Local SEO Case StudyCannabis Retail
$90M in Organic Revenue for an Industry-Leading Cannabis Brand
Ascend had the brand recognition and the product; what it didn’t have was an SEO strategy. A digital experience team that recognized the gap brought BCC in to unlock the website’s real potential and capture rising demand across a multi-state footprint.
The Results
Growth That Showed Up Everywhere at Once
The Challenge
A Major Brand With No SEO Strategy
Despite being a leading cannabis brand in a fast-growing industry, Ascend suffered from a problem we see constantly: SEO simply wasn’t prioritized in the overall marketing strategy. The digital experience team recognized the gap and brought BCC in to unlock the website’s true potential across a multi-state footprint spanning New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
“
The BCC team are experts in their field and consistently deliver better than expected results. We could not be happier with their performance. They feel like a part of our internal marketing team and have an exceptional understanding of our business needs and goals.
— Blaire McKenzie, Senior Director, Digital Experience, Ascend
Our Approach
Product-Led, Local, and Built to Drive Revenue
A brand this size couldn’t be fixed with a single initiative; it needed a strategy working at every level at once: the product pages people actually buy from, the local presence every dispensary depends on, and the technical foundation holding it all up.
So instead of picking one lane, we built all three in parallel, then ran the whole thing in sprints tight enough to adjust course before a quarter was wasted on the wrong bet.
1
Started with the local presence, market by market
With dispensaries spread across seven states, the first priority was to ensure every location could be found by optimizing Google Business Profiles and building dedicated landing pages for Google’s Local 3-Pack in every market Ascend served.
2
Layered in product-led SEO on top of that foundation
Once people could find a location, we partnered with several internal teams to redesign the menu architecture and optimized product pages around the highest-volume, most customer-driven keywords, winning maximum share of voice on non-brand product searches.
3
Continuous technical SEO monitoring across a complicated site
With the site split across a third-party menu platform and a WordPress side we control directly, the two didn’t always behave the same way in Google’s eyes. Weekly audits caught crawl and indexing issues before they compounded, and when problems needed vendor-side fixes, we pushed until they got prioritized, keeping the technical foundation solid enough for everything else in the strategy to actually rank.
4
Built a content strategy that turned the blog into a real acquisition channel.
Rather than generic education content, we built pages around the exact terms cannabis-curious searchers use: strain spotlights, product breakdowns, consumption method guides. Between January and June 2026, High Note, Ascend’s blog, grew from 483 to 1,249 ranked keywords and from 47 to 245 page-one placements, counting organic results and AI Overview and People Also Ask spots together (Semrush). As of June 2026, High Note pages were the source Google’s AI Overview cited first for “blue dream strain” (40,500 monthly searches), “spliff” (18,100) and “zoap strain” (9,900), and held the top People Also Ask answer for “chillum” (5,400).
THE EDGE
The Growth Kept Compounding Long After Launch
The clearest proof isn’t a single spike: it’s the pattern repeating. Comparing 2021 to 2022, web traffic didn’t just grow once; every seasonal peak and valley in 2022 landed meaningfully higher than the same point in 2021, month after month. Category-level search told the same story: before the strategy launched, “strain”-related search terms and “gummies”-related search terms both drew next to no traffic.
After launch, both categories broke out and kept climbing, with a +720% increase in clicks on strain-related terms alone between May 2022 and May 2023 (Google Search Console), and gummies-related search traffic following the same pattern of near-zero before, sustained growth after. That momentum carried through the engagement, which ran until April 2026: by December 2023, organic sessions were still climbing, up as much as 73% year-over-year in a single week (Google Analytics).
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