Best Practices For Cannabis Website Design
A cannabis business website needs unique functionality to create a good user experience. It should also portray the cannabis dispensary inventory and create a seamless online ordering experience.
Here are some of the key points to help you achieve these goals for your website design.
Focus On User-Friendly Web Design
Websites are for the benefit of users and the design needs to show this. Your website should be user-friendly to ensure visitors have a positive experience, which will keep customers interested in your brand and product. The website should flow well and take users on a journey as soon as they enter the site.
Here are some tips for user-friendly dispensary website design:
- Ensure all products are categorized to show consumers what they are looking for.
- Create an online version of your shop that is open 24/7 for people to browse at any time.
- Pair each product with a clear image of the product.
- Avoid using generic stock images as customers want to see what they will be buying.
- Have an easy-to-navigate layout. This is important for visitors to have a good experience on your website.
In addition to good website design, you also need to ensure mobile friendliness. Mobile commerce is expected to grow from 3.5% in 2018 to 10.4% in 2025. This means many customers are likely to use their phones to interact with your cannabis brand and buy your products.
Ensuring that your website is designed optimally for mobile devices will likely lead to an increase in sales. Mobile-friendly websites are key to creating user-friendly platforms for customers to enjoy. Google will also favour your website if it is optimized for mobile over websites that aren’t.
Reflect Your Branding
Your cannabis dispensary website should portray your brand in its best light. Your website and branding should be a reflection of your values, mission, and who you are as a company. The design, graphics, and logo, all need to be appealing to form connections with your target audience and boost brand recognition.
This connection is key to fostering meaningful relationships with your customers by:
- Finding repeat customers
- Creating natural referrals from satisfied customers
- Establishing a more robust online presence as customers share your brand messages online
This will lead to more organic visitors to your site through word-of-mouth marketing.
Creating an emotional connection through effective cannabis marketing techniques creates brand awareness. This brand awareness will cause customers to feel certain emotions when seeing elements of your branding. And you want these emotions to be positive, of course.
So, make sure that your cannabis marketing is free from cliches and clickbait adverts. Your brand messaging should be authentic and speak to your target market in a way they will appreciate.
When branding a cannabis website, you should use a skilled designer or agency, like Parachute Design, that understands the regulations of the cannabis industry. This includes displaying age restrictions and crafting appropriate marketing techniques that are in line with current regulations.
Utilize Cannabis SEO To Boost Online Visibility
Always make sure that your website stays up to date with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
An optimized website that includes the latest SEO practices for technical, on-page, and off-page SEO will bring in more visitors. This will happen organically as your website shows up in major search engines such as Google.
The latest SEO practices extend beyond using optimized keywords throughout your content. How your website is built also contributes to SEO. And this is best left to professionals.
Trusted web design teams will:
- Ensure the proper use of SEO to rank on the first page of search engines
- Help you gain organic website traffic when people search for cannabis dispensary websites in your area
- Include location keywords to target consumers within range of your store
- Target customers within delivery range if these services are offered
When building a cannabis dispensary website it is necessary to implement a strong SEO strategy. It is vital seeing as paid advertising is a violation of the cannabis industry regulations as minors may see these adverts.
So, proper cannabis SEO is your key to becoming number one on search engines and improving your web presence.
Create Valuable Content To Drive Traffic
While SEO strategies will land people on your web pages, you need to keep them there. A new website will often struggle with keeping viewers on the site due to a lack of content. Although, some websites focus on high volumes of content, but fall short when the content is not valuable.
During the building stages of your website, you should create content to post when your site is live. This content should be focused on CBD and cannabis along with other products or services you offer.
The content must be relevant to your business. If your content is not related to your company, Google will drop your ranking and customers won’t be interested.
As such, a steady flow of valuable content should be a key factor in your digital marketing efforts.
Quality content is what sets cannabis businesses apart from the rest. This content should:
- Speak directly to your target audience
- Help customers solve problems by giving them useful information
- Include product reviews or information about products you sell
- Include how-to and informational pieces that relate to the cannabis industry
Whenever you create content, you should be asking how it can benefit your customers and potential customers to ensure you provide value.
