Dispensary Pays $38,000 for SEO, Accidentally Funds a Five-Company Circlejerk That Routes Work Back to Itself

Apr 28
6 min read

Inside the Slack Channel Where No One Owns Anything

There’s a Slack channel called #springfield-seo-war-room that currently contains seven agencies, three freelancers, two AI writing tools, and a handful of “strategists” who speak exclusively in phrases like “content velocity” and “authority signals” but couldn’t point to a single page they’ve actually improved if you put a gun to their Patagonia vest.

I’m in it.

No one knows I’m in it.

More importantly, no one in it knows who’s actually responsible for the work. Everyone is involved, no one is accountable, and every message reads like it was written by someone hoping responsibility is a group project.

This all started with a dispensary, real business, real revenue, not idiots, running its menu on Dutchie, maintaining listings on Weedmaps and Leafly, and asking the most normal question in cannabis marketing:

“Can we rank higher and get more people to our menu?”

That’s it. That’s the whole brief.

Thirty-eight thousand dollars later, the answer is still “we’re working on it,” which in this industry translates to “we’ve created enough visible activity to justify another invoice.”

The Pitch: Strategy Up Front, Labor Somewhere Else

The agency they hired did what every “cannabis-specialized” SEO firm does. They sold confidence.

They talked about local intent, compliance nuance, menu structure, and how they “understand the ecosystem” like they had a lever inside Google they could just pull. Deck looked clean. Language was tight. Everyone nodded.

Then, almost immediately, they outsourced the work.

Not pieces of it. The work.

Because most of these agencies aren’t built to execute. They’re built to capture clients and redistribute tasks, taking margin at every handoff while pretending they’re the ones doing the thinking. The internal team handles calls, decks, and reassurance. Everything else gets pushed downstream to someone cheaper, then cheaper again, until the only thing premium left is the invoice.

By the end of week one, the dispensary’s simple request had been split across multiple vendors who had never spoken to each other, never seen the store, and in some cases clearly had no idea how dispensary search even functions.

From there, the machine starts moving.

How the Original Goal Gets Lost Almost Immediately

The first deliverable was a blog post, because nothing signals “SEO is happening” like content no one asked for. The title tried to hit every keyword at once: The Ultimate Guide to Marijuana Cannabis Weed Dispensaries Near Me in Springfield Illinois USA. It reads less like a strategy and more like someone smashing their face into a keyword planner.

The article itself read like someone explaining weed to a court-appointed therapist. Cannabis is a plant. Dispensaries sell cannabis. You can buy cannabis at a dispensary. Not a single meaningful mention of the actual store paying for it, no location nuance, no product relevance, nothing that would help a real customer make a decision.

By the time it came back, it was targeting three cities the dispensary doesn’t operate in, two product categories they don’t carry, and one paragraph about CBD for pets that no one in the Slack channel could explain.

It wasn’t written to rank. It wasn’t written to convert. It was written to exist.

And in this system, existence is enough to invoice.

Backlinks, or How to Light Money on Fire Quietly

Then came “authority building,” which is where the operation turns from lazy to insulting.

The dispensary’s domain started picking up backlinks from sites that look like they were abandoned halfway through development and then repurposed as digital dumping grounds.

Pages about joint pain linking to online casinos. Crypto blogs linking to CBD gummies. “Wellness” sites that exist solely to host outbound links for whoever is paying that week.

Somewhere in that mess, the dispensary’s brand gets attached to anchor text that reads like a bot trying to impersonate a human: “best marijuana cannabis store near me Springfield cheap fast,” like Google hasn’t spent the last decade building an entire empire around detecting exactly that kind of bullshit.

No one flags it. Because the people approving it aren’t reviewing it, they’re checking that it exists so they can pass it upstream, slap it into a report, and move on before anyone asks where the links actually came from.

Another deliverable. Another invoice justified. Another quiet step further away from anything that resembles actual SEO.

