How an Adult-Use Dispensary Doubled Its Non-Branded Search Clicks

The situation

An adult-use dispensary in a state market where cannabis cannot advertise on Google Ads or Meta. Search was the one channel it could build on its own terms. Most of its search clicks came from people typing the store’s name. Shoppers searching “dispensary near me” or a nearby town, the people who did not know the store yet, mostly landed somewhere else.

What we did

• Location landing pages for the towns its customers drive in from, so the store could rank for searches made outside its own town.
• A 30-post publishing plan built around the questions shoppers search before a first visit.
• Schema markup so search engines read the store, its hours and its location correctly.
• Compliance and accessibility: site content reviewed against the state’s cannabis advertising rules, and accessibility fixes to WCAG 2.2 AA, which also cleaned up the structure search engines crawl.
• Conversion rate optimization on the pages that turn a search visit into a store visit: hours, directions and menu up front.
• Media optimization: every image sized, compressed and served in modern formats so pages load fast on phones.

The results

August through October 2026 compared with the same three months of 2025:

“Dispensary near me” was the store’s second-largest search query from August through October 2026, at 1,420 clicks.

What it shows

Impressions rose 7%. Clicks rose 70%. The store was not showing up in many more searches; it was showing up higher in the ones it already appeared in, and higher positions get clicked. For a business that cannot buy its way onto the page, that is the whole game.

How we measured

Source: Google Search Console for the client’s site, final data, pulled Nov. 10, 2026. “Non-branded” means searches that do not include the business name. Google withholds rare searches from query reports, so non-branded figures are a floor, not a ceiling. We do not name clients or their towns; we can walk a prospective client through the underlying data on a call.