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Did you know the online leads your practice receives actually come along with additional, valuable info you can use to convert more of your leads into consults?

We call this extra info “Instant Recon,” and in today’s episode, we go over 5 types of Instant Recon you can start using today to connect with – and book – more of your online leads.

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Transcript

Five ways to book more online leads using the instant recon method.

What is up my friends? It’s your boy, Troy.

Welcome to a fresh episode of the Practice Growth Machine podcast where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

Let’s talk about an easy way to book more of your online leads using the instant recon method. What does that mean? Instant recon. So web leads that come through your website or your social feeds, or what have you, have additional info that’s hidden right there in plain sight and it’s super useful to you.

Once you uncover that information, the instant recon, it helps set yourself up for success when you connect with your prospects. Let’s get into it.

The more info you have, the better you can connect with your prospects and move that prospect towards scheduling a consultation. I don’t mean that you have to build all this rapport or have hour-long conversations.

There’s no set amount of time that you need to get somebody to book. But being able to speak to someone’s concerns, their desires, their hobbies, is key to making them comfortable with you and taking them to that next step to come into the practice for a consultation.

Now, when you have these web leads that come through, you gain a lot of information. I want to give you five examples of info that comes through this instant recon info that’s built right into the web leads that you can use right out of the gate on the phone call.

Number one, self-test. If you have a self-test or a quiz on your website, the answers to the questions that the prospect provides can be absolutely useful to you when you are working to book the console. So make sure that when you call your self-test back, you’re not just looking at their name and their phone number, but you’re looking at the answers to those questions.

What do they struggle with? Near vision or far vision? Do they have astigmatism? What’s their biggest concern with choosing a doctor? Is it experience? Is it safety? Is it technology? Take that and use that information on the phone call.

Number two, if you’re running Facebook ads, think about which Facebook ads the person clicked on to come over and turn into a lead. Did they watch a news piece about a certain procedure that you promoted on Facebook? Did they watch a patient testimonial?

If you have these things labeled or tagged within your CRM and you can say, “Hey, this person saw a testimonial of an outdoorsman, for example, and they clicked on that and they turned into a lead,” well, that gives you more insight, number one, into things they might be interested in.

Number two, into things that may have triggered them to take action. Then number three, topics that you can use on the call to engage and build that comfort with the prospect.

All right, number three way that you can use instant recon to book more web leads. Look at their email address. This may sound basic or simple2 but look at someone’s email address.

If someone’s email is crossfit95@gmail, then you can bet that they’re pretty into working out and you can talk about that on the phone call. If someone has a Gmail address versus a Hotmail address, that could tell you about their level of awareness and comfort with technology.

I’m not saying that all Hotmail address users are living in the stone ages, but again, these are little hints and tips that you can pick up on that help to guide you through the call. It helps guide your conversation with the prospect.

Number four, how did they hear about you? So if you have a contact form and you say, “Hey, how did you hear about us?” Or on your self-test, “How did you hear about us?” And they tell you it was with DJ Jamie on so-and-so radio station, well, what do you know at this point?

You know what station they listen to, you know what kind of music they like, you know what kind of content and presentation that DJ Jamie provides. So you know that this person resonates with whatever that DJ talents, attitude is.

Okay, so again, this is giving you insight into what they like and how the brain operates and the things that they resonate with. So use that on the call.

Then number five. This is very easy, but look at what time the form came in. If somebody filled out a form at 9:00 in the morning versus 11:00 at night, that’s going to give you some insight into when they’re on your site, when they’re doing research.

Also, it can tell you when might be a good time to call them back if you don’t get them on that first try. Of course, we want to connect with leads as soon as possible, literally within 60 seconds of the lead coming through. No, that’s not feasible at 10:30 at night, for example.

But if a lead comes through at 3:00 in the afternoon, you call them back and don’t get a hold of them, it’s probably a good bet that afternoons may be better for that person than the mornings. So when you call them the next day, call them after lunch versus calling them first thing in the morning.

None of these are hard and fast rules. I’m not saying call them exactly 24 hours later, but again, this is telling you information about your prospects and what you need to do to connect with them and to close them.

