149 – How to Rack up Winning SEO Strategies to boost your Medical Practice profits by 5X

MATT COFFY: So we’re gonna do an SEO Case Study/Overview here. This is a very interesting story. So I’ve got Ivan on with me, who’s the head of our SEO and we are just absolutely killing it for our local clients. They are beyond happy with the results. And in fact, I think they’re getting too good results. What do you think, Ivan?

IVAN JURAS: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes that can happen.

MATT: Right. So, they’re getting flooded. We’ve actually had some of our clients say that, you know, look they can’t take any more patients. And I think that’s an indicative of when you start to get really good SEO going, that you look at them and some of the derivatives of what this can do for a business. And I think we’re a benefactor. All of our leads come from our SEO. A lot of our clients who work with us have really good, you know, multi- hundred thousand dollar practices running just off of SEO. So, let’s talk about this. We’ll do a couple of case studies. So urgent care. Talk to me a little bit about what’s going on here. Let’s show some examples so we can see what, you know, the big difference is between a real SEO plan as opposed to what we see out in the market, which is, I think just a lot of fakery. And I think we’re actually one of the only customer/relationship where we try and help people with understanding this. So this is what this podcast is about .

IVAN: Yeah. So, this client, their name is Walk-In Dermatology and they’re an urgent care dermatologist in Long Island, New York. So, what we did for them is we basically made them rank for every possible version of urgent care dermatology. It was same day dermatology, walk- in dermatology, and so on and so on. And what’s interesting about this result, particular result is that you know, they pushed everyone out of the map pack and they’re ranking, just as a knowledge graph. Right. So, they have the knowledge. There’s a… when you type in urgent care dermatology and you are located on this address, right somewhere on Long Island, you will actually get their knowledge graph instead of the results in the map pack. So, we were able to push all other competitors out of the map pack. And we were only, we were able to rank this client only and they’re getting so much traffic that they can’t even handle. They can’t handle the demand, right. So, they’re literally full and booked. I don’t know how many weeks or months upfront. So, if you type in any different like permutation of the word, like ‘urgent care dermatology near me’, you will see their knowledge graph pop up, which is just amazing. This is the best piece of real estate you can possibly have.

MATT: Literally, it’s like the key to the castle. If you can do this for your main terms, your knowledge panel, which is the Google my Business, map listing full, you know, placard here, you literally own the territory. And we do this for a couple of different clients in different industries. So, let’s take a look under the hood of what this really means. Can you show some of the things that this represents?

IVAN: So, yeah. So, for example, we have another client. This is the same client, right. So, this is… This here is a tool that shows you where you are ranking currently based on the searcher’s position, right. So, this is Long Island, right. You can, wherever you are in this location, in this square you know, you were ranking number one. If your location is at the center, wherever the person is searching from, you will appear as a number one result. So that’s the Walk-in Dermatology client. The second client is…

MATT: I just have to say before you get to that, do you happen to have that visibility in ahrefs that we could show somebody what that does, what it looks like in ahrefs? of their…

IVAN: No. No. Unfortunately, for this particular thing, ahrefs doesn’t do a local right?

MATT: No I know, but I meant just their organic traffic anyway.

IVAN: Their organic traffic yeah. This is their organic traffic.

MATT: Yeah. So what I meant as in beyond the map location coming up and flooding them with ridiculous amounts of business, I mean, it’s to a point where they just basically said, “Stop it,” you know. Their natural traffic’s picked up and you can see they’ve gone from when they started this business back in mid-February to just skyrocketing. It just keeps going up and up and up. And we expect this to be thousands and thousands of organic traffic. You know as we sort of…

IVAN: Yeah. This is where we pick them up. Right. Right in this, during this COVID bump down, this is where we picked them up and they just skyrocketed. Right. So…and look at their domain rating. People tell you that domain rating is really important, like the overall authority of the website. But if you give Google the right signals, this is not even a factor, because you have to keep in mind that ahrefs is just a company and they’re doing their own approximations on what Google thinks is important and is not important. And although this has a high correlation with ranking, you can see that this is not the Holy Grail of ranking. You know, it’s not just about pounding the website with links. There’s much more to it than just that, right. Then if you want to see like what they’re ranking for, we can go to organic searches. Like, they’re literally have looked at how many rankings they have. 1200 rankings. Right. And if we go, if we push like top 10 results, they have like 200 – more than 200 page one results. And these are not small terms. Like these are like, highly, like dermatology urgent care. These are highly commercial search terms. So yeah. So that’s this client, right.

