AI SEO for Medical Practices: How Doctors Can Be Found Online

Introduction and Show Welcome 0:00

like a program like Go High Level or a similar program to automate your marketing, but you need that foundation in place. The next level up are your active searchers. These are people who are sitting at Google or Bing or now ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude. More patients, more authority, and more freedom. I'm Brett Gregory, founder of Doctor Talks for democratizing the creator economy for doctors. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the Doctor Talks podcast. I'm your host, Brett Gregory. We are democratizing the creator economy for doctors and we've got a great show for you today.

And I am really excited to share with you Stephen Schwartz, the founder of Concierge Medical Marketing, and he's got lot of great techniques for your to help you attract patients online right now today, so Stephen, welcome to program. Hey Brett, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for being here. So tell us a little bit about Concierge Medical Marketing, what you do and how you came to be. Excellent. Just a quick backstory. I grew up in Southern California and got a degree in math and computer science from Humboldt State University in Northern California up on the Redwood Trees.

Love my time there. And I then moved to Clemson, South Carolina, where I signed up for a master's program in this brand new thing called Virtual Reality. Now granted, this was 1994. So some technology has changed since then. I got there and literally within two weeks, I figured out that the program of Virtual reality at the time was the wrong program for me because it was all programming, hardcore C coding. which i was hated for my undergraduate so i moved to the washington d.c. area i lived in virginia and started working for beltway bandit companies but really interesting is i never really loved working somebody else i did not like the jobs that i had these tech companies and was only until i really discovered building websites that are really enjoyed my career And so in 1999,

Stephen Schwartz's Background and Agency Journey 2:00

I started a little website design company out of a spare bedroom in my home and kind of hung up my virtual shingle, started offering web design services to small businesses in the Virginia and DC area, as well as across the country. And lo and behold, i started getting clients right away and it was a very exciting time. Fast forward after 25 years, we had built somewhere over 2,400 websites. tons and tons of digital marketing campaigns that we did for small businesses all across the USA. And I think at most about 10 to 12 other countries.

So had a lot of experience under our belt. We built a lots of websites that gave clients the ability to update their content on their website themselves without being a techie before that was really a popular technology. It was before WordPress was popular and before Wix and Squarespace and all these different tools. Anyways, all that being said, ran the business for over 25 years, but I felt like I was being pulled in so many different directions with different industries that we needed to serve and different types of clients and their different specific needs.

And it got to a point where I feel like we were not special at anything anymore. All the technology that was offered was the same things that other people were also offering to their clients as far as my competitors. It just, it wasn't special anymore. And I also saw that there was new technologies coming, AI was coming. So many different things were changing. I made a huge decision for my life and my career in that year, 2024, which is number one, I sold my legacy agency to a friend who had a similar company and he wanted to grow through acquisition.

So he bought my business with hundreds and hundreds of active clients and took over that and part number two in twenty twenty four i launched concierge medical marketing now why why conciers i wanted to be able to help make health care better. for people across our entire country and beyond. I personally hate dealing with insurance, health insurance Florida Blues and Cygnus, all these different companies. You pay all this money, you don't get to use it until you pay even more money. And then even then it doesn't cover everything.

It was just so frustrating. When I learned about concierge medicine and later direct primary care, It just made so much more sense to me you pay a flat fee per month to have access to your provider. And they are your primary care and they help you with whatever generally that you need outside of you know really specific specialties. And in doing so, you get to have more time with your doctor. You get you really dig into issues that are going on with you health. And certainly, same and next day appointments.

There's so many cool things available in membership medicine. One of my clients at the time was a cardiologist and he was launching, from his insurance-based cardiology practice, he launching a new division of his business, which would be concierge cardiology. So I started learning all about that and thought, my goodness, what a great opportunity to help him grow his practice into this whole new beautiful space of membership. And people would have his cell phone number for text if they needed it.

