Whether you feel your organization is ahead of the game or worry it is falling far behind, I invite you to join SEO expert Jon Silver and me as we discuss how to:

• Create winning SEO strategies that scale for hospital systems, multilocation practices, and other enterprise-level websites
• Dominate the first page of Google for the most crucial search phrases
• Adapt to continuous changes in Google’s algorithm
• Develop content that wins approval from Google’s bots and healthcare consumers
• Navigate the challenging world of local listings, especially your Google My Business pages

Stewart Gandolf
CEO, Healthcare Success

Jonathan Silver
SEO Lead & Digital Account Director

Advanced Healthcare SEO*

* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Hi everybody. I’m Stewart Gandolf, CEO of Healthcare Success. We have another big audience today, including some people we know and lots that we haven’t met yet. Looking forward to doing this. This happens to be one of my very favorite topics to talk about. I love SEO, it’s a core to our company, and I’ll describe that in just a few moments, but I think you’ll get the passion of my attitude towards this topic.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Who is this webinar for? This webinar, we called this one Advanced Healthcare SEO and so we’re going to cover a lot of advanced things. We have some multi-location healthcare practices, a number of DSOs, Dental Service Organizations with multiple practices. PPMs, Private Practice Management companies or a professional private practice companies with various medical specialties and other specialties. Some big and small addiction treatment center groups online, hospitals, health plans, a couple of people from pharma and device, and we also have some individual practices as well.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, one thing that’s important, SEO is such a deep topic, and it’s going to feel like a race today. I can’t teach you everything I know in 45 minutes and with Jon here. In fact, even when we do these at our seminars in Las Vegas, we do a couple of times a year, under normal circumstances, we dedicate about two hours to this topic. So, I will be covering a lot of ground really quickly because I want to give you as much value as we can. Please recognize that if you’re an individual practice or a multi-location national leader, these principles apply to everybody. We’ll talk about how this applies and we’re going to really reach both audiences. This will become more clear as we get into this.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, we’re going to start off with introductions. Just a couple of moments about who we are for those of you that are new to us and why this matters. We’re going to talk about some of the SEO fundamentals as well as more enterprise SEO throughout this whole program. And, we’ve allowed some time at the end for some Q & A. So, we’ll be going through all of this material today.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, in the introduction phase again, I’m Stewart Gandolf. I’ve been doing marketing for about 20 years and in healthcare, I’ve been doing actually more than that overall. Done a ton of speaking and writing on this topic, SEO, again it’s one of my favorite, but I speak about lots of things. I really have worked for a thousand clients over the years and I grew up in Ohio and moved out to California afterwards, landed out in San Diego. Looking forward to working with you today.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Today, I love being able to share my webinars with esteemed colleagues and Jon is someone I’m super excited about. Again, SEO is a core of our business and I was very pleased to recruit him and land him recently. So Jon, do you want to give a little bit about your background?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Sure. Thank you Stewart. I’m the SEO and digital account director for Healthcare Success. I’ve been here now a little over a month. It’s been a wild ride and a lot of fun. I have over 10 years of experience in digital marketing, search engine optimization. More recently, I’ve spent the last over four years working with specific dental services, which I think is, at about this point, the number two dental service organization in the country with something along the lines of 900 locations both from east and west coast.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I’ve created managed campaigns across multiple healthcare verticals, many of which you… Stewart mentioned in the prior slide and I’ve led a number of digital marketing campaigns across a couple of different leading digital agencies. He mentioned I have an MA from Cal State University in Long Beach. That was in history, so I wasn’t originally planning on becoming an SEO, I don’t think that anyone goes to school for SEO, right? But that’s where I landed and it’s been a lot of fun.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Great. And so we’ve always prided ourselves as an agency having a strong SEO team. Jon brings to us just the real-world experience of working with how do you SEO, 900 locations, right? And it’s funny, some of you may know, our history goes back with Pacific Dental. For many years, one of our strategists worked with the founder back when they had five locations. Now they have 900 and they’re still doing some of the things we taught them way back when.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
At any rate, welcome Jon. Jon’s going to be providing the color commentary, I’ll be talking about a lot of the concepts and Jon’s going to tell you, “Okay, how did that apply in my life when we have many locations or a larger institution.” Again, these concepts apply to everybody, but just executed differently. Obviously, when you have hundreds of locations or even dozens of locations versus one.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Our agency, we work nationally. It’s funny, we love this photo because we do love Southern California, however we work nationally. Most of our clients are actually back east. We are a full-service agency, so while today we’re talking about SEO primarily, we really are a truly integrated digital first performance agency. Clients hire us because they’re looking for results. We are healthcare specialists, we truly are on the channel and again, we are all about results.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
For those of you that are new to us on the line, we work with tons of different… These are some of the clients we’re working with now or in the recent past. Multi-location businesses, we actually wrote an e-book about multi-location healthcare marketing and also by the way, we just completed a webinar last week about multi-location healthcare marketing. So, if you’re interested in the webinar from last week or the eBook, just send us an email after this is over and we can make sure you get the copy of those. Those are both super strong assets.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Also work in the hospital space a lot, and even pharma and device. This is fun, we joke all the time, waking up in the middle of the night asking to speak about ophthalmology, psychiatry, internal medicine, hearing, urgent care. We have worked with all of these specialties. Every single one. So, we do this in our sleep, we love what we do.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
This is something, just the last thing before we get into the meat here, I think is fun. I still remember one day I spoke for Invisalign at their annual sales meeting and the lady there gave this great introduction, “Stewart’s done this, he’s done that, he’s done this, he’s done that, but most importantly, he’s number one on Google.” Which to this day I think is a fun story because that’s how important being number on Google is. And so, the reason why I mentioned we practice what we preach as an agency, I’m sure there are probably people out there with more… As an agency, they have more visitors, but I don’t know of any. So, every month we have about 51,000 visitors on our website that are coming to us from Google. We’re super heavy SEO and that’s exactly how I founded this company.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
14 years ago in 2006, I thought, “Hey, I wonder if I could start an agency with just a website and SEO?” So again, this is something I love, it’s in my blood, I jumped for joy when Matt Cutts announced the disavow tool at PubCon one year. The SEO geeks in the room on our webinar will know what that means. I thought, “How did I ever get here?” For example, one of our other SEOs used to work for Bruce Clay, I had been through the Bruce Clay training, so you won’t see too many CEOs that embrace SEO like I do. I just love this topic.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So anyway, let’s get into the fundamentals. And again, we’ll talk… Even if you’re from one of the super sophisticated SEOs that are on the line today, recognize that Jonathan will be applying even the fundamentals to what that means to your world. So, we’ll try to make this work for everybody.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
This is a favorite thing I remember from being… I was in first grade when I heard this. First or second grade. My gym teacher said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” I’m like, “That’s dumb.” Then I found out later it’s a Vince Lombardi quote. So, that’s how Vince Lombardi would start every season, at the basics, the fundamentals. And the fundamentals with SEO are really important because you’re not going to be successful if you’re worrying about things, sophisticated things like schema and all these other things you can get into if you don’t have good content. So, we see that a lot of times. People try to make up for missing the fundamentals by just going with the ultra sophisticated stuff or the more sophisticated things. If you don’t have the fundamentals going, it’s not going to be effective.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So SEO, just for clarity, I do have to do a bit of remedial work here just to get everybody on the same page. The SEO, essentially is the process of getting traffic from organic or natural search engine results, meaning you’re not paying Google any money for this, usually you have to pay people to get you there, but you’re not paying Google directly for this. This is something that Google is giving to you essentially as a free service from their point-of-view. You can’t write to Google and complain that you’re not showing up. All you can do is say, “Do you want to be listed or not?” That’s really the extent of it. One of the things we talk about a lot with the difference here is with SEO, you can pray for clicks with SEO or you can pay for clicks with paid search. We’ll describe that in a minute.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
When we talk about Google, there’s a reason. There are for sure other search engines out there. I double checked this because I hadn’t looked at this recently. About a year and a half ago, Google had two thirds of the audience, now it’s up to 88%. So they are just the dominant beast, and I can’t think of any time when we, as we’re building SES strategy, where we do something that works for Bing, but doesn’t work for Google. Google is, you try to get Bing too, but if you had to make a decision, it’s pretty clear where you’re going to spend most of your energy. Google has the vast majority of search engine share.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Again, for those of you that are new to this category, I’m going to fly through this because this is an advanced SEO webinar, but just to catch us up. I mentioned earlier, pay per clicks versus pray. Up there at the top, those are what we call pay per click or paid search ads. That’s a whole other webinar, no time to discuss that at all. That’s a science in and of itself. Number two, down below there, Google My Business, we call that local search or we lovingly know that as the Map Pack. We will describe that today. That is a really, really important search engine optimization. We will be talking about that today.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
And then, the natural search results, that’s also super important and you’ve seen these before. Every search looks a little different. These are kind of how our base lays out. Notice on the desktop how that worked out. This is above the fold, we call this. I was at least able on my computer to see the full Map Pack and then you get into natural search results. On mobile, which is hugely important, we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. The paid ads get more real estate because you just have less real estate to work for, so paid ads are even more important on the mobile. And then you get into the Map Pack and then you can see, it takes a long time to get to the listings on mobile.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, one of the things that we are going to talk about here is to keep in mind that winning on Google is always changing. The rules to win on Google are always changing. And so, Jon, do you want to talk about this a little? About the history of this and why we care?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Sure. Yeah, I distinctly remember in 2011 when Panda came out and some of the ripples that caught, I was working at an agency and some of the shifts we had to make. I could kind of get into each one of these, ultimately the important thing to learn from this and all the changes that have happened is that it’s been a steady change to improve the search results. The quality of the search results and try and understand what people are actually searching for. So, a lot of the more recent updates, the BERT and Rank-Brain updates have a lot to do with interpreting and understanding what you’ve been actually trying to search for and delivering a better result. Penguin, Panda, that a lot has to do with improving the quality of which the algorithm and how they select things to be ranking.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
It’s been a lot of big improvements over the last 10 years and more recently, I think that applies to one of the industries that we’re talking with right now, is the MEDIC update which had kind of a big impact for probably many of you, if any of you have been watching your analytics over 2018, 2019, kind of an up and down a little bit as they’re updating their quality guidelines and that had a lot to do with EAT, which we’ll get into as well as some of the your life, your money type search results. So again, we’ll talk more about that, but it’s again, the primary thing to remember is that it’s been a steady climb to improve the overall quality of search results for the user.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
One of the things when I was… The last time I was at the Google campus up in Silicon Valley talking to the engineers, it just reminds me, we talk about this all the time about how just insanely important user experience and relevancy is to them. And so, they’re very public about this, which is kind of their culture. It’s almost a religion about being relevant results because the entire billions and billions and millions of dollars, the vast majority of it is coming from paid search and that’s coming from having a good user experience and a good search experience and being incredibly trust-worthy results.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I should add on MEDIC, which is the nickname that was given, Google views healthcare is particularly important because the stakes are so high. So, Google has a special interest in making the healthcare results credible, particularly in this world we’re in today, credibility is not always assured. So, it’s very, very important to Google to have credibility and there’s various niches where they’re even more focused on providing the best possible results because the information out there hasn’t always been so good. So they really are looking for ways of looking for authority and expertise and trust to know these are legitimate results.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, as we drill down into this, on-page, off-page and local SEO, that’s really how a lot of people in the business will refer to this. It’s how we think about it. Again, I’m going to talk about some of the fundamentals and Jon, please jump in with the enterprise level point-of-view.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, on the page means essentially, it’s things that you control on your website. Stuff that’s directly on the website itself. And this is where really you always begin and we’d be completely remiss if we jumped straight into the fun and sexy stuff or us nerds, Jon, fun, sexy, technical stuff without talking about content. And really, from the very first times I began learning about SEO back when this was a budding field, we’d go to conferences and it’s like, “Well, it’s all about content.” And so there’s a lot of varieties of content here.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I was just showing a few of them, these are probably the main ones. You have website pages, blog posts, eBooks, video, podcasts. Frequent longtime subscribers to my blog with note I give you all those things, right? Blog posts, we have web pages, we do eBooks, we do video, sometimes podcasts, webinars. All this stuff. These are basics. Jon, tell us about the enterprise level. Some of the important things for our viewers to know.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, so at the enterprise level, this is often times something that can be very difficult. Obviously we want to make sure that content is unique, and we’ll talk more about that later in the presentation here however, sometimes stamping things out for different types of doctors, different types of locations, you might run into situations where things are getting a little bit cookie cutter. I encourage everyone on the call here to try to find creative ways to come up with unique and really interesting content. Understanding your users, understanding your patients and finding ways to make your site not just this kind of business card for the business, but also a resource.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Utilizing things like white papers, blog posts, eBooks, videos if possible. All of this creates an over arching content ecosphere that they can engage with. It builds trust, obviously increases your authority and shows your expertise. Again, getting back to EAT. It’s something you really want to spend time on. I know it can be difficult when you have, let’s say, 900 locations, but it is a worthwhile endeavor.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, we talk about the technical SEO, super important here. It’s funny, titles again, I don’t have time to go into detail today, but title tags are essentially what each page you’re titling, is titled, there’s no specific way you want to do that. Description tags are theoretically the tags that you want Google to show in the search engine results page. Mobile responsiveness we’ll talk about a little bit later. Alt tags are when you mouse over a photo and you see a little word coming up, that’s essentially saying that it’s describing, in theory at least for the disabled, what is on that photo to interpret that.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
We get into H1, H2 and so for headlines and specific way of coding. Links with anchor text means having keywords in the anchor text. The navigation, the footer, link structure, this is an example of what we mean by link structure. Healthcaresuccess.com/seminar/agenda, so the URLs need to be designed both for humans and for machines. XMO site map, security, the higher levels of security, how good of a URL you have. These are all, this is everyday stuff, and again, Jon, I think the pros on the line are very familiar with these things, but maybe give us some insights from what you experience when you’re dealing with 900 locations, some of the challenges that you come up with.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah. Obviously a lot of this stuff we would consider table stakes. Best practices, right? Things that you really need to be doing to make sure that your site is in its best possible shape. When you work at a scale, some of this stuff becomes… There’s limitations. You might run into situations where you’re getting title tags punched out across dozens and hundreds and thousands of pages and making those unique can be difficult. Similarly, alt tags when content is being potentially, there is a workflow of editors and publishers throughout your CMS and getting everyone to be on the same page about to utilize alt tags to enable both the visually impaired to understand what those images are, but also Google because Google is still just a dumb robot. It can’t understand what images usually are, so you have to tell them.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
These are things that you really have to be aware of when you’re working at scale because the more you have to do things in large amounts, the fewer requirements you’re allowed. Make sure that when working with your development teams and working with your CMS managers that a lot of these things are hitting a checklist. You’re saying, “Hey, listen, Semantic markup is really important for Google to understand what the content is, the hierarchy of the information. Do we have that set up? Is there something here that is enabling us to ensure that we are wrapping H1s, H2s, H3s and what have you around the content.”