So let’s do a quick recap on today’s episode.

The instant recon method allows you to use info that is hidden in plain sight to convert more of your online leads into consults. We went over five different ways that you can do that today.

Look at the self-test answers, number one. Number two, which Facebook ads did they respond to if they were a Facebook lead or an Instagram lead?

Number three, what email address are they using? What can you learn from the name of their email address? Number four, how they heard about you.

Number five, what time did their form submission actually come in? Was it in the morning, in the afternoon, late at night? Use all this information that is available at your fingertips to convert more of your web leads into consultations.

Okay, if you enjoy the podcast, please go leave us a review on iTunes. It really helps us out, it helps people learn about the show.

If you want some free resources to help you grow your practice, to help you in your marketing and sales, head over to troycole.com, T-R-O-Y C-O-L-E.com, click on the free resources tab right there on the homepage and go over I’ve got some free gifts for you, so go check those out.

All right, have an amazing rest of your week and will see you on the next show.

“Do you guys do $250 LASIK?” Price shoppers abound when competitors market based on price. In this “In the Wild” episode, we cover the 2 biggest problems with price shoppers (both related to a lack of education) and what you can do to transform price shoppers into patients of your premium services.

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Transcript

What is up, my friends? It’s your boy, Troy.

Welcome to a spanking new episode of the Practice Growth Machine Podcast where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule. We have another In the Wild episode today.

Last week’s episode was really well received. Wanted to do this again for you.

I just wrapped a client training call. I’m about to head into my boot camp workout for the afternoon, but I wanted to record this for you quickly before I got to that. This particular call with the client was with one of their phone team members.

One of the things that we do is we have our clients record their calls. We’ll go through those – pull out any issues that we see, any challenges that we find the phone team members facing and then jump on the horn, do calls with them, and work through those, whether that’s developing scripting or word tracks, or even …

It’s a lot of mindset development as well to help the phone team overcome challenges they face when they’re on the calls and turn more of their prospects into booked consults, and it works really, really well.

I’m just talking with a client, and we’re going over a call where a prospect asked about LASIK starting at $250 an eye. Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re not in the vision correction field, let me give you a little bit of background here.

There are some chain places, LASIK places, who are in different markets across the country. A lot of my clients have these people in their markets, and they advertise LASIK starting at $250 an eye.

The scam behind this is that the parameters for who can actually have $250 LASIK are so strict that really the only folks who could even have it are people who probably don’t even need any kind of vision correction in the first place. So if you fall outside of those parameters, the price can go up 5 or 10x what they are advertising.

It’s a bait-and-switch type of an approach. I don’t like it. It causes these kinds of questions to come up for my clients because these chains are out there advertising in these markets.

So I wanted to share with you really the two biggest problems I see with price shoppers and how you can overcome them to win them over, really and to book them onto your console schedule.

Number one is that when somebody calls and they’re asking you if you do 250-an-eye LASIK or they’re asking you a bunch of price questions, they’re coming at it from a standpoint of, they see you as a commodity. Let me tell you a quick, quick story.

I’m over at the Apple store last week, and I made the mistake of running over there on the day that they’re launching a new iPhone. So there’s lines out the door. There’s people everywhere. It was a disaster.

But I’m sitting there watching folks come in and trade in their good phones that are still working and functioning fine for a new, arguably better iPhone.

And why are they doing that? Why are they spending all that money to go in and buy something that they already have a functioning use of with their current phones? They don’t see the new iPhone as a commodity, right?

They look at it, and they like the way that they feel owning the new iPhone. They want the extra features of the new iPhone, and they’re willing to pay a premium price to do it, even though … You could make a case that a lot of folks don’t even need to do it, but they do it anyway.

The new iPhone is not considered a commodity, and it’s certainly not priced as a commodity. It’s one of the most expensive phones that you can buy.

Contrast that with, let’s say you’re at the grocery store and you’re going to go buy some hot dog buns because you’re going out to a barbecue with some of your church friends. And you look, and you see the name brand hot dog buns, and then you see these store brand hot dog buns that are a couple of bucks cheaper.

