How to Audit a Cannabis Website Before Starting SEO

Crawl With Screaming Frog First

Point Screaming Frog at the homepage and let it walk every link; the free version handles 500 URLs, enough for most cannabis sites. The crawl surfaces what browsing never shows: broken internal links, redirect chains three hops deep, duplicate title tags across half the catalog, pages carrying a leftover noindex, and orphan pages nothing links to. Export the findings. This spreadsheet is the skeleton of the whole audit.

Compare Against Search Console's Pages Report

The crawl shows your site as a machine sees it; the Pages report in Search Console shows what Google decided to do about it. The gap between the two is where audits earn their keep. Pages sitting in Crawled - currently not indexed were seen and judged not worth keeping, a quality verdict. Discovered - currently not indexed means Google has not even bothered to fetch them yet, which points at crawl priority. And canonical or noindex surprises here explain many mystery traffic losses.

Check What the Menu Actually Renders

The cannabis-specific step. One dispensary I audited listed around four hundred products, all served through a menu provider's iframe. View source on the menu page and none of them existed: no names, no descriptions, nothing for Google to index. To search engines the store carried zero products. If your menu works this way, the audit has found its headline: either move to a provider that renders indexable pages or build your own category and product pages around the embed.

Run PageSpeed Insights on Templates, Not the Homepage

Owners test the homepage, which is usually the best-optimized page on the site. Instead run PageSpeed Insights against one of each template: a category page, a product page, a blog post, a location page. Note both the lab numbers and, where available, the Core Web Vitals field data from real Chrome users, which is what Google actually measures. Template-level problems multiply across every page built on them, so one slow template can be hundreds of slow pages.

Inventory the Content

List every indexable page and grade it: keep, improve, merge, remove. Look for the classic patterns — three blog posts fighting over one query, product descriptions copied from the brand's wholesale sheet, guides dated years ago. Consolidating overlapping pages into one strong page routinely does more than writing something new, and the inventory makes those merge candidates obvious.

Verify the Local Layer

Check the name, address, and phone number everywhere they appear — site footer, Business Profile, directories — for exact consistency. Confirm each location has its own page with real content and LocalBusiness schema. Sloppy local data caps the searches with the most purchase intent, and it hides well because every individual listing looks fine on its own.

Sequence the Fixes

End with an ordered list, not a document. Technical blockers come first because they gate everything else. Content consolidation second, because it improves what already has history. Authority work third, because it matures slowest. Attach an owner and a date to each line. An audit that ends as a prioritized queue gets executed; one that ends as a PDF gets filed.

Frequently asked questions

Is the free version of Screaming Frog enough?

For most dispensary and brand sites, yes. The free tier crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers a typical site with room to spare. Multi-location operations and large menus may need the paid license.

How long should an audit take?

Days, not weeks, for a typical cannabis site. The deliverable that matters is a sequenced fix list with owners attached. A hundred-page PDF that nobody acts on is a decoration, not an audit.