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Similarly with a footer, navigation, all of the things that you might get into that have something to do with the way Google crawls and understands your site. Don’t let that go just because it’s difficult because rolling it out across 900 or 1,000 or even more than that properties online becomes difficult.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
One of the things that’s interesting about this, Jon, is that when I’m… It’s funny, there are SEO is such a hard category because so many people, unless you’re a professional, it’s hard for people to judge horse flesh, right? And so, so often we’ll have businesses come reach out to us and you mentioned table stakes a moment ago, and we’ll do a quick audit and we’ll notice their title tags don’t even exist or they have the same title tag across every page. They’ve been paying for SEO and they haven’t done the… Whoever they’re working with, is either just outright stealing or 100% incompetent. Because, to not have title tags on a site done correctly is kind of like a surgeon not scrubbing up before surgery. It doesn’t matter what you do after that. I just stop the audit. I’m looking at somebody I’m auditing, if they don’t have title tags, I just say forget it. It’s crap.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Huh?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Usually there’s a much deeper issue. If you’re missing title tags, it’s almost like you know that almost everything else is probably not going to be set up correctly. It’s one of those things, it’s always an awkward conversation for us when we meet with a client who is feeling mediocre to okay about their current provider. Yeah, it can be a tough conversation.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Design for mobile first, we’re not going to read every bullet on here. I can just tell you that obviously we have numbers of clients that we work with and with overall, I would say two thirds of searches that are for our clients are coming from mobile. On more consumer friendly kinds of services, even a much higher percentage, 70 to 80%. Things like cancer, reproductive endocrinology, alcohol, drug and rehab, maybe 60% instead of 75-80 because those are more conclave searches, but even for something like alcohol, drug, rehab. You’re talking 10s of thousands of dollars, they still tend to be more mobile than they are desktop. Jon, any comments on this one?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, I mean in healthcare, there’s going to be different types of research that patient customers might be doing. In commoditized markets, dentistry is a really great example, right? That’s one of those things that you have to assume almost all of your patients in some form have tried to access your websites through mobile and what we found at my prior experience, is that it was something like 80 to 90%. It was a crazy high number. That forced us to think differently about how we were designing things. A lot of the times in the past, this is just history because we’ve been working this way for so long, we would mock thing up on a desktop format. We had to change our thinking. We had to turn it upside down and say, “Listen, I don’t want to see desktop. I want to see what it looks like mobile first, then we can go back and retro fit it as we need to.”

Jonathan Silver, MA:
You really need to start thinking about it in those terms moving forward because even those non-commoditized healthcare markets, everyone is able to access things through their mobile device and generally will be moving forward.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah. Another thing we see a lot and this is a bane to a lot of businesses is site speed. Google has been more than clear that they want to see site speed. They want to see mobile responsiveness and they want to see site speed. This is a tool that you can… It’s a free tool that you can go and try this on your own website if you haven’t already, web.dev. It’s a Google tool and I asked prior to this meeting, I asked some of the attendees to volunteer their URL for a quick scan and this is just one of the ones that volunteered. So, you can see performance is speed and that’s 11. 11, as you might guess in the red on a scale of one to 100 is bad.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, we see this all the time and again, it is super challenging and for the sake of speed here because we have so much to cover in so little time here, but Jon, is that common thing at the enterprise level?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
It’s completely common at the enterprise level and it’s usually silly things too sometimes. It isn’t immediately obvious. They’re telling us certain things about, “Oh, we want to asynchronously load the site. Maybe load some of this stuff to make it interactive before it’s fully loaded.” But in past times, I found where people were having us or the team was having us upload packets, huge font packets with arabic and other things like that, that weren’t being used for the site, and as a result, it was slowing down the site by seconds. You have to really take a deep dive. There’s things that it’s going to tell you to do on these types of tools, but you have to dig even deeper on the individual packets your patients are downloading or your users are downloading and find out, “Is there anything here we can cut back on?” A lot of the times you’ll find that the creative, the fonts, the images, these are things that you can slice back quite a bit and provide the exact same user experience.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah, again, these are fundamentals. Again, it’s not that it’s easy necessarily, but if you’re not doing this, there’s no point in going to the other stuff. If you’ve got a big speed problem, we need to fix it. Even on WordPress in particular for a lot of practices, they still have WordPress. We use WordPress a lot. It’s not the best, but it’s performance. There’s work-arounds technically for this and if you site speed is slow, it’s a problem.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, let’s talk about off-page. Those were all briefly, again, we could have spoken about that topic for an hour. So, we’re going to talk about off-page SEO here. That means these are things that you’re not directly on your website. Another way to look at it is off website. These are things beyond your immediate control. The first thing is, I want to tell a quick story. Again, there’s an SEO nerd very deep inside of me. I actually read this book, how Google started, what the story was there and the take-away that I tell audiences about this is Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the insight they had, what made the billions and billions and billions of dollars on Google was one simple insight. That the most important website… Oh, I’m sorry. The most important research papers are later linked or recited by others.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, in other words, if you write a research paper and nobody ever sites it, it’s probably not so important, but if the leading scientists come back and everybody sites it as a fundamental, then that has credibility because other is not outside of your control or siting it. So the major thing they came away with was, instead of having just loads of directories trying to figure out democracy, it’s more of a meritocracy and the idea was that if you have lots of links, then you much be more valuable. Now, naturally black hat SEOs figured this out very quickly, and by the way, if you go back to the original Google path and it talks about this, they became link farms and all kinds of spammy bad habits and so today, Google’s not stupid, they are very good at determining, is the site that’s referring, is it popular? Is it an authority site? Does it have authority in the field? Is it relevant?

