Weedmaps Saves Cost of SEO Specialist by Switching to Sitebulb Cloud

The Client

Weedmaps is a technology company that provides a website and mobile app that allows users to find and review cannabis dispensaries, brands, and products. As a technology company in the evolving cannabis industry, having a strong SEO strategy and technical infrastructure is critical for Weedmaps to maintain its market leadership position. We spoke to Senior SEO Manager, Rachel Anderson, and Technical SEO, Kyle Cooper about how Sitebulb Cloud helps the business.

The Challenge 

Back in 2022, Rachel Anderson was frustrated with the limitations of her previous enterprise crawling tool, Botify. Expensive and severely restrictive in terms of the number of URLs she could crawl each month, it prevented the team from getting a full picture of a site's technical health.

"We were super limited by the number of URLs we could crawl each month. And so it made it really challenging to get a good idea of where we were having problems with the site," Rachel explained.

The team also struggled with the usability of Botify, finding the default visualizations unhelpful and having to export data to Excel just to get the insights they needed.

The Solution

Eager to find a more powerful and user-friendly crawling solution, Rachel reached out to us. She had used Sitebulb’s desktop crawler at a previous agency and was impressed by its capabilities.

So when Sitebulb introduced our cloud-based enterprise crawler offering, Rachel saw an opportunity to upgrade Weedmaps' toolset. 

"I reached out to Patrick and Gareth and was like, 'hey, I've switched roles. I'm interested in using Sitebulb, but I don't know how much support I can get from engineering to set up a virtual machine for it to run on.’ And they were like, 'well, actually, we're exploring creating a cloud version.' I was like, 'ooh, I would love to be involved in that!'"

Since then, the Weedmaps SEO team has fallen in love with several Sitebulb Cloud features:

Single page analysis

"I'm never going to not love the single page analysis tool,” said Kyle. It allows the team to quickly analyze the technical health of individual pages, especially when testing new experiences or features.

This has been particularly useful for the team's quality assurance (QA) process, as they can opt Sitebulb's crawler into specific test environments to ensure new implementations are working as expected.

“I'm never going to not love the single page analysis tool.”

Kyle Cooper   Technical SEO

Content extraction

Rachel also highlighted the content extraction tools in Sitebulb as a favourite. 

"We were able to put a tag specifically in the head of all of our pages that identified which sales region each individual regional page was in. For example, Echo Park is in the Los Angeles region, and we can just pull that right out of the head of the page using content extraction."

This custom tagging has allowed the Weedmaps team to better align their SEO efforts with the company's sales regions, providing valuable insights that were previously difficult to obtain.

Overall, the Weedmaps SEO crew has found Sitebulb Cloud to be an indispensable tool. From QA testing to custom data extraction, Sitebulb delivers the advanced capabilities they need to optimize their complex, enterprise-scale, multi-regional website.

The Results

Overall, switching to Sitebulb Cloud has saved Weedmaps a significant amount of money, equivalent to the market rate for an SEO specialist. It has also provided them with a more powerful and user-friendly crawling solution that better meets their needs.

“Sitebulb Cloud has everything that we needed and several unique features that made it a good choice for us. Plus, we saved enough money to open up another position on the team.”

Rachel Anderson   Senior SEO Manager

For other companies considering a switch to Sitebulb Cloud, Rachel and Kyle Cooper have some advice: "I would tell them to test it out. Kick the tires a bit, see how it compares to their current tools, that's exactly what we did. And I found that Sitebulb had everything that we needed and had several unique features that made it a good choice for us."

 "Sitebulb Cloud has everything that we needed and several unique features that made it a good choice for us. Plus, we saved enough money to open up another position on the team.”

Kyle added, "I guess I would also say, compare what you are paying for to what you're actually using in your current crawling tool. Because I feel like Sitebulb is really focused on delivering that really core, strong, crawling platform and expanding on that."

With the cost savings and productivity gains from Sitebulb Cloud, Weedmaps was able to invest in growing their SEO team, setting them up for continued success in the highly competitive cannabis industry.

*These are the personal opinions of Rachel Anderson and Kyle Cooper, and are not official statements on behalf of Weedmaps, the company.