Well, all things pretty much equal, you might buy those store brand hot dog buns, save a few bucks. Hey, it gets people fed. They look pretty good. There’s not a huge difference in between them.

That’s a commodity type of a purchase, okay? People are comparing price because there’s not much else to compare it to, and they really don’t care. They just need some hot dog buns, and they got to go.

So what I’m saying is if people are asking you about price, then they’re coming at it from a position of I need LASIK, or I need Botox, or whatever it is that you’re doing. I need LASIK and there are people around town who do LASIK, so I’m going to say how much these people charge, and then I’ll pick someone to do my LASIK.

The problem is that they’re not comparing all the other factors that go into the procedure. They’re just looking at price because they see it as a commodity. This is a result of a lack of education on the prospect’s part.

That brings me to point number two which is that, price shoppers, and really any patient that’s calling in – so this kind of applies to everyone – they don’t have a framework for making this decision. When you think about it, people calling in to your LASIK practice, for example, haven’t made this decision before.

So they don’t have a good framework for how to make this decision. They don’t know what to compare. They don’t know what to look for. They don’t know what to ask.

They don’t know what’s better. And the result is that a lot of times they’ll default to something that they do know. Well, I do know that I can compare things by price, so I guess I’ll just ask about that.

So don’t take someone’s pricing questions as if they’re just a price shopper and you’re never going to convert them because you charge premium prices. No. They don’t have a solid framework for making the decision, which means, again, we have to educate them.

This is a result of a lack of education. They need to know the importance of meeting with your surgeon before the procedure.

They need to understand the importance of all the different scans that you do, of having lasers that are calibrated every single day, of having the advanced technology, of having all-inclusive pricing that includes pre-ops and post-ops, and there’s not going to be any surprises there along the way.

Once somebody knows those, all the different facets of the LASIK decision, if you will, they are much more equipped to make a decision based not on price and they are able to justify that to themselves and to others around them.

Why would you spend 1,500 extra dollars on this procedure? That sounds like a lot.

Well, it kind of does sound like a lot, but let me tell you everything that goes into this and why I have much more peace of mind spending that money with these guys than just trying to go the cheapest route.

One more thing to remember on this is that of the – let’s just say, 10 differentiators, 10 different cases that you can make for why your procedures and your offering is better than anyone else in town, if that’s the angle that you’re going for, is that folks are going to cling on to maybe one, two, three of those reasons and they’re going to own those.

If we go out and buy a suburban, right? You might buy a suburban because it seats eight people comfortably. I might buy a suburban because I got four young kids and I want to make sure that it’s a safe vehicle for them.

Those are both fine reasons for buying a suburban, but your main reason, or the thing that you’re saying, “Here’s why this car is the one for me,” is different than mine.

So we’ve got to make sure that we set the table with enough of these reasons that people can dive into the ones that make the most sense for them and say, “Yeah, this is a great reason for me to pay this premium price at this amazing practice.”

That’s it. The two biggest problems that you encounter with price shoppers, both of them rooted in a lack of education which means that you need to educate these folks not just on the call but also through your follow-up emails, through the content that you share with them, through the videos on your website.

It is our job to educate the patient on why they should spend their hard-earned money with us.

Because fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, somebody is going to educate them. Someone is going to build that decision framework.

Is it going to be the guy down the street who has cut-rate LASIK with inferior lasers who says, “You know what? This is good enough. We’ll take good care of you. And by the way, where the cheapest in town, so pick us”?

If we let that happen, then we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage, and that’s the framework that the patient will use.

So we’ve got to be proactive in building that decision framework for the patient and really setting the parameters for them to then say, “Okay, here’s how I’m going to make this decision. I’m going to use the education that was provided by you, the premium practice, not by the guy that was down the street.” So be proactive in that.

Create the content that you need for it. Get everything out there in educating the patients.

The more education that you can do, the easier it’s going to be to turn people who come across as price shoppers into patients.

Thanks for listening. If you love this show, if you’re getting value out of it, I’d really appreciate if you go over to iTunes. Leave us a five-star review, leave us a couple of comments.

It means a lot to us, and it helps us get the show out to more people. And if you want some free resources to help grow your practice, head over to troycole.com, T-R-O-Y-C-O-L-E .com.