MATT: Yeah, exactly. And they literally told us they have no ability to handle any more patients. They said they just, there’s just no way to do it that they would have… they’re literally building another building, which will not be available until next year to support the growth. And it’s interesting to be in this conversation because, you know, we see this all the time. Let’s go take a look at another client.

IVAN: Yeah, sure. So, the second client… okay. So, this is a non-medical client, but this is also very interesting, right. So, for a long time, they were nowhere to be seen. And then just suddenly, you know, on the May 5th update that Google did, right. We were just patient here. And we knew that, you know, the content marketing and all the effort that we’re doing is going to pay off one day or the other. And this thing just skyrocketed. I mean, this is from 300 searches through 300 visitors all the way to 2.5k. Crazy!

MATT: So, this is the type of stuff where patience in SEO paid off. And we have a lot of clients who we work with and it takes a lot of convincing to say, you know, if you just let us do our work, inevitably you’ll be rewarded. And it always pays out. We see it with us, for PracticeBloom, and what we’ve done with our business, how it’s grown by SEO alone for its content and strategy. So, let’s move into the next phase where we can, so maybe one client that’s really doing some interesting things.

IVAN: So let’s look at the New Jersey Center for CoolSculpting. So, this is a client. This is actually a sub site of one of our clients, and he’s doing an amazing… He’s doing amazingly well. So just for the term ‘CoolSculpting’, basically the whole Southwestern part and the center is all his, right. This is a bit problematic but this is because it’s conflicting with New York. So that’s something.

MATT: Well that makes sense. What’s interesting here is that this client came back to us after stopping SEO. Right. And said, “How do we get back to where we were”. Because we knew and he knew. I think it is in his heart that, you know, the business, especially when you’re talking about these operations of CoolSculpting, you know, $4000 potential opportunity per client, you know, we’d gone to a certain point where he was so successful and then he gave up because you know of COVID and all this stuff. And then, you know, ‘COVID comes and goes’ is a thought process. Right. I almost feel like, you know, people are part of like this world in their head like, ” Oh well, there’s… the clients are not going to come.” But then we realize, “Holy cow, we started it back up again,” and everything starts to push again. And it’s amazing.

IVAN: And this is just one term, right. So, if you search New Jersey, they’re ranking number one for everything. Almost like just a couple of spots, like a couple of locations. CoolSculpting NJ, which is actually the keyword with most search volume, they’re literally dominating everything. Right. Number one, even crossing the New York zone. Right. Which is crazy, right. Like New Jersey CoolSculpting probably. Yeah. Number one for everything, NJ CoolSculpting also, number one for everything, just a couple of number two spots. So he’s literally dominating the whole-

MATT: This represents hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know what I mean? And we watched as, “Okay look, we have to keep it going.” I mean SEO is also, it’s not like a one and doner. It’s just like anything else. It’s like, it’s marketing, it’s content. It’s consistently giving Google what it wants. And so, I think what we find is that people get so successful that they basically say, well, I don’t need it anymore. But that’s not really true. What ends up happening is that you just have to, like, it’s part of like life. It’s like, you just don’t stop providing value to your clients. Right. So, the same thing with Google, you just don’t stop providing the value to Google. Cause someone else will be right behind you, doing what we’re doing so. You know.

IVAN: The competition never sleeps. Right. And it’s also the danger when people actually… they get so much traffic and leads that they think they can stop the whole program. And they think they will do well. All right. Without us or without us doing any support work, but that’s just not true because there’s always a new update, you know, just lurking around the corner. And that’s something that, I mean, that’s really important to, you know, to be able to keep, to be able to constantly do the same thing over and over again. When you find a winning formula, it’s an ongoing process and you as a client, you will always get your ROI back. Always, you know, and according to our calculations, SEO is always somewhere at the top when it comes to ROI.

