Google Business Profile for cannabis dispensaries — what to fill in, what WAC 314-55-155 won’t let you say

Cannabis dispensaries can’t advertise on most paid channels. No Google Ads (cannabis-policy denied), no Facebook/Instagram paid (same), no TikTok paid (same). You’re left with: organic SEO, GBP, programmatic-advertising on cannabis-friendly networks, and direct-to-customer (SMS, email). Of those, GBP is the leverage point because it’s free, it’s where local search converts, and competitors mostly underutilize it. An operator who runs GBP well materially outranks an operator with a better website but a thin GBP listing.

1. 1**Business name.** Use your legal-DBA name verbatim. NO city or category keywords stuffed in (e.g., “Green Life Cannabis Wenatchee Best Dispensary”). Google’s name-spam detector flags + suspends accounts. Verbatim DBA matches your WSLCB license, your state-business-registration, and your storefront signage.
2. 2**Primary category: ‘Cannabis store’.** Secondary categories OK if relevant (e.g., ‘CBD store’ if you also carry hemp products separately).
3. 3**Address + service area.** Address is your storefront. Don’t set service-area-only mode (that’s for delivery businesses without a public storefront — most dispensaries have public storefronts). If you have delivery, ADD it as a service area on top of the storefront, don’t replace.
4. 4**Hours.** Match storefront signage exactly. Special hours for holidays + closures must be set + cleared on schedule. Per /guides/cannabis-holiday-rush-operations, rush-day hours adjustments belong here.
5. 5**Phone.** Direct line that a real human answers in business hours. NOT a forwarding number from a cell that hasn’t been answered in 6 months — Google ranks the listing by how often calls connect successfully.
6. 6**Website.** Canonical URL with HTTPS. Don’t deep-link into /menu — landing-page is the homepage; let the homepage do the conversion work.
7. 7**Description.** Up to 750 chars. Operator-voice, not marketing-verb soup. Mention years operating, neighborhood, what the customer experience is. AVOID claims that violate WAC 314-55-155 (see next section).
8. 8**Attributes.** Fill in all the truthful ones — wheelchair accessible, public restroom, payment methods, identifies-as-LGBTQ-friendly, family-owned, etc. Each attribute is a ranking signal + a filter customers use.
9. 9**Products + services.** Underused by most operators. Adding 20-50 products with names + descriptions + prices (or price ranges) gives Google more text to index for long-tail queries. UNCHECK any cannabis-product fields that auto-trigger Google’s policy filter — flower / concentrate / edible specifics often get flagged. Use category-level descriptions (‘sativa flower’, ‘hybrid edibles’) instead of strain-specific names with potency.

WAC 314-55-155 (WA) is the cannabis-advertising rule. Equivalents exist in every legal state. The pattern is consistent: NO efficacy claims, NO appeals to minors, NO unsupported quality/potency claims, NO consumption-during-purchase imagery, NO claims that cannabis is curative or therapeutic. Apply these to every word of GBP description, post, and Q&A.

• **No efficacy/medical claims.** ‘Helps with anxiety,’ ‘Good for sleep,’ ‘Pain relief,’ ‘Calms nerves’ — all violations. Stay in chemistry + experience-description language: ‘higher-CBD strains often described as more relaxing’ (frames as customer-reported, not platform-claimed) is the gray zone; better to skip entirely on a marketing surface.
• **No ‘cure,’ ‘heal,’ ‘treat’** in any form. Appears in product descriptions far more often than operators realize.
• **No appeals to minors.** Cartoon imagery, candy-imitation packaging, language targeting children, anything resembling an advertisement on a children’s media platform.
• **No ‘best,’ ‘premier,’ ‘highest-quality,’ ‘most potent’** unless you can document the claim. WAC 314-55-155 specifically requires substantiation. ‘Best dispensary in town’ is unsupported puffery and gets flagged.
• **No on-property consumption imagery.** No photos of customers holding cannabis on the premises, no staff posing with products in a way that implies sampling. WAC 314-55-079 separately bans on-property consumption.
• **No price claims that ‘everyone qualifies for the medical discount.’** Industry/medical/heroes discount language must accurately describe eligibility — ‘active military with valid ID gets 30% off,’ not ‘everyone’s a hero, ask us about the discount.’
• **No claims that cannabis is ‘safe’ or ‘non-addictive’** — both violate efficacy-claim rules.