They could have same and next day appointments much longer time. He was going to transition all of his existing insurance-based patients to his PA. And it just made so much sense. So as a business owner and a digital marketer, I put together a program of different services that would be really helpful for him, for his marketing in order to transition a bunch of his existing patients and to find new patients who are looking for a concierge cardiologist. Put together this program. We priced it at a very reasonable rate.

And when I launched Concierge Medical Marketing, I thought that's what we should offer. So what does that include? Getting access to Google Business Profile or creating it if it doesn't exist. Optimizing your Google business profile so that it's as filled out and complete as possible. syndicating your google business profile which means to send that information your name your address your phone number and other relevant details and information to lots and lots of other places across the web. The more that google sees all these different places where your practices information are listed that link back to you obviously so much more value and higher rankings so you know that Google business pro file optimization and syndication need a great website that has more of a high end feel looks great on a smartphone, shows your, you know, your reviews and credibility.

And then the magic combination one, two punch, which is Google ads and SEO. And here's the thing, in digital marketing, I talk about a pyramid structure and the pyramid is the patient acquisition pyramid. I have some of this, some other materials if anybody wants to check it out. The base level of your pyramid, is your foundation website and your Google profile and having an Like a program like go high level or a similar program to automate your marketing But you need that foundation in place the next level up are your active searchers these are people who are sitting at Google or Bing or now chat GPT or perplexity or Claude and and searching for a particular solution.

I'm looking for Concierge doctor in Phoenix or whatever. Those are people who are actively searching and there's lots and lots of them in most markets. So what we do is we provide both Google ads to target those people are actually searching And SEO, which obviously is another way of getting your name and face of your practice in front of those people who are actively searching. The final level at the top of my pyramid are the passive prospects. And those are people. Who are not actively looking for what you offer at your Practice right now.

But if you showed your Name, your face, Your message, and you know, that kind of brand awareness information, often enough, at some point they might say, Hey, I'm going to look into this, but As we've seen in most markets where our clients have their practices, we don't even need to go to that social media level, the YouTube videos. We're not to deal with that because there's enough people in their area actively looking. So anyways, that's the quick background of where I came from, what I built before and what i'm building now.

And it's a really exciting time and place because concierge and DPC is growing like crazy. And so most doctors know that they should be doing SEO. They should being doing Google ads, but what are the biggest mistakes you see that are quietly costing practices, new patients every month?

Launching Concierge Medical Marketing 9:00

Yeah, the answer is they're not doing those things that they need to do in order to get more visibility, more at bats, right? And what are those? Sure. So if you talk to most practitioners, they'll say that, get most of their new business from personal referrals, which is great. And I'm absolutely not knocking that. But if I do a search as I just did for a practice who's considering starting in Las Vegas, and I find that there's something like, I don't know, 20,000 searches per month in this one area for all these phrases relevant to a practice.

Even if my report is only 10% accurate, which it's much more accurate than that, of course, but even if it was only ten percent accurate there's still lots and lots of people who are on Google right now today searching in that market for the services that this practice offers. And if a practice is not doing Google Ads to get their name and face in front of those eyeballs right now, they're missing it because the competitors who are doing the Google ads and eventually, you know, SEO growth as well, They're Missing all of these opportunities.

Now you say, well I always get my best patients or the most exposure through personal referrals. That may not be accurate. Why? Because if I can have your ad in front of, I don't know, a thousand people a month who are actively searching for what you offer, would your typical patient, you know mention your practice a 1000 times in a. Doubt it. And okay, so what they should be doing is Google Ads, but also the combination of both. So let's talk about then the SEO. Why do some doctors dominate the local Google searches while other equally talented doctors barely show up at all?

Right. It's all about the amount of content and the links from the internet that go back to that content. So let's talk about, uh, the concept of blogging. People have often said, Oh, well, you need to have a blog on your website to get more exposure. Well, let's talk about what that really means. Let's say for instance, that you're a medical practice that offers weight loss. And obviously the big deal right now is the GLP ones and it's very trendy. It's pretty exciting and there's good results.

