re done and then you like, Have a good day, right? It’s constantly evolving. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing. They’re constantly updating, and we have to keep up with well, what are the search engines expecting? What are what are the search engines doing to consider you an authority on the top edibles in Denver, right? Why are you that person? Or why should you be the best dispensary in Cleveland right like, what does that mean? And what are the what are the signals that the search engines need to really understand that and be able to categorize your website correctly? So what content does is a couple of things. So what content does is, aside from driving that overall editorial strategy that they can then use in all your other marketing, but we’re using it to build up that authority. So our approach is really like a like a slow, you know, without getting too much into secret sauce, I’m a big walk, walk, CRO walk, run person. What can we do to really target the most attentive, the most like, what I like to call low hanging fruit? How can we get to that and then use that to build on that and create more authority. And this can take months. It can take years. It depends on the sector, it depends on where you are, it depends on who your competitors are, but figuring out that puzzle is one of the things that I love most about working in SEO, specifically in content marketing. And this is all aside from all the technical aspects that need to go into SEO, the way that things are coded to make sure search engines understand what you’re doing and can categories you correctly, the way that you’re presented on other websites and other directories, this is, you know, the estimate is just more than 200 factors that go into SEO. That’s the most. That’s the most recent that I’ve heard. Again, it’s an estimate, because a lot of the game is figuring out what Google wants and reverse engineering from that. And you know, what can we do to put, you know, put that back into play? So there’s a lot, there’s a lot that goes into it. And I’m sure I talked for 20 minutes over but that’s really kind of the core of it. Is our bottom line, from a from an importance perspective, is this is good for your brand identity, this is good for your brand reputation, this is good for your SEO, and it’s good for other marketing.

Lisa Buffo  14:49

I love talking to content marketers, because one thing I always say at CMA on this podcast and every place I talk is that my belief and our belief at CMA is that good marketing is really, good storytelling and marketing is just that, like the avenue in the channel specifically. And one of the first questions I get asked by cannabis marketers or businesses is, where’s the best place to market my business and and I always say that’s like eight questions down the line, right? Like we need to understand, what is the story you’re telling? Who are you? Who are you telling it to where do they consume information and really get into all what are you selling? What? What do you need to build trust? Right? Like you need to get into all of that before you pick the channel and how, but content as a whole is the comprehensive way of looking at that and creating a strategy and where and how do you disseminate that information. So I like your crawl, walk, run approach, with starting small and managing expectations around that too, so that you can build something sustainable and and build it over time. And what I want to ask about the follow up to that is we know as a whole cannabis marketers. I mean, the whole reason we even exist is because cannabis marketers have their own unique set of challenges that other marketers and other industries don’t have. Can you speak to what those unique challenges are in cannabis for content and SEO compared to maybe the other industries you’ve worked with?

