Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Isaac Justason of Patient Partners. Right, that's right.
Tell me what it is that you do here, Isaac, at Patient Partners.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: So I'm the founder and CEO of Patient Partners, and we specialize in helping healthcare practices grow. We work with predominantly like physical therapy practices, chiropractic clinics, you know, massage therapists, some counselors, things like that. But nevertheless, we help healthcare practices show up better online, you know, improve their SEO, their Google Ads, their web design, and ultimately drive new patients to them.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Really helpful content.
Medic update your money and your life. Healthcare is definitely a protected niche when it comes to Google's perspective and algorithms and what it's done, done over time. How long have you been doing this and have you seen changes or adaptations that are specific to the health industry? Health business niche?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: There's. Yeah, it's absolutely very well protected. And I've been doing this for coming up on five years now. About five years ago, I started the agency, but there's absolutely been changes. You know, we don't work with a lot of med spas, but a couple of our clinics have sort of a, a med spa arm of their business. They've got sort of a couple of people that do that off, off on the side. And there are all kinds of things that Google will just simply not let you advertise, you know, anything around.
Yeah, sort of slightly more speculative services. Anything around PRP stuff like this is certainly just a, a hard no from Google, which is, yeah, fair enough. You know, then it's on us to find other ways to market those services.
Fortunately, things like physical therapy and counseling are, you know, generally pretty safe. It's just, you just have to be careful in, in some of the wording, but for the most part, we haven't, you know, had nearly as much trouble with those types of services as.
Yeah, some of the, some of the other ones that are pretty common at like, things like medspas.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Just for example, I work with a couple of different local businesses, like a home construction company. What's the difference between doing SEO for a home construction company, you know, building stuff versus, you know, counseling? What is it in your strategy and execution that you're looking at as unique or different?
[00:02:57] Speaker B: So for the local SEO, I mean, first of all, as for any service business, local service business, obviously we want to rank locally, but that'll be the case for anyone whether they're a counselor or a home, you know, a construction company that only serves a particular area or, you know, a plumber or, you know, whatever for that matter. So that part's not particularly unique. I think the really unique part comes around the actual copywriting and how we articulate sort of what a clinic does, the value of their service.
At the end of the day, the mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar.
Whether you're trying to rank a plumber or you're trying to rank a chiropractor. You know, at the end of the day it's still Google and Google Maps and ranking in the map pack and things like that. But what's really different is, yeah, how we talk about the service. And part of the reason we've niche down is because we can actually talk to our clients and these clinic owners on just a slightly deeper level than just marketing in general. You know, we actually understand a little bit more about their, their industry and, and so, yeah, but from an actual, you know, the actual mechanics of local SEO, I would say there's a lot of similarity between a contractor or construction company like, like your client and a counselor like ours.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: It seems to me that one of those specialty errors is kind of knowing what the regulations are and putting out material that can help people that have to negotiate or navigate through those regulations.
I did some B2B consulting for an oxygen monitor manufacturer and a lot of their marketing comes from, you know, putting out information so that consumers, their customers can navigate. Oh, hey, these are the regs you have to comply with. You know, it's kind of the same thing in some of the healthcare niches putting out there. Hey, these are, you know, the industry standards, these are the rules and regulations around, you know, these services. So, you know, helping people become aware of that can be its own form of marketing.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: That's, that's a good, that's a good point. And each, you know, province or each state will have their own sort of rules around different language that you are and are not allowed to use. You can't make comparative statements, you can't use, you know, you have to be careful about using the word specialized or claiming you're an expert in something. And so all of those types of regulations around language and advertising and there's a surprising amount of variation across the country.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: What are some of your go to Playbooks when you're, you know, a small business in the health care space, what are you looking at for low hanging fruit when people are coming on board?
[00:06:05] Speaker B: We always, we always look at the business profile. I think it's, it's still one of those things that a lot of companies Maybe set up when they first start and then kind of forget about.
And so we still see this all the time where it's, there's just tons of opportunity there. They haven't set up their categories correctly. They don't have services listed in their business profile. Really, really simple, you know, conversion tracking is another. Although it's not necessarily, you know, about improving visibility or driving more traffic. It's so important to be able to tell what part of your marketing is working and what's actually driving results. And seldom is that set up correctly as well. So it's always one of the first things we do and it's just sort of an easy way to get some wins in and.
