Cannabis Business
Honest notes from 900+ dispensary visits. Zero sponsored posts.
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Stand on any corner of Sukhumvit at nine in the evening and watch the tourists. Nobody is looking at the shopfronts. Everyone is looking at a phone, and most of them are looking at a map.
That is where your next customer decides whether to walk into your shop or the one 200 steps further on. Dispensary SEO is simply the work of making sure that, at that moment, Google shows them you.
Here is the short answer for a single location shop in Bangkok. Get your Google Business Profile complete and accurate, build a simple website you own, earn honest reviews steadily, write a few pages that answer the questions tourists actually search, and do it in English first with Thai alongside. No ads required, which is lucky, because in Thailand you are not allowed to run them anyway.
Thailand banned all commercial cannabis advertising in June 2025. Google Ads, Meta ads, billboards, boosted posts: gone. That leaves search as the biggest channel a dispensary can still compete on, and it is one where the customer comes to you.
And the demand is real. "Weed bangkok" gets around 3,600 searches a month globally, about 1,000 of them from inside Thailand. "Weed shop bangkok" gets around 1,000 a month, about 480 from inside Thailand. The global number includes people planning a trip from home; the searches from inside Thailand are people who are already here and could walk in tonight. Add the long tail of questions ("is weed legal in Bangkok", "dispensary near Nana", "how to get a prescription") and you have a steady stream of people looking for exactly what a licensed shop offers.
Meanwhile, around 75% of dispensaries in Thailand's tourist areas have no dedicated website, based on ThaiCannaMapped's own audit. That means most of your competition is not even playing. A shop that does the basics properly stands out fast. I made the case in more detail in the ad ban made marketing mandatory, and SEO sits alongside the other legal channels in dispensary marketing in Thailand.
Google is unusually open about local ranking. Its own help page on how local results are ranked names three factors:
Relevance: how well your profile matches what someone searched for.
Distance: how far you are from the person searching, or from the place they named.
Prominence: how well known you are, based partly on how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.
The same page says plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. You cannot change distance. Everything in this guide works on relevance and prominence.
For a single location shop, this is the most important page you have on the internet, even though Google owns the platform.
Name it exactly as your sign does. Google's business profile guidelines say the name must reflect your real world name, and list things that are not allowed in it, including marketing taglines, service or product details and location details. "Green Leaf" is fine. "Green Leaf Best Weed Shop Sukhumvit 24 Hours" is the kind of name that gets profiles suspended.
Choose few, accurate categories. Google asks for as few categories as possible, chosen to complete the sentence "this business is a", not "has a".
Have a real storefront. Google's guidelines state that businesses associated with age restricted products such as cannabis are not permitted as service area businesses without a storefront. Your address needs permanent signage with your business name.
Keep hours exact. If you are open 24 hours, say so. If you close at midnight, do not let Google say otherwise. A tourist who walks 15 minutes to a closed shutter leaves a review.
Add real photos. Your shopfront from the street, the entrance at night, your counter and your team. Tourists use the street view photo to find the door.
Use a website link you own. Google wants the website and phone to represent your actual location, and discourages social media landing pages. One more reason to have a site.
Profiles do get suspended in this category, and the full picture of why, and how to get back, is in why dispensaries vanish from Google Maps.
A profile that links to a fast, clear website with the same name, address and hours gives Google and customers more to trust than one that links to nothing. Google's ranking guide says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up. The website is also where you can rank for the questions people ask before they go anywhere near the map.
For a single shop, it does not need to be big. A strong one page site with your name, address, hours, a map, how buying works (prescription, age 20+, ID), your licence details and a few photos is enough to start. I explain what to include in does a dispensary need a website if it has Instagram.
Keep everything consistent. Same shop name, same address format and same phone number on the website, the Google profile and every directory that lists you.
Reviews feed prominence, and they also do the selling you are not allowed to do yourself.
Ask, every day, without filtering. Google's own tips for getting reviews suggest sharing a review link or a QR code. A small card at the counter works.
Never pay or reward for reviews. Google's content policy treats discounts, free goods or payment in exchange for reviews as rating manipulation, and removes them. It also bans selectively asking only happy customers. In a cannabis shop, a "free pre roll for a 5 star review" deal would also be a promotion of sales, so it fails twice.
Reply to reviews, briefly and honestly. Google's guidance is to keep replies short, avoid generic thanks, and not use replies to offer deals. Answer the bad ones calmly. Future customers read your reply more closely than the complaint.
Tourists have learned to be suspicious of perfect scores. I wrote about that in are dispensary ratings real. Steady, honest reviews beat a sudden burst of five stars every time.
Tourists in Bangkok think in BTS and MRT stations and neighbourhoods, not street numbers. That is the pattern I describe in the BTS rule.
So write for it. A page or article that says, clearly, how to walk to your shop from the nearest station, what is nearby, and what to expect when you arrive will match searches like "dispensary near Asok" or "weed near Nana" far better than a homepage that only says your name.
A small set of useful articles goes a long way:
How buying works at a licensed shop now. Prescription, age, ID, what happens at the counter.
A guide to your area. Station, landmarks, food, late night options.
How to check a licence. Sticker colours, the eight digit code, and the ThaiCannaMapped Dispensary Register.
That is exactly the kind of content behind guides like weed in Bangkok. More on why this compounds in content is the only ad you're allowed.
Most tourist searches are in English, so English is your main language. But plenty of customers in many areas are Thai, and in my experience far fewer dispensaries bother to publish anything useful in Thai, so there is less competition for those searches.
Write the Google profile description and key website pages in both languages. Keep the business name identical to your sign. Google's guidelines specifically disallow repeating the name in two languages in the profile name field.
Do not machine translate and walk away. A Thai customer can tell instantly. Have a Thai speaker check every line.
Not keyword stuffing. Repeating "weed shop Bangkok" twenty times on a page helps nobody and risks your profile.
Not fake reviews or review swaps with other shops. Google removes them, and conflicts of interest are covered by the same policy.
Not selling online. Online sales of cannabis are banned in Thailand. Your website informs and directs. It does not take orders.
Not promoting prices or deals. Search visibility is earned with information, not offers. If you are unsure where the line sits, start with these ad ban safe content ideas.
From what I have seen, Google profile fixes and fresh reviews can show results in weeks. A new website and articles usually take a few months to settle. Shops that keep adding one useful page a month for a year tend to pull clearly ahead. It is slow, then steady, then hard to catch.
If you run a genuinely good shop that ranks below louder neighbours, you are not imagining it. I wrote about that gap from the customer's side in the dispensary Google won't show you: the best flower in a neighbourhood often sits behind the weakest Google presence. SEO is how you close it.
Open your Google profile. Check the name against your sign, the hours against reality, and the website link against something you own. Then put a review card on the counter. That is a better first day of SEO than most dispensaries in Bangkok have ever had.
I share what I see in Bangkok's dispensaries and search results on Instagram, and owners compare notes on this inside Reefers Club, an invite only community of people in the Thai cannabis industry. If you would rather have it done for you, Grow on Google covers a website, a strengthened Google profile and three SEO articles written to bring tourist searches to your door, and ongoing content sits within the marketing and content work I do.
Written by someone who has looked up 900+ dispensaries on Google before walking in, and knows exactly which profiles made him walk somewhere else.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. All cannabis marketing in Thailand must comply with Thai law, including the ban on cannabis advertising. Search volumes are approximate and change month to month.