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
And then, they also consider are the links fresh? In other words, links from 20 years ago or 10 years ago aren’t as good as they are if they’re new now. The anchor text we referred to earlier, the quantity of links all these matter, but the key there is to earn them. So, to have really good content and that comes back to that over and over again. And so, one of the things, I’ll just give a quick example, a number of years ago I was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal and the AMA about physician liaisons because for some reason, this had broke on USA Today and it was all this controversy. Who knew that private practices essentially had drug reps out selling to primary care offices to try to motivate referrals to their business.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Anyway, what was interesting about that was I was sited, my name and my company was sited, but not linked directly to The Wall Street Journal, but that’s good, right? That’s nice. But, with the AMA, they didn’t want to link to us directly either, but I said, “Hey, I have a special report that might be great for your doctors, relevant to this topic.” And they said, “Great, we’ll link to that.” So, there I got a link from the AMA. So, that’s a way… I love that story because it’s just a way to get really good back links from obviously credible sources, relevant sources. It’s not easy though, is it Jon.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
No, it’s really not. It’s an effort in itself, it almost a PR effort to some extent. You’re really trying to sell your brand in an online space, so a lot of ways that we’ve done that in the past had a lot to do with relationships that currently exist, these partnerships that you have and how you’ve provided resources to them in the past and sometimes it’s an I pat your back, you pat mine type situation. You really do want to look for those opportunities where it’s clear that they’re referencing you, but they haven’t provided a referral link in some way. It’s sort of best practice at this point. If you are mentioning another organization or you’re mentioning some resources from another place, you really want to site your source. That is what you would use in those discussions.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I think if you have anything like that currently happening, but there isn’t any referral link, it doesn’t necessarily always have to be what we would call a do-follow link. Even a no-follow link has, to some extent, some value. I encourage you guys to work with your partners and make sure that there is some kind of reciprocal link back to your online properties.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah, it’s funny, a couple of weeks ago I did, some of you may have been there, a webinar with Binary Fountain sharing some data. Sure enough, I checked and they hadn’t linked to me. I said, “Hey, can you guys link to me?” “Oh, of course.” And so, there’s an example of we had a good partnership, we’re friends, we provided a good experience for their audience as well as our own, but we link to each other because we’re both credible sources and that’s a good thing.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Local SEO, again, that’s another weekend seminar we can talk about that, but today, for the purpose of 45 minutes, we’re going to go pretty quickly here. Local SEO goes back to when we talked about the Google Map Pack. This really what the focus is most local SEOAs however there’s many, many sites, not quite as important as Google directory, but local SEO we’re focusing today mostly on the Map Pack. So, the Map Pack to show up in My Google business listing, and again, you’ve seen all the… Typically there’s three business listed on the search results. If you look up doctor near me, it’ll see, in most cases, there’s going to be the Google Map Pack, and the question is, how do you get there? That’s super valuable real estate.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Data varies all across the board. I don’t think there’s one single authority, but a lot of times I’ve seen numbers like 19-20%. 10 to 20% would be the paid search ads, where the clicks happen. Those are high intent so those could be really good clicks. But, maybe up to half of the main searches are Map Pack related. So, whether directing those three businesses or they click for more results. Map Pack is vitally important to this. Now, it’s important to note that the Map Pack or the Google My Business team is different from the one that works in the natural results. They actually have different algorithms however, they share data. They’re related. Doing a lot of the stuff we talked about on the website helps your Map Pack and vice versa.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
For the purpose of today, and again, I’m not going to read all these bullets, but I’ll just talk about some of the most important stuff. The citations are the online references and the key thing here, we talk about this in the trade in NAP. N-A-P and that means the name, address and phone number. So often it is inconsistent. The name, address and phone number isn’t consistent and I’m going to show an example of that in just a moment. So, the problem is, there’s many data sources online and Google has a really hard time determining what’s real. What’s an authoritative trust. When you have 20 different sources all presumably trust worthy and they all say different things, it’s very, very difficult. And so, Google tends to reward people who make things easy for them and have consistent online citations.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Another couple of things that really matter, and really especially making sure that your Google My Business profiles are claimed, they’re filled out appropriately, all the data that you can put in there the better. So, more photos, details of whether you accept credit cards. As much as you can fill that out as possible and again, this sounds like it’s easy, it’s not. Even for a single location practice, you try to claim your listing and doctor left and now you don’t know what happened to the doctor. That listing is floating out in space, how do you claim that, how do you get it back.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Google will send a postcard to verify you really do own that listing, but your staff thinks it’s junk mail and throws it out or maybe you’re virtual and there is nobody to fill out the postcard, right? So now, imagine that when you have hundreds or even dozens. It can get very, very complex. Making sure you’ve got strong profiles, making sure that you have consistent results, even at a single location is difficult. Multi is hard, right Jon?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, multi-location can be very difficult because what you’re doing is you’re trying to organize thousands and thousands of pieces of data. And what comes into play in an organization with many, many locations is your source of truth, how are you pushing that data, how does it get to where it needs to be and how is that organization then pushing it out to the right locations and making sure that it’s consistent.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Things that don’t get updated very often and cause big problems for organizations are office hours or which doctors or medical professionals exist in those locations. And so, it’s something that’s worth spending a considerable amount of time to solve. I’ve seen many organizations that don’t get this right and as a result, the impact is downstream with reviews and with unhappy customers and patients. It really can’t be undersold how important it is to get this right, and with organizations I’ve done this for where they started out with manual updates or they found a way… They were doing it, they were trying their best on it and they found ways to automate this process or to connect this through API to whatever tool sets they’re using.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
What they found was a major uptick, just a huge uptick in the amount of views and clicks that they got from Google Map Pack and of course, that can’t be undersold either because any organization has a local business and that is to say if it’s a dental office, doctors office, what have you. That is going to be hugely vital to driving traffic.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah, so a couple of other points before I move on from this. Google loves having you go to a Google property. So many patients now are going straight to this and not even going to the practice’s website. So, think about the power of that. This is an important piece of real estate that you cannot… You can claim, but you can’t truly ever own, is in the hands of somebody else. It’s like having beachfront property that’s a door to your practice that you don’t really own, you can only influence. So it’s a really important factor.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Ratings is something else, before I move on here that’s really important. Google, again, is big on ratings and I may have mentioned in past webinars, when ratings first came out, I used to get interviewed a lot about… Because everyone was like, “Oh my gosh, I can rate doctors like a pizza?” My comment was, “Yeah, get over it because patients love ratings, Google loves ratings. This is not going to go away.” And clearly it has not. Now though, if you’re putting best… If you want to describe that about looking for best doctor near me, how do the ratings matter, Jon?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, so ratings are really important just on a basic level because Google is determining local ranking, to some extent, based on relevance, distance and prominence. And prominence is how often you’re getting reviews, what are people saying about your business and other things around that. But, there’s also this extra piece which is just a nice factoid that I think everyone should know. If you don’t have a four plus star review score overall average on Google My Business, you will not show for searches like top doctor near me. Top dentist near me or best dentist near me or best cardiologist near me. Those searches are only available to those with a four plus star review score average.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Pretty amazing. And one final note here, on your Google, and in particular, Google has admitted or has stated, Google is often very cagey about what is and what is not in the algorithm, but Google has actually come out and said that responding to reviews is a ranking factor. So, good or bad, it’s better to have good reviews, but it’s also, even if you have bad reviews to respond to the reviews because it shows that you’re serious about providing a good user experience.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So again, one of the volunteers, one of the people that signed up for this meeting said, “Hey, I wanted to volunteer my own site as an example.” And I picked the first, they have multiple locations, I picked the first location on the website and we used a little tool here, low and behold, essentially 100% listing inaccuracy. Either there were no listings at all on Yahoo, for example, on MapQuest, Local.com or the names were wrong, they had a doctor in one case, the name of the practice in another case and then they had the practice again, but without the PC. Different addresses on the location and I wish I could say that this was uncommon, but it’s by far the norm.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Then we looked at reviews, in this case none of the ones that this tool pulled up had reviews. So, this is not uncommon at all and today, and we’ll talk about this later. There’s a variety of different… We partner with a number of different companies to help solve this problem. To do this at scale is brutal. We had a few years ago, a leading multi-location oncology business who we still work with to this day, but we had an intern spend about a year of her time trying to get this together for them. It was such a mess. Today the tools are better, but this is something that… And you can look at on our website we have this tool, so if you go to our website there’s… If you go to, I think it says listings under resources. It’s the last pull down. You can do this for yourself, try it. It’s actually on the website. If you’re not sure and you can’t find it, just send us and email and we’ll give you the tool, but it’s very helpful.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Jon, I have to feel for you when you’ve got hundreds of locations and the other day, my daughter was doing a school project, we had to go to a hardware store to get some tools and low and behold, I drove all the way over there, 20 minutes and they were closed. They had not updated their Google Maps. Very unhappy father, let’s put it that way. And my daughter too, she was under a deadline. Is there any magic sauce or is it just a lot of work?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I mean, it is a good amount of work. Again, it starts with that source of truth. You have to make sure that the data that you have internally is accurate because it’s often the case that people are trying to do their best and make it right and the locations just don’t give you the right information. So, whoever’s managing your marketing internally might be working with one hand tied behind their back because they’re just not getting all the good information.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Secondarily, updating this type of information is very, very time expensive. If you go into each individual one of these types of things, that could just be a full time job for one FTE. You’re just having this person updating and managing the profiles. So there’s ways about improving that, but the reality is, it is an important job because it has such an impact on your Google Map Pack and your rankings with Google My Business. It’s worth doing. There are ways to obviously speed this up, these are things that we’re able to do.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Other organizations can do that as well, but we would encourage you to take a run through, take a look at this and then run some searches on your own based on your location. Drop a pin, have your phone nearby, run a search for something. If you’re not showing in the Map Pack and then you go to the map and you’re not even showing in the top 10, you’ve got a problem and you need to start looking at ways of fixing it.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, I mentioned platforms a moment ago. There are platforms out there where you can monitor your reviews, generate reviews, publish reviews, respond, get insights to it. Again, there’s a couple of leading providers we work with depending on the case. This is again another webinar. I’m not going to spend any detail on this, but just know that this can be done. Everything put together in one place and again, we partner with some leading providers there.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
