Grady Moore, Director of SEO for PufCreativ – Interview Series

Given the mountain of never-ending issues cannabis brands face when attempting to advertise on Google and Meta, effective search engine optimization (SEO) can be a true lifeline. Even though most of these companies are fully licensed and compliant within their respective state markets, tech giants continue to restrict them regardless of their legal status. Because these challenges show no sign of near-term reform, crafting the right SEO strategy for a given market remains equal parts art and science.

To better understand what makes an SEO campaign succeed and why it is so vital amid these marketing hurdles, mycannabis.com spoke with Grady Moore, Director of SEO at PufCreativ.

What were the most worthwhile courses and lessons you took as part of the Master of Science degree program in Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics from the University of Maryland? Why do you feel it’s special that universities have entire master’s degree programs dedicated to cannabis subjects?

The courses that stayed with me were the ones focused on the pharmacokinetics and chemistry of cannabis. Learning how the individual compounds actually move through and interact with the human body was pretty eye opening, and it put the therapeutic potential of the plant into a completely different perspective for me. Before that, I understood cannabis the way a lot of people in the industry do, through work experience and listening to others share their experiences. The science coursework replaced a lot of assumptions with evidence. As for why it matters that universities offer full degree programs in this space, it comes down to credibility. Cannabis has been shaped by misinformation and stigma for decades, and until recently there was no formal way for a professional to demonstrate real subject matter expertise. Programs like the one at the University of Maryland give the industry a standard to point to instead of asking people to just take your word for it. That benefits patients, it benefits policy, and it raises the floor for everyone working in the field.

How was being part of Phi Kappa Phi and Rho Chi Honor Society rewarding in the long run? How did it provide an advantage to both your studies and the beginning of your career?

I was invited to join both based on my coursework during my graduate program at Maryland, and I accepted because the recognition meant something to me personally. I would not necessarily say they shaped my career in a direct way, and they are not something that factors into my day to day work. What they did represent was an acknowledgement of the effort and dedication I put into the program and of my commitment to increasing cannabis literacy, which is something I’m pretty passionate about. In a field where most people are self-taught, having an academic institution recognize the work carried value for me.

What were some unique SEO and marketing-related challenges that home improvement and lighting companies like Hubbell Lighting (now Current Lighting Solutions LLC) or Carolina Granite faced? How did you solve those issues?

My role with Hubbell Lighting, which at the time was a publicly traded, Fortune 500 brand prior to its acquisition by a private equity group, was marketing strategy and programs specialist. It was a valuable experience during my early days as an SEO because it taught me how large-scale digital marketing and visibility campaigns actually work when you are operating at that scope and coordinating across that many stakeholders. Carolina Granite sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is a niche, regional, service-based business, so the challenge there was precision rather than reach. I had to get comfortable targeting a specific geography and a specific type of buyer instead of casting a wide net, which was not what I was accustomed to at that point in my career. I am grateful for both opportunities, because neither one could have taught me what the other did.

How did those effective SEO strategies that you implemented help increase sales and the public profile of those companies? Why was search engine optimization so crucial for finding new local business, especially?

Understanding that visibility compounds has been, and will likely remain, a fundamental component of SEO at both the local and national levels. When you fix the technical foundation, make the site easier for a search engine to understand, and put genuinely useful information in front of people who are already looking for what the business sells, you stop competing for attention and start showing up at the moment of intent. That is a core advantage of search over almost every other channel. Nobody is searching Google for granite countertop installation unless countertops are already on their mind. For local businesses the stakes are even higher, because local results are often the entire top of the funnel. Someone making a large purchase is going to search, read reviews, compare a handful of companies, and narrow the list long before anyone picks up a phone. If you are not in that consideration set, you never get the call. You are not losing the sale at the quote stage, you are losing it before the conversation ever starts.

Because of the clients’ involvement in the cannabis industry, how do Google and other popular search engines cause issues for fully licensed cannabis brands? What are the most common issues that PufCreativ’s cannabis clients run into?

I’ll start with the most obvious one….A fully licensed, fully compliant cannabis operator still cannot run paid search the way most brands can. That single restriction reshapes everything, because organic and local end up carrying the entire acquisition engine. From there the issues stack up. Google Business Profile is where a lot of the local funnel lives, and for dispensaries it is a historically fragile asset. Suspensions, category changes, restricted/limited features, and inconsistent NAP data across multi-location operators who opened stores faster than they standardized their listings. We find duplicate or unclaimed listings on a surprising number of accounts, and fixing the profile is often just as high leverage as the things we do on their website. 