Stella Morrison  16:11

So one of the most interesting and appealing things about SEO in for the cannabis industry is it’s not beholden to the same restrictions that you see with other channels and that you see with other method, marketing methods and tactics. So there’s really two aspects to this. There’s a regulatory influence approach, and then there’s like, a typical, typical marketing approach, right? So you know, from a from a regulatory approach, you’re not going to see any state regulations that say you can’t optimize your website, right? There are states that have restrictions, very few, but there are ones that have very tight restrictions, like your site has to be behind, like a like a login, right? Like that does exist. It’s very rare, but it exists, but, and that obviously affects SEO, because if people can’t read what you’re saying, what’s the point? But that’s very, very few and far between. What’s more important is that you’re that what you’re using in search marketing is compliant with whatever those those state regulations are. So for example, if you’re an MSO and you have a state where you can’t you have to say medical marijuana in one state, and you have to say cannabis in the other state, or you should say cannabis in the other state. You know, what does that look like for your content? And how do you need to optimize your website that? But you’re delivering the content in a way that’s compliant to those customers, right? So that needs to be taken to account. But that still doesn’t affect the actual, you know, the actual tactic of SEO. It doesn’t mean that that’s off the table, right? If anything, it’s one of the most marketing tactics. That’s the most on the table, right? So the other hand, on the other hand, when you’re you, when you’re writing that content, it does need to be compliant, right? So there has to be you have to make sure you’re not marketing to you have to be more a lot of it is a lot of that is practical. So there’s obviously not targeting people under 21 it’s making sure that your messaging isn’t making any very lavish medical claims, anything like that. There’s a bait that’s really basic. And then there’s also, there’s, there’s more specific than that. So there are states where, for example, if you’re in a medical market, Ohio is a great example, where you actually can’t, if it’s not a listed condition, you can’t talk about it. So that’s, that’s one aspect of that to keep in mind. Then there’s states like New Jersey, where the regulations are still like, kind of open and free flowing. There’s states like New York where you can’t mention how you have to be really careful with medical then you, if you’re an adult, you really can’t, kind of, you can’t go down that road, right? So you have to be careful with how you’re mentioning it. So whatever you’re writing has to still make sure it’s compliant within the state or states that your dispensary is in. But that doesn’t affect the methodology itself, right? There’s nothing against content marketing, but you have to have that age gateway in your website, which, you know, I don’t know how other SEOs feel about this, but like that can slow down traffic. This, any little obstacle you put in front of somebody to get from, you know, home page to add to cart, any, any little obstacle you put in front of them can derail things, but you have to do that right, and that’s just not part of the package. What you have to do. And that’s really good, because human behavior, and this is a big thing that I like, this is a big point that I like to make in cannabis marketing. A lot human behavior doesn’t change just because the regulations tell you that you can’t do something a certain way, right? People are still going to search weed near me, dispensary near me, even if it no matter what happens, and they’re looking for those results online, just like someone’s going to search for a restaurant or a furniture store or grocery store, whatever it is, they’re going to be searching for a dispensary closest to them, and that’s going to pop up, which makes local SEO, which is a discipline in itself, makes that extremely important from from an SEO perspective, and reaching those customers you know. I say this all the time, right? Like, and this is, you know, sort of my, I guess gripe is the right word with, like, cannabis specific, like social channels that let you say whatever you want or whatever. Average person doesn’t know those exist, right? They’re going to Instagram, they’re going on LinkedIn, they’re going on Tiktok. That’s where they’re going, and we need to cater to that. And people are, what are they doing? They’re going to Google. 91% of people estimated, use Google. They’re going to Bing, their search GPT when it comes out. And they’re looking, and their search habits are they’re looking for the dispensary near them, they’re looking for deals, they’re looking for sales, they’re looking for specific products. And you can cater to that within the framework of compliance within your state. There’s no reason why you can’t cater to that, right? It’s content, whether that has to be educational in nature, whether it can be more salesy in nature, that’s going to that’s going to vary from state to state. But the bottom line is, the actual processes of SEO and content marketing are not off the table for the most part, in almost every state with a legal program.

Lisa Buffo  21:05

Yeah, that’s that’s a good part and a good point, and that all makes sense. So and you had mentioned in the basic pillars, brand identity being a big part of that. I like how you mentioned the Dunkin orange and the AT&T magenta. I’m I love Dunkin, and I very much sort affinity with their brand and those colors. And it’s funny you said that, because it’s how you mentioned that people don’t necessarily, I don’t know if you said like they don’t know it or it’s not necessarily conscious, but they or they’re waving that flag, right? But they do feel that way, and they are drawn to those brands and make those choices when it presents itself. So brand in the visual aspects and everything about brand has a big part in this. But I am curious your take on how brand identity impacts SEO performance in the cannabis industry and vice versa, like, how are, how are those things related?