The enterprise SEOs. In our remaining 10 minutes or so we have left before we get to Q & A, we’re going to do this pretty quickly as well, but we want to talk about yet more things that are common. So Jon, I’m going to lead this part here. What Jon and I talk about this and really, at the end of the day, when you get to multi-location practices and businesses, hospital systems and even, I have mentioned pharma and health plans, but this just gets more complex. When you get to the enterprise level, it gets much more complex and on the localized basis, you have competitors for every location, you’ve got data management problems. We talked about reviews and reputation, it’s just critically important to think about scaling. Jon, what’s your 30 seconds on the scaling issue? Any secrets you can share on that?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, scaling issues, man, when you’re starting from something where you maybe start just a few at a time, a lot of the problems with some of these organizations, they started small and then grew very, very big and very quickly and may never really adapted that well to that size. Finding ways to deploy that data in a streamlined and connected way to some of your partners is really one of the key important features.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Also finding ways to include reporting. Online reputation matters in online listings, how do you know when something’s not right? How are you able to bubble that up? Building those reports, building that connectivity to what’s going on at the ground level is really important. You don’t know what’s happening. You could have offices that are offline for months from Google Map Pack’s standpoint. They’re going to see a tremendous drop. Ultimately, it comes back to things I’ve said before. Strong sources of truth internally, finding ways to connect to partners or to some of these tool sets in automated ways, and delivering that content on a day-to-day if not hour-to-hour basis, if you can.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
For sure. And the last comment on that is that when we start looking at these issues, we’re going to get them to the next issues more… It just becomes harder. We’re working with a 40-ish derm practice, dermatology business and one of the things that’s really important is when you get into these kinds of businesses is to make sure there’s somebody on their end that can handle the details. We’re the agency, we can make the magic happen, but we can’t possibly know what’s happening in Poughkeepsie. You have to tell us and say you need somebody on the client’s side to be able to pull this website together.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
SCHEMA, I mentioned earlier, it’s not new anymore, but essentially the idea with SCHEMA is that Google is huge on artificial intelligence, machine learning and Google really the goal is to make machines understand what the page is about as though a human would. SCEMA is a way of structuring the data to help Google interpret what’s actually on the page. Jon, any specific ideas on this one?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, so SCHEMA, it’s a really interesting development in our online world here. It’s helped to provide sort of an abstract for robots that understand what the page is about, what content is going on there, ways to wrap, contextualizing information around basic content or images or what have you that you have on your site. So, it’s really an important factor. It’s funny because it’s not really a ranking factor in many respects, but it does fall to the SEOs to often take care of this because it doesn’t prove search results, so to speak. It does pull in opportunities for rich results, sometimes you can get star review scores in there if you wrap the right micro data and structure data around your testimonials on your site, for instance.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Some very basic stuff that you have to do. I mean, you really have to make sure that it’s rolled out. When you’re doing it at scale, you’re really trying to find ways to do it with variables because you’re usually probably setting up a JSON-LD tag or something that has all the information about your business, but there’s going to be different information in all those fields because every business is slightly different, right? So, you have to come up with… You have to have a really smart solutions developer to work with your SEO, and enable these types of enhancements to your CMS or your web properties to enable a quick streamline of this. You can go really deep on this. I don’t want to get too deep on it, but there lots of ways you can enhance your site with SCHEMA, some of which is worth more than others. We’re happy to talk to you guys about that if you ever have any questions.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Very good. So, and these again, we talked earlier. This is sort of the next level on the enterprise level. We talked about the basics like title tags and descriptions, these are some of the things we work to. We don’t have time to go into detail on all these, I guess we haven’t talked about… Pillars and clusters. Do you want to spend a second on that?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, so this is kind of a concept behind the way you organize content. Pillars and clusters have to do with main category pages. Things that maybe you might be a treatment center so it’s like rehab or alcohol rehab might be like a pillar page, but then clustered behind that are all of the symptoms and all of the ways in which you might treat it. So you’re clustering all of that behind, and then you end up with a hierarchy. I often use this metaphor, a good website kind of needs to look a little bit like a Christmas tree in its page organization. The home page up top and then everything kind of filters down. You really don’t want to end up with a hockey stick as a website where you have your home page and then everything is just right off the home page and it’s not clustering appropriately.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
There’s two reasons for that. Obviously it’s a really unique crawl path and it gives kind of a bread crumb path through to the concept. Google understands you went from the home page to a topic and to sub-topics within that topic. So it’s all contextualized, but it also helps from the standpoint of building out the authority of those individual topics and linking back to those other pages. It really just feeds authority back to the home page in a really strong way.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Excellent. One of the things we talk about is two-click content. This is an example of a couple of years ago we were at one of our seminars and somebody said, “Yeah, I’m paying for SEO. Look at our great SEO.” So, we did a quick Google and ran it through a tool called Copyscape. You can look that up. I think it was a free version, cheap, you can look at it. Copyscape.com, and low and behold, boom. This SEO company was using the exact same content, they were in the hearing business, with all of their hearing clients. Not only was it not helping them, it was hurting them because duplicate content in the eyes of Google is essentially plagiarism. Google feels like there’s very little, at best, added value by duplicated content, and at worst, plagiarism.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
When you get into multi-location businesses, again, that can become very difficult. We see this all the time and Jon, you’ve seen that a lot at scale as well, correct?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
That’s right, and it’s not just multi-location because even with pharma or device type pages, which almost breaks into e-commerce so to speak. The way you role out that content, oftentimes has this templated format with content that’s more or less the same except for maybe device information or specific related to that particular formulary. That can be a problem as well. And we know that you sometimes have to roll it out that way, but there are ways to get around it. And with something like this, this is just egregious. If I were to scroll down to the footer of each one of these pages, I wouldn’t be surprised that there’s a link back to the agency. It’s both duplicate content and a link farm. Just totally black hat.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah, we definitely don’t want to do that anymore. That’s not a good thing. Voice Search, the key here is just to set up your pages so that it’s good to answer the questions. I want to make sure we have some time for question and answer. Let me just leave this part here, Jon and we can go into more detail if anybody asks questions in the Q & A section.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So essentially, the big secret there is to think through about how people ask questions. This is really… and develop content. Strong content around that because that’s the best place to go with Voice Search. Featured Snippet, you may have seen this. This in the tray as position zero. This is when Google picks a very good strong synopsis of a common question and shows that above everything else. We love that. This is an example of one of our pages, Evergreen Forest is about how to write a marketing plan for healthcare. It’s in the Featured Snippets results and this is where Google gets its Voice Search typically. Right Jon? This is something that as you get more sophisticated, you can purposefully try to win these kinds of positions.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Knowledge Graph, do you have a few seconds on Knowledge Graph, Jon?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, I mean Knowledge Graph is really an interesting thing that Google’s done. I like to think of it as Google’s own personal encyclopedia. Trying to understand the relationship that certain things have to other things and what they will do, is provide this Knowledge Graph box or this Knowledge Panel on specific topics. You can see here for encephalitis, but there also one for Healthcare Success and there should be one for every one of your businesses. And if you don’t have one of these set up, you’ve got a big problem there too, and that’s just a local thing. But yeah, every concept, everything that’s out there, Google has information in the Knowledge Graph connected to other things it’s related to.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah. COVID?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, so this is something we added in kind of near the end because we realized we should probably mention something about COVID given that’s been kind of a big topic lately. Some of these locations, some healthcare locations need to have automatic update about COVID cases on their site available. That can be a really difficult process because what you’re talking about is automating a process of updating content onto your site nearly every day, if not on a regular basis throughout the day. This is something that you have to start thinking about pretty quickly if it’s a requirement for you. If it’s not, it should be something you still want to think about as a healthcare organization because others are doing it and they’re kind of leading the way on it.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
SCHEMA Markup, this helps… There’s ways to markup individual pages you have about what your protection policies are or what your protocols are and you can add SCHEMA. Google just recently came up with it that says, “Here, we’ll pull this information in to whatever other place you happen to be online if you wrap this SCHEMA around that content.” Yeah, telemedicine too, same thing. Really, this is a new area, a new field for a lot of people and there’s ways to improve your site for ranking for those types of searches and I encourage you guys to do so.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Great. It’s funny, on automated we have a large skilled nursing business that we work with, with many, many locations and they have laws they have to comply with. And so, COVID cases and so forth, they have to update daily and our programmers had to create an automated program so they could just simply upload data information because again, scale, we can’t go in and update 100 or 60 or however many locations, you need to figure out a way to do it.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I’ll close the thoughts here. SEO takes time, it’s a marathon that never ends. Once you gain a competitive advantage, it’s something you want to attack. We started our business with SEO in mind to this day and we put tons of energy into it. It’s where we get the most of our business. I talk about when people ask me what do we know about SEO, well out website, over the years has brought 10s of millions of dollars of business to our company because that’s where most of our clients come from, is calling us off the internet.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, it’s a perfect launch of investment. Right now, there’s a lot of other things were on pause and Jon’s company did that as well, but a lot of our clients have where during COVID, especially at the beginning back in March, we paused all the paid search, we paused all the advertising and just doubled down on SEO because by definition, SEO is longterm. So this is a great thing to be doing now as we sort of wait for people to make a vaccine to get us out of this mess. We’re looking at spring, summer, next year sometime. It’s going to be awhile, so this is a great time to put this longterm investment to work.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Last thing before I get to Q & A, some of the things people ask us, “Well, how do you find somebody?” You can read here, you can read these kinds of things, but I think it’s important to make sure that out of all these things, I would say that if you’re looking for an SEO partner and certainly, people ask us, sometimes at these webinars, Jon, they say, “Hey, do you know anybody good?” “What, are we chopped liver here?” It’s like, “Yes, we do this,” but whether you use us or somebody else, I would just make sure they do have the healthcare expertise. There’s lots of ways to get tripped up regulation wise inadvertently and make mistakes.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I would recommend that they have enterprise level, certainly demand that they have experience with that. That’s a whole different thing. Understanding their reputation and one last comment, especially on the low end, if you’re seeing some guy saying we’re going to do SEO for you for $700 a month, just pass. Real SEO requires time, people, smarts, there’s no way around it. It’s labor intensive, knowledge business and it just is what it is.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, I’d like to open up the floor for questions. That was a race, we did pretty good. We’ve got three minutes left, but Jon and I can hang out a little longer, so for those of you that can make it past the hour. Kyle, let’s go ahead and start the questions.

