How NAP Listings Can Enhance Your Cannabis Dispensary Local SEO

What is NAP?

To understand how your cannabis dispensary local NAP can affect your business, we must first define what NAP means. NAP stands for Name-Address-Phone Number. NAP is incredibly important for local SEO because Google and other search engines rely on the NAP information that you present to determine if they should display your dispensary to a person who is searching in that area. Your dispensary's NAP data signals to search engines that your business belongs in a certain neighborhood and that your site's addition as a local result to anyone searching for a product within your industry in that area.

NAP Consistency

Search engines are all about confidence and consistency. Before showing your website to a user, the search engines need to be confident that you will be able to help provide a solution for the user’s search. Ensure that a search engine understands exactly who and where your company is.

Let’s say your actual business name, address and phone number are:

Purple Star MD
2520 Mission Street San Francisco
CA 94110
(415) 550-1515

Your dispensary might have decided to create business listings on Weedmaps, Leafly, and Yelp over the past couple years using slight variations to the NAP. For example:

Purple Star
2520 Mission St. San Francisco
CA 94110
(415) 550-1515

(Wrong Name)

Purple Star Medical Dispensary
2520 Mission St. San Francisco
CA 94110
(415) 550-1515

(Wrong Address)

Purple Star MD
2520 Mission Street San Francisco
CA 94110
(415) 560-1225

(Wrong Phone Number)

Even though all four listings are for the same dispensary and provide very similar information, from the search engines' eyes, they are four separate businesses. Slight variations in your NAP information can be detrimental to your dispensary's local growth and presence online.

You want your NAP information to be 100% consistent across all listing sites that display your dispensary information.

When you are cleaning up your local citations, there are three main types that you should be looking for since these three are the most common types of issues your dispensary might face:

• Duplicates: Duplicate listings on the same directory.
• Mismatches: Listings for your business that have the wrong Business Name, Physical Address, or Phone Number (or just the 1-800 number and no local number).
• Incomplete Citations: It's important that you fill out the profiles to completion once you've claimed them. Add a photo and fill out every field in the profile.

Some sites could potentially house your citation information. In another post, we’ll dive into the steps in finding the sites that have your citation information, but for now, we’ll go over how to fix your NAP information on the most important citation building site: Google My Business.

Google My Business

In order to correct your dispensary's NAP information in Google My Business, you can follow the steps below:
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1. Login to your profile by visiting Google My Business.
2. Once you’re in your profile, you’ll see an edit button which you can click.
3. You’ll be shown a page with all of your dispensary's business information, including the NAP information.

Side Note: If you don’t see any place to put an address, that’s because instead of a business page, you have a brand page. In this case, you would need to open a new Google My Business page which is different than a Brand Page.

4. Once you’ve made your changes, save your edits and they will display within 24-48 hours on the web.

Taking these initial steps to clean up your local citations and make your NAP information consistent is vital for the local success of your dispensary. In order to get a leg up on your local competition, understanding how the search engines see your business and adhering to their rules and practices will help your dispensary succeed farther than you may think.