Stella Morrison  21:56

So brand identity work is foundational to everything you’re doing. From a marketing perspective, the analogy I use is, are you going to buy your furniture before you move into your house? Right? You don’t know how many bedrooms you have, you don’t know how big the living room is. And if you buy the couch before you move in, you’re going to find yourself forcing that couch in friend style, moving it down the the stairwell they had millennials, and you’re going to find yourself forcing your way down the stairs with this pivoting and wondering why it doesn’t work, right? And that’s because your fundamentals, how big is the living room, wasn’t answered, right? And that’s the exact same thing with your brand, right? And there’s a lot of elements this that, as I said before, people who aren’t versed in branding or marketing aren’t necessarily thinking about and they might not think it’s important. And I talk to a lot of folks who own cannabis companies who think it’s not important, but and they it takes some convincing for them to understand that this is something that matters, right, that the fact that you use the same color or color palette throughout matters the fact that your logo has standards that need to be applied correctly matters, because, you know, there is, I think it’s very unfortunate that there’s a really prevalent belief among marketers that consumers are dumb and they’re not. They are going to pick up on these cues, and they’re all going to add up, because it’s a visual identity that makes the difference across all mediums, across your website, across your Instagram, wherever you are, people are going to automatically realize that it’s you, right? So there’s when they have no backing as to why you picked a brand, and you can’t communicate why that’s your brand, and you can’t communicate the kind of customers you want to approach. You’re going to be cramming that couch into that living room and wondering why it’s at a weird angle, or part of it is propped up against a wall, and wondering why you can’t sit on it comfortably, right? It’s the exact it’s really the kind of same thing with with the brand and from an SEO perspective, that matters for a few reasons, right? Because first, there’s an element of what’s called branded search, no matter what you’re doing. So there are always going to be people who hear about the Cannabis Marketing Association, and they’re going to Google Cannabis Marketing Association, you’re going to see almost, I would guarantee almost entirely every I can guarantee almost every client we work with, one of their top keywords is always going to be their brands because people heard about them, or they were told about them, or they learned about them somewhere, and they’re Googling to learn more information, right? That’s really powerful, and offers a way for you to establish authority right out the gate, right? Some other some non digital examples of this are like Kleenex for tissues, right? Like You mean a tissue, but you use the word Kleenex, right? The way that in cannabis, the way that the word dog walker is a trademark, but it’s evolving to mean a small joint that you can finish while walking your dog, right? It’s like, literally, it’s evolving. The language is evolving like that, which is fascinating. And that’s a hard power of branding at work, right? And then there’s a soft power where, you know. Patagonia invokes the great outdoors. REI evokes the great outdoors, or Mercedes evokes luxury, right? It’s the same. It’s the same with cannabis, right? Like, are you associated? Are you all about cannabis in New York City? Are you all about high dose edibles? Are you are you all about really quality craft or right? What does that involve, and how does that how do we, how do we push that beyond branded search, right? So this is where, kind of, really, it divides content divides, really, into two ways. There’s a, you know, there’s a brand awareness and enforcement perspective, right? Where people are already looking up your brand, and that’s already that’s huge for marketers, because that’s an indicator that the step one of awareness has already been achieved. You have people hundreds, 1000s, whatever it is, per month, Googling your brand. They already know about you, and you’ve already skipped over that massive educational hurdle that a lot of brands face, is people just need to find out about us, or they learn, and they say, Oh, my God, I didn’t know you were here. And that’s that’s a huge hurt, and seeing those numbers and seeing those numbers grow is an indicator that board’s getting out there and people are learning about you. And then there’s the other side of it, which is problem, solution oriented, right? And this is where a lot of content marketing comes into play. I have a specific problem that I want to solve, and I’m going to Google different phrases or different things to figure out how to solve that problem. I want an energizing strain. I’m going to Google energizing strains. I need a software that does this. I’m going to Google, you know, software that does x, right? I’m going to be looking up those things and getting really specific. And that can get really specific, that can get very broad. And there’s a whole strategy to that that not enough time this conversation to talk about, even though I alluded to it earlier. Um, you know, that’s and that’s something you know. So your brand identity really becomes super important from that, from that perspective, because branded search is a really, it’s basically a free money, right? It’s an automatic way to bring customers in that already know about you, and you really skip that major education step. And another really important element of this is you can’t SEO your way out of a bad reputation, right? If there’s a scandal, if you have one star review saying your customer service sucks, people are going to see that, and they’re just going to start deflecting, right? So I’m a big I’m a big believer in PR, in cannabis, for this reason, because it helps with that brand reputation, and it’s really hard to come back from that, right? Because, like, practically speaking, let’s say there is a controversy, right people, it’s maybe comes up in the news, right? And those articles come up, and those are very large websites, they’re very old, they have a lot of authority, and that could risk somebody clicking on that instead of your own website, right? So you know what? When you’re the most recent statistics I was looking at this morning, I see around 84% of people look for reviews for a company before, before they make a decision to purchase. And that’s that’s a lot, and that’s a lot. There’s a lot riding on that. That’s why reviews on your Google Business profile are so important, that’s why customer testimonials are so important. That’s why case studies are so important. Depending on you know your industry and who you’re trying to reach, we want folks who are conducting on our own research to find you and not the people who are talking bad about you, right? So there’s a there’s a if you have a bad brand reputation, you can’t really have good SEO and try to bring somebody around because you’re coming up first on Google. Because bottom line is, if you have a bad product or an undesirable product, if you have a bad name, if you have an unpleasant that’s just known for unpleasant experiences, SEO is not going to solve that. That’s a fundamental issue. Good SEO doesn’t solve that. Good SEO enforces the good right. Good SEO enforces what you’re already putting out there and enforces and reaffirms to customers that you’re the right choice for them after they’ve kind of gone through this process, and in an industry like SEO that’s constantly in flux that is consistently changing. Foundations, like a brand, are one of the only constants that you can lean back on, right if there is a change, who am I? Who are we reaching? What are my goals? And then you work backward from there, and you can work outward from there when you know who you are at your core, your foundations aren’t shaky. That couch fits in the living room, and you don’t have to worry about down the line, because who knows what’s going to happen down the line in five years, you could have 10 stores in five years. You can add 20 SKUs to your product line. You don’t know what that looks like. And if you get to that point where now you have to re right now, you’re at the point where you have to reinforce that brand reputation, where you’re at a point where you have to choose between T-Mobile and Verizon, because that that there’s a there’s a misconception that that doesn’t exist in cannabis, and it does. There’re, there’re brands that I will call national, even if they’re only in like five, six states. To me, that’s national, and it’s only going to get stronger, right? How many states is one of brands in? Or why? Old or, you know, Brune, or, you know, Heavy Hitters, right? Like, think about, like, any of these brands that are in multiple states, and that’s, that’s, that’s a national reputation, that’s a larger audience, and there’s more and that’s something that they might not have been the case five years ago or two years ago, depending on how fast your your market is moving, how fast you’re moving, getting this essentially correct now is going to save you a lot of headache down the line.

