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Opportunity: As the cannabis market matures, consumers are rapidly developing brand and product preferences.
Search volumes for specific products and brands are up. Way up! Search terms are steadily shifting from vague, to specific.
More and more, people know what they want and they know how to find it. Google!
Spoiler alert... chances are, you're missing out on that traffic.
Here's a look at the search volume for the top 10 brands in California over the last three years. Consumers have been incrementally establishing their preference for specific brands and they are searching for them hundreds of thousands of times per month. This is really only a small snapshot of what is happening on a larger scale. If we dug down into long tail search queries and counted all of the variations of ways people search for their favorite cannabis product or brand, the volumes would be in the millions every month, highlighting the importance of native ecommerce so the products and brands on your menu show up in search results.
The Problem: Your ecommerce provider is stealing your traffic, and spreading your customers around.
iFrames or embedded menus are invisible to Google. That means your website will never rank for brands, products and categories. Moreover, Google sees your site as a small, informational website with a high bounce rate. No products, no engagement and no conversions.
Need to get up to speed on what an iFrame is? See our post on the difference between iFrame menus and native ecommerce menus.
You see, iFrames and aggregated marketplaces weren't built for dispensaries.
They were built to use dispensaries to reach end consumers. Much like Amazon, the sellers on these platforms become faceless providers of similar products. And thus, you become interchangeable and largely dependent on the platforms for orders.
If you are using an iFrame embedded menu for ecommerce on your retail dispensary's website, Google will not rank the products and brands on your menu in search results when customers search for products and brands you have in stock.
The Solution: Native ecommerce, powered by Tymber.
What happens when someone searches Google for a specific product or brand in your area? Chances are, Google will show the Brand website first, followed by aggregated marketplace listings. But nested among these results, you will likely find native websites for the most sophisticated cannabis retailers. Most of those sites, are powered by Tymber.
For this specific search query, Tymber's native ecommerce menus are dominating the real estate on the first page of Google while aggregated market places are there to take traffic away from independent retailers. How does this happen? Tymber's native ecommerce platform has been optimized with SEO best practices. Every product is marked up with Schema data - Google's method of understanding everything it wants to know about products on your menu. Below you can see the schema markup information found when Google crawl's a product from one of Tymber's native menus.
Win more traffic, convert more visitors, make more money with Tymber.
Here's the good news. Google is hungry for native content to feed the flood of buying intent searches. For now, the bar is low, and it's relatively easy to beat your competition. Since tenure is a big part of Google's algorithm, it pays to act now while you can solidify your seat at the top.
If you read this post and like what you've heard, you are definitely going to want to read the Tymber case study on the revenue potential with a native ecommerce system versus iFrame's.