Hit that free resources tab at the top of the page, and I’ve got some things that you can download there and use for your practice. I’ll send them over to you.

And yeah, I want to see you just be super successful. I hope this episode helps with that.

Keep charging your premium prices, educate your patients on why that is important, and we’ll see you on the next show.

In today’s “In the Wild” Episode (out on a walk immediately following a client call), I share the “3 Ps” – 3 simple habits that will help you turn more of your online leads into consults.

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Transcript

What is up, my friends? It’s your boy, Troy.

Welcome to a fresh, piping hot, nice, right-out-of-the-oven episode of the Practice Growth Machine Podcast where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

This is a, in the wild episode. I am out on a walk at the moment. I like to do my client calls out walking. I enjoy the fresh air. I enjoy getting the blood flowing, getting the ideas flowing, keeping my brain sharp.

I just wrapped up a client call and wanted to share with you some of the recommendations that we discussed on the call, which all revolve around booking more of your online leads into consultations. This is a big area of opportunity for practices in today’s day and age.

If you’ve been in practice for more than a few years, you know that you receive fewer inbound phone calls of people who are looking for your services and you receive more leads coming from the web – your contact forms, your self-schedulers, your online self-test, your Facebook ads, your landing pages, your pay-per-click ads.

You’re getting more leads online than you’re getting on the phone.

Now, if you’re in a spot where you’re thinking, “Man, I just … I wish our phone would ring more. I wish more people were calling in,” I understand that and I’m with you. I wish that was the case as well.

But the reality is that is not the trajectory we’re on and it’s going to keep going the way of online, okay?

So rather than trying to change reality and getting frustrated, my encouragement, first and foremost, is to face reality and then build your systems around that to give you the best chance for success.

Three habits that we’re going to talk about real quick for how to convert more of those opportunities that are happening online in the consultations. And wouldn’t you know it, all three start with a letter P, so the three Ps.

Number one, you’ve got to be proactive, all right? Proactive wins online. If you go back to the first few episodes of the Practice Growth Machine Podcast, we have several different deep dives into aspects of follow-up. One of those is how quickly you follow up.

I won’t get into all the details now. But as you can imagine, the faster you follow up with these online leads, the more likely you are to connect with them, the more likely you are to get them when they’re still excited and thinking about coming in for that consult and that gives you the better chance to do it and to get that book. Proactive.

And let’s just be clear on this. I don’t mean if you get a lead this morning at 10:00 that somebody calls them by the end of the day. That is not proactive.

So if you think like, “Hey, well, we call them all back within 24 hours,” that is not proactive. Proactive is calling them back within 30 seconds. And I’m not exaggerating. That’s not hyperbole. 30 seconds, all right?

The problem is that a lot of your systems are set up where your online leads come in, they go to somebody’s inbox, that person’s away from their desk, they come back and check their email a little bit later, they go to … Oh, wait. Got interrupted.

They can’t call them back, right? So it becomes a back burner issue. When really, the inbound leads, the fresh ones that you’re getting have to be the number one top priority.

So functionally, how do you do that? You got to set up some kind of an alert system. Even if it’s just a text that goes to somebody’s phone that says, “Hey, John Doe just filled out your contact form. Click here to call,” then that’s what you got to do.

If you’ve got a CRM like Salesforce or something like that, you can probably set up those alerts in that way as well. But the bottom line is, as soon as someone hits send on your contact form, on your Facebook form, on your landing page, whatever it is, that you are getting an alert and somebody is calling them back.

And if that’s somebody is busy, the backup person’s calling them back or the backup of the backup. So you need to have some cross-training done so that your best tech who doesn’t normally answer the phone, if it gets down to the third or fourth person and it’s them, then they’re the ones that are calling the patients back.

We don’t want delays. Call them back within a minute of that lead coming in. The sooner you do it, the better chance you’re going to have of booking that consultation. So we have to be proactive.

Number two is persistence. We have to be persistent. It is not good enough to call that person back one time, leave them a voicemail, and hope that they call you back.