But those are two big ones.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: What are some of the marketing pitfalls that you've seen? SMBs that you've worked with have fallen in and you've offered a kind of
[00:07:05] Speaker B: ladder up the pitfalls? You know, that's a good one.
I have seen companies spend big dollars on just boosting meta Instagram posts and their Facebook posts, thinking that's what's going to drive more new customers in the door. And obviously there's a place for boosting posts in certain contexts, but really that's not the most effective use of what are usually pretty limited marketing dollars. A lot of these clinics, they don't have big budgets to throw around at marketing. And so when you're spending your, you know, you've got a thousand bucks a month to spend on marketing and a good chunk of it is going to just boosting posts. It's, yeah, always one of the first things I'm just, I tell them, hey, we got to, we got to change this up.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: What is the mix of channels that you're looking at and recommending for these businesses? I know, you know, boosting posts might not be the best strategy, but, you know, where are you looking to get eyeballs versus, you know, show up for LLM citations versus, you know, your basic, you know, SEO fundamentals, getting in some local directories and things like that. What's your, your mix in the first six months when somebody comes on? Like, how do you process that?
[00:08:38] Speaker B: So for us, we have different programs depending on, you know, what the clients, what the clinic needs.
For sure, the biggest channels are SEO and Google Ads. Those are the most common things clinics come to us for. But a, you know, AI visibility is becoming increasingly important and we do have some clients on, on meta ads. But I think one of the more overrated or sorry, rather underrated marketing channels for clinics is community building. Is Getting out there, getting involved in the community.
Go to a marathon and set up a booth, you know, tape some ankles or, you know, stuff like that. Go sponsor a youth sports team in the area and get out there and get involved.
You know, when they come to us, it's usually for SEO and for marketing and for website and, you know, Google Ads and local SEO and that's.
Those are our sort of go to channels. Right. Especially in the first six months, get that sort of foundation laid and then we can look at the more advanced strategies. But in terms of.
Yeah, some, some a channel that I. That I think can be really important for clinics. I think community building is, is often overlooked.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I've. I've got a program at my agency to set up community cleanups and whether remote or, you know, they'll send one or two people out, I'll set the date, but I'll harvest so much digital fr of like, you know, Eventbrite has an API to ChatGPT.
Google has a special SERP view for events. And so if you're listing that you're doing a community, you can actually get in Reddit for your community. Reddit by posting, hey, doing a community cleanup. Who can come out sponsored by, you know, thanks to JoJo Skincare, you know, and that's one of the few times I've seen fly like blatantly putting someone's brand out there is when they're running a community cleanup.
Still got the upvotes I've done it with, with the brand name in the title, with the brand name out of the title and the brand name in the title actually got more upvotes for. It may have been just specific to that community, but I'm going to hit that button over and over.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: That's brilliant. And Reddit is typically so sensitive to any sort of, sort of promotion or anything like that. You know, they typically, yeah. Can smell that from a mile away. And so the fact that you were able to actually get positive engagement while still finding some, you know, a way to get a brand mention and talk about the company. I love that. I love that idea.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Even snuck a link into the event description on Reddit.
Also Facebook, there's always like in Cookeville, it's hip Cookeville and then there's hipper Cookeville and hipist Cookville, like the knockoff, like Parcheesi versions. But if you go and post it on there, it's just one of those things, you know, that's, that's great at driving engagement. So looking for, you know, those opportunities I did an interview. I think it was bone dry roofing. They have a trailer with. And they. It just has, like, their logo on the sides. And they'll do movies in the park, set up a projector and. And do free movies in the park once or twice a month. No, no hard pushing. Just logos on the side of the trailer.
Show up in the community and, you know, they'll have somebody out there and they've gotten roofs, they've gotten, you know, legit business just by showing up in the community. So I love that play.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, I love it. And, you know, we've. Where I'm from, it's called Victoria, and the local group is called Keep Victoria Boring. And you see. See these kinds of events in there.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Oh, one big hint is if you just go and do the trash cleanup without advertising, make a pile of the trash and take the picture, there's subreddits where you can post, like, hey, look at my trash haul.
You know, clean this up.
So that. That's another tactic too.
