Search engine optimization (SEO) gets a lot of attention in cannabis marketing circles. Operators hear “rank higher on Google” and assume that investing in technical SEO alone will get customers in the door. The nuance here is that SEO does not work in a vacuum.
For dispensaries, one of the biggest missed opportunities is Google reviews. Too often treated as a defensive tactic, something you monitor but do not actively manage, reviews are one of the most powerful levers for improving local rankings, driving traffic, and ultimately impacting revenue.
If you want SEO to deliver real ROI, you need to approach it holistically. Reviews are far from just a few stars on a screen. Reviews reflect into how your team operates, how you train budtenders, how you engage repeat customers, and how you show up online and offline.
How Reviews Influence Rankings
Google evaluates business profiles based on three main factors: proximity, relevance, and prominence (sometimes called authority). You cannot control where your storefront is located. Relevance is a black box influenced by everything from backlinks to content updates. However, when we consider prominence, that’s where reviews come in.
Review frequency, recency, and volume all send signals to Google that your business is active, trusted, and worth showing to people searching “dispensary near me.” We’ve seen new dispensaries leapfrog long-established competitors simply by generating a flood of recent reviews. That ranking boost doesn’t last forever, but consistency will keep you competitive. Oh, and if you think fake reviews are a cheat-code to all of this, you have another thing coming. Google is savvy at detecting fake reviews and penalizes businesses for violating its rules and guidelines against them. Save your money, play the long-game, and do it right. Despite what some may say, there’s no short-cut to dominating SEO rankings.
Here’s another piece of the puzzle most of us overlook: keywords inside reviews matter. If customers say you’re the “best dispensary in Burlington,” those words help you rank for that exact phrase. Replies from the business do not have the same effect, but authentic customer language does.
Why Operators Undervalue Reviews
So why do so many dispensaries underestimate reviews? Because they see reviews as reactive. The thinking goes: “If we deliver good service, the reviews will take care of themselves.” That’s only half true.
Treating reviews as an afterthought is like leaving money on the table. Reviews should be part of your standard operating procedures. They should be tied to training, incentives, and customer touchpoints.
Think of reviews as a marketing channel, not just reputation management. There are levers you can pull: QR codes at checkout, budtenders asking directly, loyalty programs that nudge frequent shoppers, automated emails or texts sent after a purchase. Each tactic builds a system for consistently generating authentic reviews.
Reviews as a Reflection of Operations
Here’s where most dispensaries can unlock a ton of value. Reviews don’t exist in isolation from the customer experience. They’re the digital echo of what happens at your register, in your lobby, and in conversations between your staff and your customers.
Take Silver Therapeutics, a dispensary we work with, as an example. They view every customer as a patient, even in recreational markets. That philosophy translates all the way through their team and shows up in the reviews they receive. This goes beyond SEO and is instilled in company culture.
When you start to think of reviews as the outcome of operational excellence, you realize SEO is just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. You cannot optimize your way to more reviews without aligning your business functions around delivering experiences worth talking about.
Common Missteps to Avoid
Not all approaches to reviews are created equal, and a few missteps can seriously undermine your efforts:
- Buying fake reviews: While it might feel like a shortcut to building credibility, Google is cracking down hard and now flags businesses with warning badges if suspicious activity is detected. Once that badge appears, trust evaporates with both potential customers and the search engine itself.
- Treating reviews as separate from SEO: Reviews are not a side project; they are a central part of your SEO strategy. When you treat them as an afterthought, you ignore one of the most powerful signals Google uses to evaluate your business. This disconnect leaves strong ranking opportunities untapped and causes you to miss out on a direct path to building customer trust and long-term growth.
Best Practices That Drive ROI
If you want reviews to pull their weight in your SEO strategy, here are a few proven approaches:
- Automate the ask. Use loyalty or retention platforms like Klaviyo, Alpine IQ or Springbig to send a review request after a visit. This increases the chance of generating five-star reviews. Pro Tip: If you’re more concerned about quality over quantity, send the request after the second or third customer visit. Customers making repeat visits are more likely to leave a positive review.
- Incentivize internally. Reward budtenders whose service consistently earns positive reviews. This reinforces good customer interactions.
- Showcase reviews externally. Feature them on your website, update your schema markup with star ratings, and integrate them into your email marketing. Reviews double as social proof.
- Respond thoughtfully. Replies may not impact SEO directly, but they show customers you care and encourage future engagement. Your reply to a 1-star review is your chance to give your side of the story. Use this as an opportunity to showcase top-notch customer service, and make it count.
Reviews as a Competitive Edge
For cannabis dispensaries, Google search remains the number one driver of new customer acquisition. The keyword “dispensary near me” signals immediate intent: someone nearby is ready to make a purchase. Showing up at that moment is everything.
Strong SEO gets you visibility. Reviews seal the deal. They build credibility, reinforce relevance, and give Google every reason to rank you above the shop down the street. When operators ask me what SEO superpower they are missing, my answer is almost always reviews. They’re low-cost, high-impact, and rooted in the parts of the business you can actually control.
The Future of Reviews
Even as AI reshapes search results and Google experiments with loosening restrictions on cannabis advertising, the fundamentals have not changed. For more than a decade, reviews have influenced local rankings. That is not going away.
As the industry evolves, dispensaries that view reviews as both an SEO tactic and an operational KPI will win. The stores that create a culture of asking, responding, and learning from reviews will rank higher and build stronger businesses.
Also Read: Last Week in Weed: October 7- 14, 2025
SEO Does Not Work in a Vacuum
At CannaPlanners, we manage SEO for more than 150 dispensaries. The dispensaries seeing the best ROI are not the ones obsessing over keywords in isolation. They are the ones weaving SEO into a larger strategy, where reviews, operations, loyalty, and branding all reinforce each other.
Think of SEO as a system. Reviews are one of the most overlooked components of that system, but they may also be the most powerful. Done right, they drive revenue. And in cannabis, where every customer counts, that’s the ROI that matters.