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Sure. We have several questions here. Let me start off with the question that came in from Jake. He said, “I’m suspicious of a number of SEO firms. Some have said it takes two years to bring up rankings and others have said two months. What’s the truth and why the wide range of time?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Do you want to take that one, Jon?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I sympathize with those SEOs he may have talked to that said two years because they probably don’t have very much confidence in their product. The reality is it does take time, it’s not immediate. If someone says, “I’m going to get you results within 30 days,” I’m like, they might, but if they’re promising the world, it’s probably almost too much to be believed. We’ve worked with many clients. Those that we’ve updated content and site architecture stuff for, generally speaking we see beginning of impact within 30 days, but real impact worth producing big reports for and that boards of directors are really happy about, usually after about three months.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
So that’s the timeframe. We usually try to chunk our campaigns into phases. Phase one, phase two, phase three. Phase one usually is somewhere between one to two months, but really by phase two, after about three to four months is when we’re getting ready to start doing a quarterly business review or a bi-yearly business review that will show the impact. So no, you don’t have to wait for two years. I think if you do this right and you spend the right type of money, have the right type of partner, you can get this done.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
What’s interesting too is some businesses have low hanging fruit. They may have lots of content, it’s not linked well together, it’s not done well. Those are easier to make a big impact quickly because we’ve got something to work with. We’re starting with a blank slate and there’s a very thin content site on a bad URL, it’s brand new, that’s going to take longer. But, if you have a respected URL with tons of content, but technically it’s just garbage, that we can make some big fixes fast, you’ll get a bigger result.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So it is case by case, but yeah, if you’re hearing two years, that’s a long time. I totally get it and the problem is, there are a lot of sleazy SEO firms. Let’s just call it like it is. There’s people that do black hat technics that can actually hurt you forever in the eyes of Google and then you have to… We get that once in a while. We have to come and… We’re very white hat. We like to do things very ethically and sometimes we’re engaged to clean up a mess somebody else left behind. It is scary, I get it. Kyle, next question?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Sure, and actually someone just rang in with another comment that’s based on that. They said, this is from Marshal. “How do you track SEO to see if it’s improving?”

