Getting your business to just get noticed online is not easy, let alone having it rank on the first page of SERPs, but doing so for a business as competitive as cannabis and for a local dispensary? Now that’s the real challenge.
That’s why we’re here to help you learn how to find the best Michigan marijuana dispensary SEO expert.
Why Do You Need a Local Michigan SEO Consultant?
A good Michigan SEO expert can be a boon to your local marijuana business and can really take a load off your back. This person can perform an audit of your current SEO strategies and tell you what works and what you’ve been doing wrong this whole time.
They can also fine-tune your current approach to be more effective, perhaps by improving your keyword research, or helping you get better outbound links.
In the end, if you choose wisely (and are patient since SEO takes time), your business will get more online authority and relevant traffic, which will eventually lead to better engagement, conversions and ultimately sales.
But all that is easier said than done and you actually need to first find a good Michigan SEO expert that will help you do this.
So here’s how it’s done.
Where to Look for a Marijuana SEO Consultant?
There are a couple of places where you can look for a local marijuana SEO expert. We recommend checking out all of them and then see if any names or Michigan SEO services appear in two or more of these.
So what are these places?
This is the easiest place to start. Just type in “Michigan SEO expert” and you’ll get a bunch of results.
One warning though. If an SEO company is ranking high on Google, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the best for your type of business (or best at all). It does, however, mean that they are very good at what they do (otherwise they wouldn’t rank high on Google).
So let this be your starting point and from here, you can filter out based on social media groups, online reviews, portfolio and, of course, your budget.
- Online Reviews
Okay, now we’re getting a bit deeper. You should be able to find plenty of online reviews on Google and these will tell you a lot about what other clients think about the Michigan SEO services that you are looking into hiring.
Naturally, you want someone with consistently high reviews, but also be careful that some of these reviews might be fake, so don’t rely only on them.
- Online Directories
Searching for a local Marijuana SEO consultant using Google is a good start, but you might get too wide and too mixed results. What you should do instead is check online directories.
With these, you can narrow the search down locally to by city (for instance Detroit) and by field of expertise (like SEO consultant).
- Word of Mouth
Finally, don’t forget to ask the people you know and trust if they can recommend someone. If they were unhappy with the SEO company’s service, they are unlikely to recommend it to you, whereas if they were, you can probably trust their judgment.
What to Ask Your Michigan SEO Expert?
Finding a good Michigan SEO consultant candidate is just the first step. Before you decide to hire them, you should ask them a few questions, such as:
While this doesn’t have to be a deciding factor, it’s a good idea to know just how long an SEO company or consultant has been in the business. Have they just recently started or have they been in the SEO consultancy business for more than a few years.
That being said, there are plenty of young companies that are actually quite good, so don’t immediately discard them.
This should be your next question, right after “how long have you been in the SEO business?”.
Because, let’s face it, if they’ve been in the business for a few years and can only show that they’ve worked with a couple of clients, something’s not right there. In addition, you want to see what their previous clients think of the SEO services they received. Were they happy? Why are they no longer working together?
It’s very rare to find an SEO company that is experienced in all parts of SEO. Search engine optimization is a very complex field and it consists of several parts. For instance, SEO experts might be good at content writing, others at SEO auditing, others at local SEO and so on.
SEO is not a guessing game and different tools that can help an SEO expert do his job. For instance, keyword research is one of the main tasks they’ll be doing for you and tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, Moz Pro, Screaming Frog, or Majestic are all that you can expect them to use.
But the thing is that most people already know about these tools, so this alone doesn’t prove much. Pay attention if they also mention a more obscure SEO tool like Answer the Public for example, or if they use Google Trends (a lot forget about this). Then you will know if they truly know what they’re talking about.
Not all industries are the same. Someone who is versed in SEO for one industry won’t necessarily do as well in SEO for another.
This is especially true for a marijuana SEO as here the SEO expert needs to also consider the local and state laws and regulations.
And that’s it. With this, you should be able to find the local marijuana SEO consultant that will help your business grow.
