Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics

Isaac Justesen founded PatientPartners to work with one kind of client: physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage and counselling clinics. Coming up on five years in, his blunt read is that the mechanics of ranking a clinic and ranking a plumber are almost the same. What differs is the copywriting and the advertising rules, which change state by state. Key takeaways The mechanics travel, the language does not. Map pack, profile, reviews, pages. What changes is what you are legally allowed to claim. Two opening plays, every time. A profile audit, because categories and services are almost never set correctly, and conversion tracking, because it is almost never set up at all. The typical clinic budget is around a thousand a month. Much of it currently goes on boosting social posts, which is the pitfall he names. Nobody answers the phone. The single biggest leak he finds sits behind the marketing, not in it. Community building is the underrated channel. Slower than ads and the only thing that compounds. Curation to selection. Search is moving from ten options to one recommendation, which changes what a location page has to do. On this page Why a clinic ranks like a plumber What you are allowed to say The first two things he fixes The leak behind the marketing From curation to selection People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Why a clinic ranks like a plumber The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor.— Isaac Justesen It is a deliberately deflating opening. Healthcare marketing is sold as a specialism, and the technical work underneath it mostly is not. It is still the profile, still the map pack, still proximity and relevance and prominence. But for local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options.— Isaac Justesen Which is a useful thing for a clinic owner to hear before paying a premium for healthcare expertise that turns out to be the same checklist with a stethoscope on the invoice. What you are allowed to say The genuine specialism sits in the copy. Advertising rules for clinical services vary more between states and provinces than most marketers expect, and the platforms enforce their own layer on top. Some treatments are a flat refusal in ads regardless of what your local regulator permits. So the skill is writing something persuasive inside a box that changes shape depending on where the clinic is. Physiotherapy and counselling are comparatively safe ground. Anything speculative is not. The first two things he fixes A Google Business Profile audit. Primary category, secondary categories and the services list are wrong on nearly every clinic he sees, and they are free to fix. Conversion tracking. Not analytics for its own sake. Knowing which enquiries came from where, so the next thousand pounds goes somewhere de...