Lisa Buffo  30:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that proactive planning is a big deal, and it helps on the at least in cannabis. What I always find so interesting about this industry is that everything is B2B and B2C. So brands have to sell not only to their customer, but they have to sell to retailers, and get retailers to want to carry them on their shelves. And so if you have there’s no like direct to consumer in this industry, the way that that word is sort of typically used. So the better your brand identity and reputation is, the more likely you’re probably going to be carried in these retail stores, which allows you to actually expand and get that national footprint faster, if that’s your goal. But it all to your point requires having really strong foundations in the beginning. And to your point about PR, I agree with you, and also think it’s so important in cannabis, it’s also one of the marketing channels that is protected by free speech and the First Amendment, so it there’s much more freedom to speak to the press how you want, in a way you can’t communicate, perhaps in, you know, a marketing medium, so to speak. And I just think strong like strong brands, withstand changes over time. Stronger, whether it’s economic, whether it’s the industry, whether it’s crisis like the the stronger the brand is, in theory, there is more trust, and the more trust there is, the more likely you’re going to be able to survive all the things that happen over time and as you grow and scale business. So all of that is a good point. So we’ve talked SEO and content strategy. We have talked brand a bit. You talked about a bit about the website, and, you know, kind of the technical aspect as well. This is something I have personally had to learn a lot about since I started CMA, over the last five years. You know, I went into this, my personal skill set is really around brand strategy, content, a lot of the things you’ve said, but I’ve, I have learned a lot about the technical aspects of managing a website, and what that means, particularly when you have your customers rely on it, whether it’s for ordering ahead if you’re a brand or retailer, or it’s for getting information, or it’s for, you know, for us, accessing member benefits. So can you share some of those best practices for optimizing websites for search engines?