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, good question. We use a number of tools. There’s rankings you want to track and that’s sort of both to understand how you’re improving across the areas that you’re trying to rank for. But also as much for a canary in a coalmine, you’re looking to see if there’s any major shifts up and down in that regard. But one of the best ways I find lately has been working with Google Search Console which provides day-to-day measurement of how you’re doing both on impressions in search, but also clicks. So you really want to be looking for that growth in impressions and clicks.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I usually try to develop a report based on that data. I’ll export some of that data out, develop my own reports in Excel that show the growth. There are ways statistical analysis to verify if there’s a variance that has to do with the work that you’ve done. This is getting into kind of the more advanced mathematical work you might to say, “I did this and the result is because of me, not because of environmental factors.” The fact is, Google isn’t… there’s whole hidden unknown data set which is that Google isn’t telling why or how they’re ranking thing. They give you indications, but there’s no direct cause and effect data that they can provide to you. So you have to pull that out yourself and make relational arguments for why what you did has created an impact.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Usually it becomes pretty obvious if this is the first time working on a site for instance, where there’s a lot of work that you’re doing on your development of content. You will see big improvements in the impression share that you’re getting and the number of clicks that you’re getting to your website.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Kyle, one thing I wanted to say because we’ve got a number of Q & A items. I’ve got time here, so we’ll go ahead and go long. If you need to leave, just recognize that you can get to the according slides and cover the rest in the Q & A later. It looks like most of our audience is still here, so we’ve got their apt attention. Also, if you are interested on the agency side of having us help you, call us, Jon and I or one of our teammates, depending on the situation will jump on the phone with, explore it, so just let us know. Next question Kyle?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Sure. We have a question from Katie. “Do ratings and reviews on different sites matter differently for SEO? Example, are ratings on Google better than ratings on Yelp?”