There's maybe some side effects and all this stuff's going on with GLPs ones, right? Now, if there are 10 doctors in your area. And half of them are writing articles relevant to the services that people are actively searching for like GLP ones. They're writing articles and they're publishing those articles to their website and then they are doing something called backlinks which are places around the web where the article, the topic and information about the practice link back to that article on the provider's website.

those that are doing that, Google sees that. Google scans the entire internet for as much content as it can absorb. And so the practices that have the content published on their website, like the GLP-1 article in my example, and are are these backlinks, links from around the web that link back to that article, google can then offer that solution or an answer to the question that the person is searching for so let's say i'm bob i trying to lose weight i hop on my computer on google i do a search for how do i lose wait with g l p one.

And it knows that i maybe i live in las vegas like my previous example. Google is smart enough to say this person is actively searching for a provider that offers GLP-1 in the Las Vegas area. For the medical practices who have written content in this manner that I've just outlaid here, Google can say, oh, here's a few great options, including this one and that one, and why? Because they have the articles, the content and the links back to it. If a different competitor, different medical practice still offers GLP-1s and weight loss, but does not have that content published on their website and therefore does have these backlinks, Google can't offer it because it doesn't know that the practice offers it.

Does that make sense? Yeah, sure. So, okay, so they got to have, for SEO, the doctors that dominate the local searches, they have articles, back links, offers clearly written in a way that Google can read it. What has changed now with AI? We hear so much about AI is just changing search forever. How has AI changed SEO and what should doctors be doing differently? Yeah, that's a great question. And, and the, the date that somebody watches or listens to this podcast and a week or two later, it may be totally different.

Patient Acquisition Pyramid and Marketing Foundations 14:00

But when it comes down to it, if you're effectively writing content, showing your authority, your knowledge, Your experience, um, listing the different services, Listing your location, providing good quality content as an authority. on the topics that people are actively looking for. And here's a clue. You want to be sure that your content is written in such a way that it lists questions that People are asking and then it answers what people Are asking. And in doing so, the different AI large-language models, like your chat GPTs and Anthropics and everybody, they're looking on your content of your website, and in so they are trying to put together those questions and those answers.

so that when people are asking, it says, oh, here's the answer. And it pushes you higher up on the page of the AI results. The last handful of leads that I've received into my digital marketing agency have all come from AI search. Every single one of them, which is really exciting. So yeah, that's where if you focus on good quality SEO, you should be doing pretty well with the AI. And again, the advice that I offer today could be different a week from now or a month from, it'll certainly be in a couple of months.

But basically it's taking those FAQs. So putting on your website, here's the questions that our patients are asking us and here is the answer. What about, can that be done in video format, like a podcast or, you know, a solo video that has a transcript associated with it? Right, you want to make your content as easily scannable by all of the major search tools including Google and Bing and ChatGPT and everybody. So here's what I recommend is that you as a, now talking to our medical practitioners who are listening to this or your office managers, You can use AI tools to onboard your practice into the tool So that it knows who you are.

It knows how you talk. In other words, what words you use. Do you say things like dude and far out, or are you very clean and clear cut and very clinical? It learns how use communicate with your audience. And then based on it, analyzing your website, have it ask you questions one at a time. So it really learns your practice. Then you can say, write a list of the top 30 questions that people are actively searching for on Google and AI tools right now, that we can eventually write answers to, so that, we rank better on AI searches.

And your tool of choice will go, and give you a wonderful list, of 30 topics. You can read through those, pick out your favorites, then ask it to answer it in your voice. Then, you could revise it, say oh, make sure this is, a thousand words, or make this sure is whatever, Let's include the name of our city more, let's, include, the, name, of the doctor more. Whatever you want to do to make it really sound like you, you writes the article. Then you as the human can set up your camera and your microphone in the background and do all these things to record a video.