Stella Morrison  32:41

Yep, yep. So optimization, involvement, mix of the user experience and what’s going on in the background, right? So at the end of the day, you want your website to come up first and not somebody else’s. You don’t want a competitor or a third party to get that because then you’re not you’re not getting your data. You don’t know how people are finding out. The only way to the best way to be able to get that information is if everyone is coming to your website, as opposed to another, another, another, another, another, another party, right? So when you’re dealing with optimization… I believe there’s a core for ways that this is structured. It’s a good user experience. It’s site speed, it’s good content, and it’s accessibility. So to go through that a good user experience — is your site easy to navigate? Do people understand what you’re selling, what you’re talking about? Do they know how to sign up for a demo or buy a product or check out? How easy and seamless do you make that process? And that really overlaps with the other three things I mentioned, right? So site speed is a factor for Google. And we’re talking even, even site speed is a factor for Google and other search engines. And even if you shave milliseconds off the loading time, it can make a difference. So that’s something you want to look at, and that’s part of a user experience too. How many times have you gone to a website and has it loaded in 10 seconds and you said, forget it, and you X out, right? You just lost a customer. If that happened, if you and this is something I like to tell people a lot, if you exhibit a certain behavior, it’s likely that your customers do it too. If you read a bad review and say, I don’t know if I want to go there, your customers are doing it too. If you go to a website and you can’t find the contact button, you’re not going to contact that person because you can’t find that essential information. So there’s a there’s a site building element here where it’s about a lot of it is meeting user expectations, making sure they’re delivered to the information that they need first. So for dispensary, that’s finding the menu, most essentially, for a B2B business, it might be get a demo for a software or speak with an expert for a consultant. Uh, there’s other ways you can do that, and you want to make sure you’re driving people as part of that user experience as quickly as possible to the end result. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about conversions, right? It’s all about are the people coming to your website taking the action that you want them to take? That can mean a lot of different things. That can be signing up for an email, that could be downloading a case study, that could be buying product, or reserving their, you know, reserving, reserving to pick up in store. It could be a lot of different ways, right? So that all really plays into that, and good contents a part of that as well. If something is hard to understand, if it’s not engaging, if it’s if it’s difficult to read, or it’s too heavy for them, or it’s just, it’s just too much and doesn’t really make sense or doesn’t align, that can throw people off. And then I always thought to touch in accessibility, because a it’s really important that we don’t forget about we cannot forget about folks who accessibility is important, because every person, no matter their abilities, should have the ability to go through and navigate your website, just like anybody else. And this can be a physical meaning, like mouse changes. This could be colors for folks who are sensitive to seizures. This could be audio and video audio and visual enhancements for folks who have visual or audio problems, and a lot of this is actually connected to SEO, because aside from that being contributing to the experience accessibility and SEO has a lot of overlap so and the bottom line is, there’s also a compliance issue with accessible websites as well. No accessibility could land some little hot water. But it’s also really important, especially if you’re in a medical community, you might have patients that have, you know, physical issues or conditions that make it difficult for them to use a mouse or type. And how are you serving those customers?

