Cannabis cannot buy ads, so it has to be found. Brady Madden founded Evergreen SEO to work exclusively in a category where every mainstream paid channel is closed. Mack Lunn interviews him about what that constraint does to a marketing strategy.
Key takeaways - The paid-media ban is the strategy. When you cannot buy attention, organic search stops being one channel among several and becomes the channel.
- Brand recognition does the work paid media usually does. People search for the dispensary they already trust.
- Technical SEO matters more here than in most verticals, because the sites are often built fast on templates and never audited.
- State regulation fragments everything. What you can say, sell and rank for changes at the state line.
- Pick KPIs that survive a compliance review. Measurable success is what keeps a cannabis marketing budget alive.
- AI is changing how cannabis buyers search before it changes how agencies work.
On this page - Marketing inside a paid-media ban
- Why brand recognition carries cannabis search
- The technical SEO gap
- State by state
- Measuring it so it survives
- People, ideas and sources mentioned
- Questions this episode answers
- Go deeper
Marketing inside a paid-media ban Brady came out of general digital marketing and built an agency aimed at one industry. That is normally a positioning choice. Here it is closer to a technical specialisation, because the rules a cannabis operator works under have almost nothing in common with the rules anyone else works under.
No paid search. No paid social on any major platform. Restrictions on email and on what a landing page can even claim. Everything that is left is organic, local and reputational.
Why brand recognition carries cannabis search Brady puts weight on brand recognition, and in this category it is not soft. A person who already knows your dispensary searches for it by name, which is the one query no competitor can outbid you on and no algorithm change takes away.
That makes offline presence, community work and word of mouth into search inputs rather than separate activities.
The technical SEO gap He is clear about the role of technical work. Cannabis sites tend to get built quickly, often on a menu platform bolted onto a template, and then never audited. Crawlability, indexation and site structure problems accumulate quietly.
That is good news for an operator willing to fix them. In a category where competitors cannot outspend you, being the site that search engines can actually read is a durable advantage.
State by state The last practical constraint is legal geography. What you may sell, ship, claim and advertise changes at the state line, and so does the search intent. A national playbook does not survive contact with this industry.
Measuring it so it survives Brady pushes on KPIs, and in this context the reason is specific. Cannabis marketing budgets get questioned harder than most, so a programme that cannot show measurable outcomes gets cut first. Decide what counts as success before the campaign, not after it.
He also touches on AI and what it does to SEO practice. The short version from this conversation: the tooling is changing faster than the fundamentals are.
People, ideas and sources mentioned EntityWhat it isEvergree...