Or you can now use AI tools to capture what your face looks like. The microphone that records what you sound, like, and how you talk. And then an AI tool can put that together so that it looks and sounds like you, the practitioner speaking, but it's really your AI clone doing it. And they're speaking or you're the script that the AI wrote for you. So you didn't have to take hours writing it yourself. There's so many cool things that you can do here. Once your video is made, publish it on YouTube, you can publish on Vimeo as well.

There's also lots of other places around the web where you could publish a video, provide your name, address, phone number,

SEO, Backlinks, and AI Search Visibility 18:00

and links back to your website. But the best, easiest thing to do is once your videos is ready, the video should be on Youtube. and then you copy the embed, E-M-B-E-D, code from YouTube, embed that video onto a blog post on your website, then grab the transcript of what was said in the video and paste that below the Video on that webpage. That way, Google and the other tools cannot just see and scrub the videos for what's in there, but also you're giving them all the words on the page makes it as easy as possible.

We actually created a tool for doctor talks because what I've seen on a lot of doctors websites where they had the Google video, there's a problem called leakage. And so where people would watch a Google Video, but then when they pause it or it ends, There's several other icons with other videos and people click on those and then they leave your website and they go to YouTube. So we created on Doctor Talks, a video embed that does not do that and also a WordPress plugin where people can take the video that they've created.

It comes with the description, it comes the transcript and the can just plug it and make a Video blog page for themselves. Kind of automated that entire process for SEO. Right. One more thing to chime in there. I believe there was a setting on YouTube where you can specifically say, don't offer the other recommended videos if somebody pauses or once my video is done. Yeah, they got rid of that. Yeah. Because they want to keep you sucked in there. They want you to get sucked. Right. One more thing I wanted to chime in before we go to your next question.

About a year or so ago, I built a new AI tool that I call Maddy. That's M-A-D- D-Y. Maddie is the AI digital marketing assistant specifically created for membership medical practices. This AI tool is designed specifically for medical practises who want to go at it with their digital market themselves with AI support. Nice and maddie is free to use and people can can download it and use it I even wrote a book teaching people how to Use maddy and with that like I talked about you want to onboard your medical practice Who you are what you do staff the services analyze my website, you know all these different things and then you can say maddi Um, let's write some blog posts or madi.

Let's do some posts for this or that Can they find that on your website? Is there a link to it from your web site? Sure. The best website I've been sharing with folks recently for all of my resources is stevenschwarz.info. stevenschwarz dot info. the more tools that I make for the membership medical community, it just made sense to have one single place to put all these resources. So Maddie is there. It's toward the top. And again, It is free with my compliments. Just go ahead and grab it. When I created it, I thought, oh, this would be great.

I'll charge like 97 bucks a month for people to use it and have a membership and having a community and all this stuff. And then when it came down to it is like, look, just give it away. People can use if they want to. Use it. If they use and succeed, fantastic. All power to you. if you use that and struggle and you want some help. Well, we're a digital marketing agency. We're here to assist you and we are available for hire and partnering with you to help you succeed in your digital market and to grow your practice.

That's great. And so our last question here, if a doctor listening today fixed one thing on their Google business profile this week, what would have the fastest impact? One thing. I would just say name, address, phone number, or which we nickname NAP. Make sure that's accurate, make sure it's correct. But if I could just add a little bit more, it doesn't take that much more time to fill in all the boxes that Google offers in your Google business profile. So that includes the services that you offer, products that your offer.

The ability to make posts in there. Upload pictures. Yeah. Fill out all the fields possible in doing so and making sure it's accurate. Then Google has a better chance of referring you, but then use a tool like BirdEye or a similar program that will syndicate your information to many different directories. Go High Level does this as well. But the idea that if Google sees that your Google profile exists in one place and has good information on it, that's good. Okay, that's important. But if Google then sees that your information is listed at five, 10, 20, 100, 500 different business directories across the internet, and all that information Is accurate and consistent, then you have a dramatically higher chance of ranking more favorably on the Google organic and in the map pack, because Google feels more confident that Your information Got it.