1. 1**Replace the Google Street View exterior with a real photo within the first week.** Listings dominated by stale Street View underrank professionally-photographed competitors.
2. 2**Upload 3-5 NEW photos per month.** Recency is a ranking signal. Most cannabis dispensaries upload once at setup + never again; you outrank them by adding 3 every Friday.
3. 3**Mix the photo categories** Google offers: Logo, Cover, Exterior, Interior, At work, Team, Product (NOT cannabis-product close-ups — gets flagged for policy violation; product-CATEGORY shots like ‘our flower wall’ or ‘the CBD section’ pass), Food/Drink (N/A), Common areas.
4. 4**Caption every photo.** Google indexes the caption text. ‘Our flower wall, organized by terpene profile’ beats no caption.
5. 5**No close-up product shots that feature potency labels.** Google’s cannabis-policy filter flags these + can suspend the listing. Product photos at the case-card / cabinet level pass; tight zooms on a labeled package fail.
6. 6**Watch for customer-uploaded photos.** Customers upload too — and sometimes those photos violate the same rules. Flag-and-request-removal of any customer photo that shows on-property consumption, minors, or is policy-violating in another way. Google removes them within 1-3 business days when reported.

• **Weekly Google Posts.** 7-day expiry; the listing scores higher when fresh content rotates through. Don’t auto-post deals (the WAC-155 efficacy-claim filter triggers); DO post events, store updates, hours adjustments, new-product-category announcements (NOT specific potencies).
• **Q&A is a moderation queue.** Customers and competitors both ask questions through the Q&A interface. Answer your own listing’s questions promptly + accurately; flag offensive/policy-violating questions for Google review. Don’t leave a customer’s question unanswered for >48 hours.
• **Pre-post your own FAQs.** Use the ‘ask a question’ flow as the operator to seed common questions: ‘Are you cash-only?’, ‘Is there parking?’, ‘Do you have ADA-accessible facilities?’, ‘What times are quietest?’. Then answer them as the operator. Google indexes Q&A heavily; pre-seeding gives you 6-10 indexed FAQ pairs that compete with thin-listing competitors.
• **Reviews — respond to every one within 48 hours.** Per /guides/cannabis-customer-sms-deliverability-discipline cross-link logic, response rate is a ranking signal. 5-stars get a brief thank-you; 1-3 stars get a longer professional response that addresses the specific complaint. Never get defensive in the response — read by 100x more future-customers than the original reviewer.

• **GBP token health monitoring** — /admin/integrations/gbp surfaces token-expiry warnings before the listing-management API throws + the photo-upload pipeline silently dies (per existing cron `system:gbp_token_health_check:v1`).
• **Photo-upload reminder cron** — weekly Friday reminder to the manager-on-duty to upload 3-5 new photos. Reminder includes the ‘policy-safe categories’ checklist + the 7-day expiry framing.
• **Pull-GBP-reviews cron** — daily pull of new reviews into /admin/marketing/reviews surface so Doug + Kat can respond from the admin without leaving the dashboard. Auto-flags policy-violation customer photos for review.
• **WAC-155 advertising-rule check on every customer-facing string** — the platform’s copy-review pipeline scans for the strike-list (cure / heal / treat / best / premier / efficacy claims) before any string ships to GBP description, posts, or product copy.
• **Q&A pre-seed template** — /admin/marketing/gbp-faqs panel with 12 pre-written FAQ Q&A pairs Doug can submit + answer through the GBP interface in under 10 minutes.