The harsh reality of using Dutchie and Buddi is their menus go against the fundamentals of SEO. It causes your store to have visibility and ranking problems.
This means the thousands of cannabis customers searching for specific cannabis products, categories, and brands every month can’t find your store.
It leads to losing customers and ultimately a loss in revenue. In this article, we’ll go over the importance of ranking for your store along with the impact Dutchie and Buddi menus are costing you.
Let’s get started.
Why it’s important to rank online for your menu
Your store menu can act as a tool to help your store rank for cannabis keywords. Each month there are thousands of visitors searching for specific cannabis products, categories, and brands.
However, by using Dutchie or Buddi you are not ranking for these keywords that are on your store menu.
Let’s take a closer look.
Cannabis Products
Let’s consider this scenario: you’re the proud owner of an online cannabis store, offering a wide variety of high-quality products to your valued customers. Among your products, you have a popular strain known as “Pink Kush.”
It’s the type of product that receives thousands of monthly searches from cannabis customers actively seeking it out. However, there’s a problem.
Despite the demand for Pink Kush and your store’s commitment to providing products, you find yourself unable to rank for the relevant keywords associated with this strain.
The reason behind this is the menu practices by Dutchie and Buddi. It creates a challenge for cannabis store owners like yourself.
By relying on platforms that utilize these menu practices, you miss out on many potential customers actively searching for specific strains like Pink Kush. It’s a missed opportunity.
Pink Kush alone attracts an impressive 3,000 monthly searches in Canada and 1,300 monthly searches in the United States. This represents over 3,000 potential customers who could discover and purchase from your store.
Now, take a moment to consider the bigger picture.
If each of your cannabis strains, each with its own dedicated monthly search volume, could potentially attract such a significant number of customers, just think about the massive amount of potential traffic your store could be losing.
It’s not just Pink Kush; another popular strain, OG Kush, which gains 1,700 monthly searches in Canada and 18,000 monthly searches in the United States. This means that your store has the opportunity to capture the attention of over 1,000 potential customers who are specifically interested in this particular strain alone.
It’s crucial to recognize the significance of these numbers. The cannabis industry is a highly competitive market, and the ability to attract customers actively searching for specific strains can make or break the success of your online store.
Cannabis Categories
Again, let’s picture yourself as the owner of a dispensary that prides itself on offering many product categories, including an extensive selection of cannabis pre-rolls.
These pre-rolls have the potential to captivate the attention of cannabis customers actively searching for terms like “prerolls.”
However, you have the issue of not ranking for “pre-rolls” in the search engine. Your dispensary is missing out on opportunities to connect with potential customers who are specifically searching for these sought-after categories.
Each month, over 1,100 searches in Canada and 4,400 in the United States are conducted for the term “pre-rolls” alone. These searches represent potential customers seeking this product.
It’s also not only about pre-rolls; customers also explore various other categories such as edibles, concentrates, and vape pens. Each of these categories boasts its own monthly search volume.
Edibles alone have 7,400 monthly searches in Canada and 81,000 monthly searches in the United States. It’s way too many customers to not worry about ranking for product categories.
When you consider the impact of all your product categories and their monthly search volumes, the potential traffic that your store could be losing becomes too high.
Thousands of cannabis customers searching for pre-rolls, edibles, concentrates, and other categories are unable to discover your store.
Cannabis Brands
Brands hold a significant influence over customer preferences. In the cannabis market, brands have immense popularity, and for a good reason—they invest resources in marketing to establish their unique identities.
When customers have a specific brand in mind, they often look for the brand itself. However, if your dispensary’s menu fails to be discovered online, customers may encounter difficulties when searching for brand-specific terms.
As a result, your dispensary’s visibility is lowered, and these opportunities to attract customers who are ready to purchase products from brands are missed.
Consider the brand “Wana,” known for its exceptional cannabis gummies. This brand alone has an impressive 450 monthly searches in Canada and 2,800 monthly searches in the United States from customers actively seeking out its offerings.
By implementing menu practices that prioritize the visibility and recognition of brands, you can capture the attention of customers actively seeking products from these names.
Another cannabis brand, Redecan, also brings an impressive 1,900 monthly searches in Canada and 150 in the United States. That’s 1,900 potential customers in Canada alone that could be coming to your store.
By enhancing the visibility of brand-specific terms on search engine results pages, you have the potential of attracting a loyal customer base that actively seeks out brands.
The reason why Dutchie is harming your store
Dutchie uses an iFrame—a convenient tool that allows web designers to easily implement store menus. However, iFrames are not common practice among web developers.
They bring along a host of issues that can significantly impact the performance and visibility of your cannabis store.
One major drawback of using iFrames is that they hinder Google’s ability to crawl and index the content within them. This means that all the products, categories, and brands that your store offers will have a hard time gaining visibility and ranking on search engine result pages.
While Google has made changes to address the challenges caused by iFrames, their solutions have often been seen a band-aid rather than a fix to the root problem.
The non-native nature of iFrames prevents Google from fully understanding and evaluating the content within them, leading to bad rankings compared to websites built with native code.
For more information on iFrames, read our article “What is an iFrame?“
The reason why Buddi is harming your store
Buddi uses a script that they call a database for store menus. Just like Dutchie, it isn’t a native integration. While this may provide convenience in terms of menu implementation, it introduces challenges when it comes to search engine optimization.
When a script is used to create a database for store menus, search engines may not be able to understand it.
Search engines use robots or crawlers to visit websites and figure out what they’re about. These robots navigate through the website’s structure, analyzing the information to determine its relevance and ultimately decide how it should be ranked in search results.
However, when a script-based menu is used to create a database for store menus, it can present obstacles for search engines in understanding the content.
Not understanding the content, leads to bad ranking on search engines. These search engines need to read your content.
The solution: Building a custom menu with dedicated pages
Creating a custom menu is an essential part of getting your products, categories and brands found online. Platforms like Dutchie and Buddi are hindering your SEO potential.
It is crucial to maximize every opportunity to reach your customer. Remember a native menu that’s on your website will always rank better than non-native code like iFrames or scripts.
At Breadstack, we specialize in creating custom menus with dedicated pages for your online cannabis store.
Our team of cannabis experts works directly with cannabis brands to ensure your menu receives search visibility and performs well with SEO.
With our custom menus, your products, categories and brands will be easily discovered by potential customers through search engine results.
We optimize each page with relevant keywords and SEO techniques to improve its visibility. This helps drive organic traffic to your online store.
By choosing Breadstack, you gain access to a team experienced in the cannabis industry. We are dedicated to helping your online cannabis store succeed and building trust and loyalty among your customers.
Choose Breadstack to set up a custom menu that enhances your online presence and drives growth for your cannabis brand. Contact us today to get started.