Okay. So for your Google Business Profile, get a system like BirdEye, fill it out completely and let it populate over all the other places. Exactly. Where can doctors learn more about Concierge Medical Marketing and connect with you? Sure. The easiest is my website, conciergemd.marketing. Again, conciergemd.marketing. And again, separate website, all of my free resources, stevenschwarz.info. All right. StevenSchwarz dot info. Great. Well, Steven, thank you so much. This has been a wealth of information.

Video Content, Maddy AI, and Google Business Profiles 24:00

Really appreciate you coming on today. Any last words of, parting words, of wisdom for our doctors? Well, Brett, thank you for having me on the podcast. I have my own podcast called The Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, and I think we just passed 52 episodes that we've published, primarily of medical practitioners in the membership space, as well as different businesses that support that space. And I encourage people, if you want to grow your medical practice or specifically membership medical practices, tons of great information there the one i guess final nugget i would say to people is utilize a marketing automation platform or system that works for your specific type of medical practice go high level is a very popular one in our industry.

And the idea there, people go to your website through an ad or a referral or SEO or whatever it is. They fill out a form to get the thing that they want from you to schedule a time to meet or to download a case study or an ebook or something. Fill out the form, click submit. Go high level takes that information, puts it in a database and then triggers automations automatically, like sends them an email. Hey, Bob, thank you for filling out the form. Here's the thing you requested. Sends you a text message.

Hi Bob. This is so-and-so. Did you get the email I sent you? And then the next day it sends another email, here's a video, get to know our practice. The next thing here is a list of frequently asked questions. All of this automation can happen without the practitioner having to lift a finger. Just set it up one time and once it's up and running, then that system keeps doing marketing for you and nurturing and loving on your leads without human intervention. So super cool looking to go high level or another marketing automation program like that.

Yeah, I heard a statistic, something like 80% of most practices don't follow up on leads that have come in and patients who actually are interested. If they don' get them the very first time they stop following up, but an automated system will take care of that and allow you to send as many follow-ups automatically. So great. Exactly. The old way of doing websites that I did back in, you know, between 1999 and well, about 2020 or so, is you have a form on your website, people fill it out, and you click submit.

What happens? That information gets emailed to somebody on you team, most likely the nice young lady who works at the front desk, whose job is to answer the phone and check people in and out. They're not a marketer. Right. There not necessarily a salesperson. Sure. And so what happens if the email gets lost? opportunities gone, you know, if it doesn't deliver. What happens if the person at the front desk is out today and somebody's, who doesn' normally work there, handles the desk? They're not going to know what to do.

There's so many ways that you can lose a lead, but if you implement a marketing automation solution like Go High Level, the system will automatically drip

Automation, Lead Follow-Up, and Closing Remarks 27:00

and love on them with text messages and all that, with emails. You can even have it record a voicemail message. Hi, this is Dr. Bob so-and-so and thanks for filling out the form on our website. I encourage you to do X, Y, and Z and then schedule an appointment with our... Whatever it can be an audio message and that can get triggered five minutes after somebody fills out your form and it goes straight into the voicemail on their cell phone. So lots of cool things that. Can be done, but if you don't jump on it right away, as you've just mentioned, most likely you're going to lose the opportunity to bring them aboard.

as a new patient to your practice. And when it comes down to it, you spend so much time, money and effort and aggravation sometimes on your marketing, so that when a lead finally comes in and the human on the other side doesn't deal with it quickly enough, um, You've lost and it's just like throwing your money out the window. So we don't want to sell the sense in the world. Steven Schwartz, that's all the time we have today. Thank you so. We really appreciate you. That's another edition of Dr. Talks and we will see you next time.

If you found this episode valuable, please consider hitting the like, subscribe, and leave a review. It really helps others find the show. And if you're ready to get known, get booked, or get more patients now, visit DrTalks.com forward slash connect to sign up for free and start getting booked on podcasts today. We'll see you next time.