So coming back around to the importance of brand identity, right? I know I ranted about brand identity for 10 minutes. But all of these elements affect SEO in some way. There’s, there’s a technical component to accessibility, whether that’s something called all image attributes or all image tags, where it’s like a short description of the image. That way, it’s not just it’s for folks who use like image readers to tell them what the image is, and also gives Google information about that image on your website. So that image optimization is important. For that reason, there’s a lot of overlap like this, and as I mentioned earlier, the estimate is that there’s more than 200 factors that really influence how a site comes up and how site appears. It’s going to depend on literally, where you’re physically located, the time of day that you’re searching. Search is extremely sophisticated and is only getting smarter, so all those little details make a difference, and it’s something that we want to we want to make sure that we’re hitting all of those points and doing things as best as possible. But when I talk to somebody, I think it really boils down to those four essentials, which is a user experience, and that’s really formulated by site, speed, good content and accessibility,

Lisa Buffo  38:04

I like literally wrote those down because that you just summed it up so well. So we’ll make sure we summarize that in the show notes, because I they all build on each other. And I actually want to ask a follow up question on accessibility, because you did mention it as a compliance issue. Can you just speak more to that? Like, it’s not just when, usually when I talk about compliance on this podcast, or in general, it’s cannabis industry specific. But my understanding is that this accessibility question concept is, is beyond that, right? It’s like, Is this in the ADA? Like, can you just speak to the tie between accessibility and compliance and where that’s coming from, or that thought process to help websites who are listening better understand where to get more information on it.

Stella Morrison  38:50

The ADA does have requirements for accessibility for websites, for businesses that are open to the public, so that it does cover retail establishments like dispensaries, they are affected by this. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s also good from a branding perspective, that you’re making it clear that cannabis is for everybody, and everybody includes folks with disabilities, so and there’s also certain states and certain local governments that have their own requirements. I can’t speak to those specifically, but that could affect, you know, how that’s done, right? So there might be, it might not be geographically limited to websites that are for companies that are based in a certain state. It has to do with who can access and realistically access that website, and in the day and age of the internet, that’s everybody anywhere, right? So there are some, even some global compliance standards that I’m not specifically clear on if they applied to cannabis because of federal restrictions in the international status of cannabis, but there’s, it’s definitely something to keep in mind, because this could, this could impact you on a state level or a local level. So I would recommend, and. Anybody who’s curious about this definitely speaks with marketing experts or their or their attorneys to see what kind of obligations they have to the public.

Lisa Buffo  40:09

Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. We always suggest that marketers have very strong relationships and a lot of communication with their compliance experts and attorneys, because in this space, there is way more overlap with compliance and marketing and communications than so many other industries and spaces. So I appreciate you clarifying Absolutely. So with that, so is there anything you haven’t talked about or anything you want to mention before we wrap up?

Stella Morrison  40:37

SEO is not a one and done, and it’s also not one size fits all. It’s really important to understand that it is an ongoing process, because not only do the algorithms change and do industry standards change and best practices change, but things can break. Right? Websites are not wind up and let them go. Websites are complicated and there’s a lot of elements, and if one of them goes wrong, that can start a chain reaction that affects everything else. So it is vitally important that we don’t just do SEO for three months and let things go on by the wayside. That’s just not how it works. It needs consistent monitoring, it needs consistent optimization, and you need constant revisiting, right? And we have infrastructures in place that make sure that websites are as up to date as possible at all times. And that’s something that we really pride ourselves on, is making sure that all touch points and all pieces of content are always going to be relevant for the client, and that’s something for the customer.