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Better is an interesting way of describing it. I would say that for rankings on Google My Business, it is more important to have rating reviews on Google My Business than it would be on Yelp. However, Yelp has its own traffic going to it, so you don’t want to ignore that. I’ve worked with Yelp for many years. They say that the reviews don’t have any impact on their search results. So far I see that to be true as well. It’s really just kind of the patient comes to vet and they’re looking to see how your review scores are. You want to make that they’re as positive as possible on Yelp.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I’d say that if you’re working to develop a review management platform or some kind of request for feedback to a third party platform, focus that on Google My Business. That will get you ranking.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I would say also that if you… I did a webinar about a month and a half ago with Binary Fountain and they actually quantified this and they said that the data shows that Yelp is becoming less and less important. Yelp still is important, but it’s becoming less and less. Because Google, back in the day, when they were just getting started, showed lots of directory sites and as things changed, Google started showing less and less directory sites. I’m not saying they don’t, they still do, but you notice Google My Business is a Google property and everybody else is everybody else.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, I forget the number of consumers that went to it, you can go back and find that webinar if you want to get the details, it’s around. But it is becoming less and less important. Google My Business is becoming more and more important. Kyle?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Perfect. All right, another question here from Lauren regarding our listing scan that we talked about earlier. “As a healthcare organization, how important is it to be listed in some of those listings? Many I have not heard of before and many of our millennial end users probably won’t use some of those resources. Examples, MapQuest or YP.com. Can we pick the top few we think our audience may utilize and be okay with that strategy? Or, what are your thoughts around that?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
That’s a great question. Yeah, it’s not so much about you’re going to get… We didn’t talk about this at all, but to me, every little hook in the sea is a hook in the sea, right? So, even if it’s not originally known or not used very often, if it’s a hook in the sea, I’ll take it. So, if you’re doing it manually, then yes, she’ll have to prioritize. If you’re going to go through it manually and pick and you’ve got a single location practice, then maybe that’s realistic. You can manually check the top 10 that you think are important and continually come back to them and do it that way.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
The problem is, that the data keeps changing and so, over time, because there’s so many… It’s kind of like imagine, I don’t know where I can put my crazy analogies, but it’s imagine a river where you have hundreds of tributaries. That’s kind of what this is like. So, the listings online have different information sources coming from the big credit ratings companies or there’s different list companies out there. There’s a bunch of different sources. So, your information will degrade over time, and so when if you use one of the services that we work with, then you can do this at scale and if you’re going to do the top 10, you do all of them anyway.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, it’s easier to use a tool, again, especially, this isn’t as important for a single location business, although we do it really for all of our clients because it’s a good value, but it’s especially important when you have multiple locations. So, that’s a good question and some just cannot be done through automated tools that are ours, so it gets really complicated really fast, but essentially, the biggest thing is we want to avoid having inconsistency or nothing there at all. It’s a good question. Kyle?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Sure. Yes, another question here from Jack. “What are some best practices for doing podcasts?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I’m going to share because I do follow a good number of podcasts, and I’ll share some of my favorite secrets, and then Jon, you can jump in if you have any additional. We’ve been doing podcasts for years. It’s a big part of what we do. One of the great things about podcasts is that you get to talk to experts. So, usually when I’m doing a podcast, I have been the guest of my own podcast once or twice, but usually I’m interviewing very, very smart people. For example, a frequent guest on my podcast is Dr. Jim [Molito 01:02:46] who’s chief transformation office at Cleveland Clinic. And what’s great about that is I, as an expert in my field, keep writing for people like him. We develop relationships, so there’s one part of it, there’s just that, so we keep in contact and we do that.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Another thing is the thought leadership about that. Because you have people on your podcast, you’re getting exposed to really smart people and it’s funny, as you get better and better guests, you get better and better guests. It sort of self builds itself. And so, for example, the last… We haven’t published it yet, but I just caught through interviewing Dr. Hassan Tetteh about patient experience in his book, The Art of Human Care. And so, by doing this again, you’re building your credibility, you’re backing structure, you’re building your audience. So the key with podcasts is to put out good content. And, I think it’s important that whoever is your host, be good at it. To be able to talk interactively.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Another thing that’s fun is that if you set it up right technologically, and it’s a lot of work, ask poor Kyle. But there’s multiple places that where you can serve your podcasts through, so Kyle, which ones are we on now? Some of the top ones?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Okay, so we are on iTunes. We’re on Spotify. We’re on Google Podcasts. We’re on Stitcher. We are on Podbean. We are on… Let’s see, what else. iHeart as well. We’re on iHeart-

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
And what’s interesting by doing this, we actually ask our subscriber base, which ones do you want to follow? It was Podbean, which I never even heard of, a fair amount of people use. So, you give the people what you want. The podcast, another tricky thing about podcasts is that it’s easy, I don’t have to prepare a deck. I can have somebody on, we agree to what the topic is, I usually come up with about seven questions that are pertinent to the topic at hand. I keep it very conversational, we see to get very good response from it, so yeah, this is a fun topic. Jon, would you like to add to this one?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Well, when people come to me with podcast or videos, they say, “How can I optimize this?” I’m like, “Okay, well there’s only a few fields you can really manipulate.” So, I’m thinking from the standpoint, usually they’re asking me not as the content creator, but as the… “How can I know that I’ve created this content make people see it.” You really want to take some time to find a way to optimize these pages. Usually there’s a subscription section, idling how to do this and certainly from the standpoint of how you blast this out to whatever audience you’re at.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Most of these podcast type tool sets or video type platforms have some kind of rudimentary search for how people can find these things. Make sure what they’re looking for is in the title and the description of your podcast.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah, choose your podcast title wisely when you can because that will sharpen search. Also transcripts. I forgot that. Just take a look at our website and look for some of these podcasts. We’re in the process of reorganizing our data, I don’t know if the podcast is still in our dropdown, but at any rate, if you’re not sure, send us an email and I’ll send you an example of ours too. Go ahead, Kyle.