On the ecommerce side, none of the standard SEO levers are available to us. No product schema, no merchant listings, no review stars in the results, no Shopping markup. Every rich result a normal retailer takes for granted is off the table in the cannabis space.

The third issue, and the one clients are usually most surprised by, is measurement. Almost every dispensary runs its ecommerce through a third-party menu and it isn’t uncommon for those menus to live on a subdomain or inside an iframe. Unless someone configured cross-domain tracking and referral exclusions correctly on day one, and on nearly every account we inherit nobody did, the session gets handed off and the revenue source is reported in a channel other than Organic. This can result in the client looking at a report that says SEO drove almost nothing, when in reality SEO drove the session and the menu took the credit at checkout.

Subsequently, it isn’t unheard of for ecommerce platforms to change their attribution methodology. We had a client whose ecommerce provider reclassified a whole bucket of Referral revenue into Organic, and overnight the organic revenue line shifted to a trend that looked incredible.. it was not a win, it was a reclassification, and if you put that into a year over year comparison without flagging it you are handing the client a number that is far from accurate.

What are some effective SEO strategies you’ve created or implemented for PufCreativ’s cannabis clients? How did those strategies increase their sales and overall success?

The first thing we do on any new account is reconcile GA4 against Search Console and figure out what is actually being measured, because you cannot build a strategy on a broken baseline. A good example is an account we took over where organic was showing almost no revenue. The issue turned out to be cross-domain tracking with their menu provider, not performance. Once we fixed it, we could see that organic was already responsible for a large percentage of their online orders. The client had been underinvesting in the channel that was already working hardest for them, purely based on inaccurate reporting data from their former provider. Beyond measurement, the work is entity and local. Proper Store and Local Business markup, real areas-served coverage, tightening up every Business Profile across the footprint, and educational content that answers what people actually search before they buy. It is slower and it is less flashy than what you can do in a normal retail vertical, and it requires real discipline about what you measure, because we don’t have the ability to earn those quick rich result wins. The thing I always drive home to both clients and my team is that the first limitation of quality SEO is data accuracy. 

What are some notable ways you’ve had to alter your go-to strategies and solutions for cannabis brands based on the state market they’re located in? Are certain state markets more difficult when it comes to effective SEO and utilization than other state markets?

I have worked with clients in nearly all 50 states as well as internationally, and I honestly could not tell you that one state is definitively harder than the rest. They all have their own nuances and regulatory restrictions that an SEO has to be mindful of. Specific words you can and cannot say, required ways of presenting information, and even restrictions around how certain areas can be targeted versus others. For example, you might be free to say “check out our special offers” for a client in one state, while a client five miles down the road on the other side of the state line cannot. Same tactic, same intent, completely different compliance outcome. That is what makes this such a multi-faceted industry for SEOs. We have to stay on top of search best practices like anyone else, but layered on top of that is a regulatory landscape that evolves constantly and varies state by state. The cherry on the cake is staying informed on the rules governing what analytics data you are allowed to collect and how you are allowed to collect it, which is its own moving target.

Looking forward, what are some useful ways that search engines can be more friendly and open to fully licensed and compliant cannabis companies? Do you think the federal rescheduling will do anything to change Google and Meta’s policies on cannabis brands?

The most useful thing the platforms could do is apply a framework they already use elsewhere. Google runs verification and certification processes for other regulated categories, where an advertiser proves licensure and is then allowed to operate inside tight, geo-targeted, age-gated boundaries. There is no technical reason that model could not extend to state-licensed, compliant cannabis operators. Verify the license, restrict targeting to the licensed jurisdiction, enforce age gating, and hold those advertisers to the same standard as any other regulated vertical. On the organic side, simply making Business Profile enforcement for licensed retailers more consistent and less prone to unexplained suspension would make a huge difference. 

As for rescheduling, my view is that it is an initial step rather than a finish line, and it does signal forward progress towards normalizing cannabis as a regulated industry. But platform policy tends to follow legal certainty rather than lead it, and rescheduling does not resolve the federal and state conflict that these companies cite when they write their rules. I expect movement eventually, just slower than the industry would like.

Thank you for joining us, Grady! For more information on PufCreativ, please visit its website.