When it comes to one size fits all, you might see a certain set of standards applied across the board to every client, and assume that strategy is always going to work. But in reality, that’s not always the case. There are going to be some situations where you’re going to need some certain services. There are going to be situations where you don’t need something…  That’s why everything that we do is custom, because we want to make sure that what you’re getting is actually reflecting the reality on the ground, right? Because the content and the SEO work that you’re going to be putting into the site, the content you’re going to be producing is going to depend on a lot of factors. It’s going to depend on your audience and who you’re targeting. It’s going to depend on where you are right. Are you in a location that only has two dispensaries in a 50 mile radius, or they’re three on your block. And that’s going to make a huge difference on how we try to work with the system and try to get you to the top of search results as quickly as possible and as effectively as possible. And competitions element is that as well. Are they, even if there are three other dispensers on your block, how’s their marketing doing? Right? Are they putting messaging out there? Are they really on top of reviews on Google business profile and replying back? And while you don’t have that granular insight into your competitors, you can get a general idea from what you’re seeing out there, right? So, you know, we work with dispensaries that they’re the only one at a 20 mile radius, and then we work with some where there’s five others in town, and their strategies look radically different because we have to take different things into a consideration. So I really encourage people to when they’re talking to an SEO agency, you know, if they’re not explaining why they’re choosing a certain strategy as questions, and if the answers aren’t thorough, there’s a signal. And if you are, if you’re thinking when you’re thinking about your budget, and you’re thinking, Oh, well, just do this for a couple months and we’ll be fine. I don’t need to do this anymore. Think about what a retainer budget looks like for a year or two years, because if something goes awry on your site and nobody’s there to flag it, no one’s there to fix it, you might see your site start tanking, and you might not know why that’s happening. And there’s, again, so many factors that go into SEO that could be, that could be a technical element where something is broken. It could be the contents not serving the client. It could be there’s something wrong with the user interface. It could be site speed, it could be all these other issues. And if you’re not going to be that person who’s sitting there and diagnosing that, you’re missing out on people who are actively googling your brands and actively looking to buy from you to go back to branded search, and you’re missing out on the acquisition, that you’re missing out on potential new customer acquisition as well. So make sure you’re planning for the long term, both in your spend and your strategy and who you want to be talking to, and what where do you want your dispensary, your brand, your company, to be six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, because the SEO is going to play, play into that, right? I’ll give you an example talking to a client where they’re very, very, very packed with leads right now, and they’re just like, we don’t want to do anything because we’re we just can’t handle the leads we’re getting right now, and we need to stop because we don’t have the time for them. Well, that’s going to change in six months. Right? What happens when they need new leads in six months, or they need new leads in a year? We’re going to be starting from square one if we start in six months, right? So if we start now and at least keep awareness up and maybe not flag the people to contact us for consultation, we just sort of keep things going, they’re going to be in a much better and much stronger position six months from an hour, a year from now than they would be starting from the very beginning. So I would really, really stress to people the importance of thinking long term and plan for that in your budget, and plan for that in your strategy. Thank you, Stella. I really appreciate your time and all that good information and insight I know that’s really going to help our audience. And do you have any contact information you want to share website, social, any email, any way folks could get a hold of you?  So our website is, can a content.co ceo.com so we’re kind of content.co and you can find me on LinkedIn. Linkedin.com/in/stellamorrison, you can find me on LinkedIn. That’s the best way to find me rambling more about SEO and content. I do it a lot.

Lisa Buffo  46:04

Thank you so much, Stella. I appreciate your time. Absolutely.

Stella Morrison  46:07

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Lisa, and I really appreciate you having me on.

Lisa Buffo  46:11

Thank you everybody for tuning in. Please subscribe to this podcast. We’re also on YouTube, where you can see the video version. And if you’d like to connect with the CMA community, please visit us at the cannabismarketingassociation.com, or on social media@cannamarketing. You can also sign up for our newsletter on our website to stay up to date with new episodes, tools, insight, blog posts and more from the CMA community, and hear from our members. And if you’re interested in learning more about membership or becoming a guest on the show, please reach out to our team at membership, at marketing cannabis.org, see you next week.