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Yes, another question here from John. “What sites would you recommend to keep up on the latest SEO best practices?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Wow, this is a good one. Search Engine Watch is one, Moze has a blog that’s pretty good. What else? What are your favorites? You’re closer to that than me.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, I go to Search Engine Journal. I like that one, it kind of brings in a lot of different responses from a lot of different places. I still go to SEO Roundtable, which is Barry’s blog where he’s giving you up-to-date, day-to-day updates on what’s going on. Very short, snippets, which is if you’re looking for a very specific change if something’s happened, you don’t know what’s going on that day? That’s the place to go first. Apart from that, Search Engine Journal is another favorite of mine.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Good deal. Next?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Yes. We have a question from Catherine. “Does social media presence factor into SEO?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Love that question. Jon, you’re going to take that one.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, we were talking about this a little while ago. Yes and no. The reality is, social signals aren’t really a ranking factor. That is to say that when you’re linking to different… Your business website for instance from different places in social. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, it’s not necessarily going to drive any authority or any trust, necessarily to that. However, and it sort of is a standard practice. Again goes back to sort of like the table stakes. As a professional organization, you should have these profiles and you should be utilizing them for the purpose of their need. For instance, with Twitter, it’s kind of a customer service tool. Facebook, it’s a really great way to share content. LinkedIn is sort of the business, that’s where your business profile lives.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I think of it as an opportunity to kind of ride the wave. If your organization can get involved in some really interesting content or be a part of something that’s happening on social, it can be a reason people might be searching for things that are related to your business, and in that way, driving search engine results. It’s sort of they’re cousins, but they’re not necessarily driving anything from one to the other directly.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Good deal. I would just also add that I have 7,000 followers on Twitter and it’s less active than it used to be. But, by doing that, you do meet people. I mentioned my relationship with Cleveland Clinic started with a follower that was active on Twitter and LinkedIn and I noticed she was more active on my blog than my editor was who I was paying money to. So, I ended up emailing her. That’s how I built a relationship with Cleveland Clinics.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, that became an indirect source, but it can be a powerful source. Especially as you start building true thought leadership. It’s not just a bunch of robots following you, but real people. That tends to give you more interview requests, more speaking opportunities, and again, for example, on the press and the speaking, we don’t actively go after that. I don’t have a press agent. It comes to me because of the content and credibility we’ve invested over the years. Once you do that, it builds your competitive advantage. It’s really hard for someone new to come in. You can’t just do some good title tags on a website and compete. It’s really hard to beat that reputation once it’s established. Kyle?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Oh, let’s see here. Question from Mark. “What do you see as the future of SEO?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
I’ll take a stab at this, and Jon, you’re closer to it than me on a day-to-day basis. I feel like the answer is really the same answer I probably would have given a couple of years ago. Google is insane about trying to interpret… They want to make a natural language. My experience in dealing with the people at Google has been that they’re trying to make it so users don’t have to be smart with what their queries are. For example, one of the comments I remember from going at various meetings I’ve had with key people in the Google team is, if someone misspells it, that’s not the user fault. That’s our fault, right? They want to be able to interpret that even if it’s a misspelling, what is the intent behind the search. It’s more than just keyword phrases.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Because in the beginning, we all figured out by trial and error how to do a keyword search, so instead of saying, “Who’s the best dentist I should see?” You would say, “Dentist, Tuscon, licensed or something.” People would try to come up with these artificial things. But now, Google has become much better at, “What’s the best dentist to offer telemedicine?” It’s beginning to figure that out. It’s beginning to figure out the meaning of search queries and handle much more sophisticated queries. And by using artificial intelligence in our machine learning, it’s able to figure out, it comes up with little meme hypotheses and it’s able to evaluate whether this result was better or worse based upon the user’s behavior.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Some of the things I was telling Jon last night as we were comparing, I remember at one point they said, “If you could ask Google what college or what school did Jimi Hendrix’s father go to?” And so that’s where they kind of want to go. Last time I checked, they still couldn’t do that one, but maybe they can today. I don’t know, but that’s really where… It’s trying to understand the meaning of search and it’s just optimizing and getting better and better at it. So, that’s what I would suggest. Jon?

Jonathan Silver, MA:
Yeah, the future of search is interesting. I like to have these debates with some of my SEO buddies. One of the ones that I’m…I have two pieces personalized search to get even more precise. They’re going to be even starting to predict what it is you’re actually looking for, which is if you’re logged into Google, they’re going to do everything they can to actually deliver you a result without even you having to search. It’s going to be a lot to do with your behavior, other types of data that they’re tracking across platforms.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
If you’re working on an Android, forget it. They have everything that you’re doing. That’s one of those things that they’re going to try to deliver to you a result based on what you were just looking at. If you’re looking to do additional research, they want you to stay in their content ecosphere as long as possible, so they want to serve up everything they can possible think of that might keep you there. That might also include integrations with other platforms you’re used to using, just to keep you in the window that happens to be Google owned. So, that’s something that I would expect that in the next couple of years.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
I’m also expecting that anything that’s currently free with Google, will be monetized in the next couple of years. I called this for Google My Business a couple of years ago. I said, “They have to monetize this somehow.” And, they’re already in the process of doing that, both in the ad standpoint, but also they’re testing this opportunity to have a more advanced listing.

Jonathan Silver, MA:
So, these are the types of things you should be looking for. I think they’re going to start rolling that piece out probably more broadly as it’s more successful. Right now, they’re just testing in places like San Francisco and stuff, but as it gets more… They prove it out and they get more data on it, it should be rolling out across more markets and more verticals.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Yeah, and I was sharing with one of our directory tools yesterday, which I’ll probably share that in an upcoming webinar, but they were also showing me data that they’ve seen where it’s becoming less and less about the website where the website’s still vitally important, obviously, but so many of these offline directories, they do accumulate and bring in a ton of search. So that’s important as well. So, making sure you have those directories, and again, be part of a couple of the leading companies and different ones for different reasons. But both of those companies can help you show up in multiple locations. Kyle?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
I have another question here from Catherine. “How should I explain to doctors how important it is for them to write blog posts?”

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
So, you will find that some doctors will do it, some just won’t, ever. You’re just not going to be able to get them to do it. That’s not really going to be the best model for it too because… Well, it depends. Typically, we’ll find that in a group of 10, there might be one that likes it, enjoys it. Likes the thought leadership aspect of it, and so that would be the one I’d want to do. Even then, some people are better writers than others, and certainly most doctors aren’t going to be great writers and SEO writers. So, what I would probably do is make that opportunity available to all your doctors, and particularly, help them understand, because they usually are like the thought leadership aspect of them. They like being able to be a thought leader in the community. But that’s at best, one out of 10.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Another option is to either do this on your own or work with a firm like ours to have people write, professionals write the blogs because content is everything, right? Getting good SEO content, not writing for the sake of writing, but figuring out what topics are actually being searched and writing content that’s candy for the search engines. And then, even like some of the things we do for some of our clients when they want to do this is interview the doctors and get their take, so that we’re able to understand from the doctor’s point of view what they want to write about, but we have that translated by a ghostwriter. That would be probably my best answer for that. Kyle?

Kyle Hojem, CDMP:
Perfect. Let’s see if there’s anything else here at the moment. It looks like that is it for now.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA:
Great. All right, we went 20 minutes into Q & A, but that’s good. Over two thirds of our audience is still here, so obviously this is a hot topic. If you made it this far, thanks for listening. If you’re interested in having a selfie that’s great, if you have any quick questions on stuff that we alluded to, that’s an email address you can send to me. I appreciate your time. Thank you.