MATT: Of course, because there’s no real cost laden in there that’s going to be having to relate to a different set of tract of clients that get pushed into this because of ad spend, you know. That’s a variable because you’re just basically spending, but when you stop, everything disappears completely, where, you know, this is obviously you need to keep some maintenance going. But I think at the end of the day, our clients who are smart, who really want to work with us… boy, I’ll tell you they are making hay. And they love the fact that we’re doing this stuff for them with a value of really 10x-ing most of the spent that they’re coming out of report later.

IVAN: Yeah. We’re seeing somewhere around like 10x ROI. It’s really like, almost unheard of. Right. And it’s on a consistent basis. It’s not luck or gambling. So, another client, you know, another client is a… they’re a plastic surgery practice in Michigan. So you know when they came here, they had a poor website when they came over to us, you know, they had the poor, completely like devastated rankings and their website was in a terrible mess. So, we rebuilt it for them. And we were actually ranking really well around the whole area, or you know, so they’re really happy about it. Because they’re finally starting to show up for like, for example, the term nose job. It’s a… I don’t know how much even, like it costs probably 5 to 6 or $10,000. I don’t know the cost is. So, they’re also very happy, you know, and their rankings, their organic rankings are growing skyrocketing, too. So, another client is a podiatrist in New Jersey. I mean, just look at the chart, right. We started working somewhere in the January 2020. And it just, you know, just consistently; there are no magic bullets. There is no like one trick that can do this. It’s all about giving Google what it wants and giving it on a consistent basis and they will reward you.

MATT: That’s another 10x that even looks like it’s, you know, one of those things where you 10x to traffic and then right behind it follows all of the activity which you’d expect. Which is that they get 10x the amount of phone calls, 10x the amount of inquiries, 10x the amount of activity related to people finding them, you know, in other spots too, because Google is sort of a, you know, it’s a conduit as well. And the people will go check out their reviews on Facebook. And then they’ll go to the, you know, the other parts of the internet where they can test and see, you know, this is the right podiatrist. Do they, you know…it creates such a different mindset when people are being educated, not from an ad, but from a listing that they find because they’re searching and they find it organically, they know that the person hasn’t paid for this, you know, specific… so they’re basically in their head saying, “Well, Google must be putting the right person in front of me.”

MATT: Cause that’s what Google does. And we all know human psychological behavior is based off of like, “Hey I need something to get this thing done and whatever it is, where do I find it? I go to Google.” I don’t trust maybe the ads because people are put up there and I don’t trust them. So, I’ll go to the first organic or go to the first Annapolis thing, because that’s what Google is telling me to do. And boy, working wonders with some of these people. And we’ve had so many great compliments with our clients and so much, really positive feedback on doing good SEO strategy. Is there anything else you wanted to show, Ivan?

IVAN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that’s for example. This is one of the clients. This is one of our biggest clients. I just wanted to show you like, this is September 1 to September 18. So, two weeks. Yeah. Maybe a bit more, right. So, this is the dashboard that everyone gets, you know, especially our high tier clients. And this is everything you need to know. Right. So how many visitors you get, look at this: 223 appointment requests in two weeks, right. You know, 30 contacts, 70 new first time callers. And this is the estimated lifetime revenue, right.

MATT: A couple of weeks. So, this client’s going to probably push close to 400,000 in revenue this month from SEO. It’s just bananas. Like, you know, this is why we try and tell people, like, you’ve got to consider this as part of your strategy. You know don’t go thinking that this is just a walk in the park with a couple of hundred dollars. Do the right thing and get your stuff so motivated so that people, you know, get to a certain level of understanding within the sphere of influence you have in your local area that you can convince them with natural traffic, good content, educating, and all the things that you would expect if you were in front of an audience, if you were on a stage, or if you’re a practitioner and you’re trying to give a lecture and you’re trying to convince people. I mean, these are the things that you do online and it makes a huge difference.

IVAN: Yep. Yep. Organic traffic and organic engagement. I mean, in the long run you can’t go wrong with it. You just can’t. Because as Matt said, it’s very important for a person when they’re trying to find your practice that it was organic, that they can immediately start trusting you more than if it were just an ad.

MATT: Yep. Very good. Thank you, Ivan. I appreciate all the effort that the team does and you know, we’ll hopefully show more of these examples on a monthly basis. We’re going to try and do this more appropriately for individual industries and niches so that you can understand what we’ve been doing in each segment. So, this is great stuff. Thanks.