Technical SEO: A Report No One Is Responsible For

At some point, someone says “we should run a technical audit,” which triggers yet another subcontract.

A new team runs a crawler and generates a report full of the same issues every site on the internet has had for the last decade: page speed, duplicate titles, missing descriptions. It gets packaged into a clean PDF with color-coded warnings and performance scores.

It looks like work.

It feels like work.

Nothing in it is implemented.

Because the people who created it don’t execute, and the people who execute weren’t part of creating it. So the report becomes a standalone artifact, proof that effort occurred, completely disconnected from any outcome, quietly aging in a shared drive like a gym membership no one plans to use.

The Exact Moment the Work Comes Back Home

Then it happens.

Buried deep in the Slack chain, a contractor asks a simple question:

“Hey, can someone clarify the original intent for the Springfield pages? This doesn’t match the brief.”

That message starts moving.

From the contractor to the link team. From the link team to the content team. From the content team to the strategy layer. Up, up, up, until it lands in the main channel run by the agency the dispensary originally hired.

There’s a pause.

Someone opens the document.

Scrolls.

Stops.

“Who wrote this?”

No one answers.

So they trace it back. Vendor to vendor, handoff to handoff, until they find the source.

A Google Doc.

With their own logo at the top. Their own formatting. Their own original brief, now stretched, rewritten, keyword-stuffed, and completely unrecognizable.

They are now reviewing work that started with them, got outsourced through multiple layers, mutated into something worse at every step, and came back looking like it was written by someone who has never seen a dispensary, used Google, or met a human being.

And they don’t realize it immediately.

They critique it.

“This doesn’t align with our strategy.” “This feels off.” “Who approved this direction?”

They are arguing with their own work, marking it up, fixing it, and preparing to bill the client again for correcting a problem they created, outsourced, and then bought back at a markup.

The Call Where It Almost Falls Apart

On the monthly reporting call, the client asks the only question that matters:

“What was actually completed this month?”

Behind the scenes, Slack explodes. Every layer trying to figure out what the layer below them did. Messages flying across channels:

Do we have a deliverables list? Was the audit implemented? Who owns technical? Did the content go live?

No one has a complete answer. Not because nothing was done, but because everything was done in isolation. Pieces exist, but no one owns the full picture.

The presentation goes on anyway. “Momentum.” “Expanded footprint.” “Increased visibility.” Words that sound like progress while the people saying them are actively trying to figure out what they refer to.

At one point, someone pastes a list of deliverables that includes work from three different vendors, one duplicated task, and a backlink report no one on the call has actually opened.

The client nods.

Because from the outside, it still looks like something is happening.

What the Dispensary Actually Paid For

When you strip it down, the dispensary didn’t pay for results. It paid for movement.

Content that doesn’t rank. Backlinks that don’t matter. Audits that don’t get implemented. Strategy that never exists in one place long enough to function.

Meanwhile, their real performance still comes from proximity, product, pricing, and basic reputation. The things that actually move revenue.

Everything else is just layered on top to justify the system, a carefully maintained illusion of progress where the only thing consistently optimized is the agency’s ability to keep getting paid.

Why This System Exists (And Keeps Working)

Cannabis SEO didn’t accidentally become this.

You’ve got platforms like Dutchie controlling structure, marketplaces like Weedmaps and Leafly capturing huge chunks of search demand, and compliance constraints that make standard SEO playbooks unreliable.

So instead of solving those constraints, the industry built a layer on top of them that sells abstraction. Authority. Signals. Optimization. Language that sounds like control without requiring results.

Outsourcing isn’t a side effect of that system.

It’s the foundation.

Because the more hands touch the work, the harder it is to trace failure back to any one of them, and the easier it is for everyone involved to say they did their part while nothing actually improves.

The Only Honest Question in the Entire Process

At one point, back in the Slack thread, someone finally says it:

“Do we actually know what the client’s original goal was?”