Genius.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Genius.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Tell me a little bit more about some of your evolving marketing strategy. As we get our hands on more and more technology that's accelerating our skills, accelerating the speed to market for us to execute on these things, where's the balance point for you and your team of integrating new capabilities, you know, holding back when a client, you know, wakes up on Tuesday and sends you 15 pages from ChatGPT of this brainwave of like, oh, I, you know, they've replaced their. Their intelligence with chat GPT and they feel really like it's, oh, this is such. GPT said that this must be a good strategy, but it's not wisdom, as Brett Sklar, my last interview, said, he said, you know, AI gives us a second brain, a third brain, but that's not the same as having the experience or wisdom of how to use it.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: I think that's a good point. And it's becoming a little more common these days where we recently had a client, for instance, just ask us, could you just redo the entire site with Claude? And, you know, we had to push back on that around.
Yeah. Just the efficacy of that. So the wisdom of that approach, for me, you know, these days we're using AI, you know, a fair bit to increase our efficiency, obviously with a heavy human hand involved in there.
But I like to see AI as sort of additive. All right, I don't want to replace, you know, automate all of our client work. I want to be able to deliver more value because what previously took us two Hours now takes us an hour. And so that means we can just do more of it.
One really cool tool that I've been using quite a bit recently is called Victor. And it's just a really smart AI that connects other different platforms. It's sort of a little bit like openclaw and those types of tools, but it's very simple to use and it's been a real game changer. As far as our own AI tech
[00:15:40] Speaker A: stack, one thing I interviewed Jake Melendi of Ignivedo and they're using it to speed up response time. And you know, they did a study where 64%, 68% of businesses that they measured 1800 or so businesses, 68% never replied in the first 24 hours.
And he realized, oh hey, there's a market opportunity there. And having worked with small businesses and having tried to get services from small businesses, it definitely seems that that's part of the stack that can be easily optimized. You know, some type of AI responder to text messages having, you know, immediate surfacing, you know, trying to get calls back as short a time as possible. Because if I'm on my phone, I'm thinking I'm going to go to a location. I think Google did release these stats that, you know, 70, 80% of people who go to any business in a community are looking on their phone either immediately before they're driving or while they're driving on route.
So if you miss that window where they're searching or where they're trying to book something right away, trying to find immediate availability, you're. You're leaving cash on the table every time.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I don't think the AI phone answering is that good yet. I don't think we're there yet. And I certainly don't recommend to our clients that they replace their front desk team with an AI tool. But I do look forward to the day that it is good enough. Because you talk about the contact forms don't get responded to, you would be blown away at how few phone calls get answered.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: It's just people are calling these clinics and nobody's picking up the phone and the missed revenue opportunity there. And so if there was like a really good phone call answering, you know, AI that could take in the questions, book people an appointment, stuff like this, I feel like that's, that would be such a game changer for tons of local businesses.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: I hate to oversell. He was a previous guest and his stack look did look pretty good. Igna Vito so I'll send you The URL after all words. It'll be in the show notes. But it did. I have tried one before. It was called lead truffle.
But their game was to have it go to voicemail, but immediately answer with a text message. And the text chatbot was really good and they used a real phone number and then had a really smooth function to pass that off to a live client. But yeah, there is a decent tool.
I was checking it out at Ignavito, so that might be a solution for anybody who's listening and maybe for you to check out afterwards.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Cool, man. Thank you. Yeah, I'll take a look.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: But I'm curious, are there any other pain points that you've been able to solve either within your own organization or pain point with a particular client where you spotted, oh, hey, this specific headache, let's get rid of that. Let's use, you know, plod or chat GPT and smooth this wrinkle out.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: You know, I think one of the, for one of the really easy ones that come to mind is just responding to reviews.
It's one of those things that I.
It's perhaps a little bit lower on the priority list for a lot of front desk teams that are busy.
And so we've been able to set up a system that uses AI to just respond to the review. And it says, you know, maybe you leave a review for a clinic and, you know, mention, oh, Isaac helped me with my shoulder pain or whatever. And the AI, you know, sees your name and sees what your is in your review and is able to come up with a pretty good response to that. And then the other thing we were able to do is layer in some tone and, you know, is it a little more friendly? Is it a little more clinical? Is it a little more professional, Is it a little more casual and kind of come up with some nuance there. I think that was just a really simple way you could use AI. And oftentimes, you know, we're. We're not looking to replace. I don't ever really want to replace sort of the patient interaction. But if we can find simple ways to save time, that's usually where we can see some really good, really good value with the AI.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, smoothing out and understanding, you know, what are some paperwork workflows? You know, is there any, you know, submission of documents that you can make easier? You know, even just looking through, looking, querying, you know, Claude chatgpt okay, for this, what are some of the paperwork headaches and how can we, you know, find a portal for that? Or find a tool for that, or make a tool where they can submit this, you know, can we augment the site where, you know, it pulls and checks, you know, insurance for X, Y or Z or surfaces, different things like all those are, are part of the ecosystem for getting the job done. But any friction you can remove.
Yeah, 100% every time.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: And you know, I'm seeing all kinds of tools pop up, like AI charting notes, where that's a big part of the workload for clinicians.
But then it takes those charting notes and if your patient has, you know, one particular type of insurance, well, they'll have their own, that insurance provider will have sort of their own process for, well, how do you submit this? And so the AI is taking the charting notes and then putting it into the format that the insurance provider is looking for. And so there's all kinds of, that's obviously not exactly marketing related, but all kinds of really neat ways that people are using AI and some of these tools to just speed things up.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: If you could talk to small business owners and just get them to stop doing one thing, what would that one thing be?
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Let's see, what would that one thing be?
I think it would be stop using generic canva templates on your Instagram.
Nobody likes them. I don't know why that's the first thing that came to mind. But you know, if you're going to be doing social, put a little extra effort in there. In fact, I would rather just take, have you take a photo of your team or the trash you've picked up or whatever and put that out there. But the generic canva templates, we see a lot of clinics do those. And yeah, every time I see them I cringe a little bit.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: What do you think is going to be the shape of local SEO in the next few years? It seems to me that out of the ecosystems in search, local SEO seems to be here to stay with the fewest disruptions.
What's your take on the SEO and marketing side for SMBs?
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree because obviously the AI mode in Google is, they're really pushing that and that's going to really impact a lot of websites. But for local searches, Google Maps is still, you know, the best way for Google to serve up options. And so I think the business profile, the Google business profile is becoming even more important.
Yeah, the map, if you can be in the map pack, it can make such a massive difference for a local business.
And so that's where I really think local SEO is moving towards and just more weight and More importance on the business profile and perhaps a little bit less on the website. Obviously they're still related, but I think there's a massive opportunity there for sure.
ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity, you know, yes, people are asking those about local businesses as well, and so those will still be important. But I think the business profile and getting in that map pack is going to be really, really important.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: What's the last clip, article, interview or snippet that kind of changed what you're doing for your clients?
And who said it?
[00:25:07] Speaker B: I was listening recently to a, to a podcast from.
They had the founder of Patch Marketing on and he was talking a lot about sort of this, this local SEO and, and the, the move with AI. And one of the things he said was that Google is moving away from curation, where it just curated, you know, 10 blue links for you to look at and more into selection, where it's, you're maybe asking Google's AI a couple of things. You're saying, hey, I've hurt my knee playing soccer on the weekend or, you know, doing whatever and I'm looking for someone, blah, blah, blah. And rather than just curating 10 options, it's saying, hey, here's the best option, right? Here's the best clinic for you.
And so it's kind of moving from curation to selection, which I thought was a really interesting framework.
And it does seem like that's how things are moving towards.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: What's your website? What are some of the resources you've put out recently? And if people want to connect with you and ask more questions about your strategy, your process, if they've got a business in your niche, how can they find you?
[00:26:30] Speaker B: Our website is PatientPartners Co and we have a clinic marketing blueprint that people can download for free. We also offer a free website and SEO and AI visibility audit.
We'll show you exactly how your clinic is doing or how your local business is doing right now and what you can do to improve. And anybody that's listening is more than welcome to go request one of those audits.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Well, I'll be sure to add that to the show notes for everybody that's listening. This will go out on unscripted SEO.com with a full recap where you can find other fantastic interviews like this one with other SEO professionals. Isaac, thanks for stopping by.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Thanks, Jeremy. Great chatting with you.