The reality is people are busy, people are distracted, people have a thousand things going on. And you’re not just competing with other practices in your area. Of course, you are, but you’re also competing with the distractions of family, the distractions of social media, the distractions of the inbox.

You’re competing for attention. That is the battle that we are fighting, the battle for attention.

And reality is that somebody’s not going to maybe not answer your phone call when you called them right back. It’s not uncommon for somebody to send a phone number they don’t know to their voicemail and not answer it. There’s a lot of spam calls that are going on right now.

Of course, you’re not spam but they don’t know that, okay?

Point is persistence is going to win the day. Call them back quickly. We want to be proactive. If you don’t connect with them, we need to call them back again.

Use your text messaging – texting, calls, voicemails, email follow-ups. It’s a multichannel thing. It’s not just one. If somebody has raised their hand and said, “I’m interested in what you guys have to offer. I have a problem. I think you can solve it,” then they’re interested in talking to you.

On that note, don’t take the fact that somebody didn’t answer your call as a rejection or if someone didn’t respond to your texts as a rejection. It’s not.

They’re probably just busy. They want what you have to offer. And if they don’t, they will tell you, “Please stop contacting me.” Until then, be persistent in your follow-up.

And the third thing, positivity. When I say positivity, what I mean is we want to be so excited that we have the opportunity to help anybody who reaches out to us. So it’s important that that is conveyed through tonality, through our language, through everything – through our smiles, through the energy that we have on the phone, and, of course, in the practice as well.

We want to be positive and energetic throughout the whole patient journey. We want people to know, even if we have to leave them a voicemail, we want them to know, man, this person is really excited and happy about what they’re doing. They must have some great things happening over at this practice.

Positivity is contagious. Energy is contagious. We want people to feel that. We want people to get sucked up into our energy, and our momentum, and to follow us.

We have to be the leaders. We want to lead our patients to the decision that is right for them, and that starts with having a positive, energetic attitude toward our patient engagements.

So, the three Ps, the three habits of booking more of your online leads into consults are being proactive, being persistent, and having an attitude and a presentation, and a tonality of positivity. Do that, and you’re going to win those patients that are coming in from the web.

This is important at this moment that I’m recording this podcast. This is going to be more important in a year. It’s going to be even more important in two years. This is the direction everyone’s going.

So make sure you have the right people on the bus and make sure that everyone is on board with being proactive, being persistent, and being positive.

That’s what we got for today. If you like the show, if you’re getting value out of this, please do me a favor. Take 30 seconds, head over to iTunes. Leave us a five-star review. It helps the show out. It helps us out. It lets me know that that you’re liking this content, that you’re finding value in it.

So please, please go do that. If you’re interested in some resources for growing your practice, templates, budget outlines, all kinds of different things, head over to troycole.com/resources or just go over to troycole.com.

There’s a button right there in the menu says resources, free resources. Click on that thing, and you’ll get some practice growth tools that I know are going to help you.

We will see you on the next episode of the Practice Growth Machine Podcast. Thank you.

In my experience, it can be difficult if not downright impossible to get straight answers from most SEO companies. That’s why on today’s show, I invited my friend and SEO aficionado Jordan Fowler from Moon and Owl Marketing to give me the scoop on medical SEO, including:

• What’s working in Local SEO right now
• How Google treats medical sites and what we need to know about it (they treat your medical site differently than say, your local plumber)
• What questions to ask an SEO to make sure they know their stuff
• The easiest way to keep tabs on your SEO performance in just a few minutes per month
• Common myths about how to measure the success of SEO
• And more…

Get Jordan’s free training video (he created this just for our listeners) at https://moonandowl.com/pgm

Subscribe in iTunes   |  Subscribe in Overcast

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Transcript

Today’s show is about SEO.

What is up, my friends? It’s your boy, Troy. Welcome to a fresh episode of the Practice Growth Machine Podcast, where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

Something a little different for you today. A recording of a conversation I had with a friend of mine: Jordan Fowler from Moon and Owl Marketing.

Jordan is one of my go-to guys when I have questions about SEO – and ranking, and search engines, and what the heck Google is doing.

We were due for a conversation and I thought, “Hey, this might be something super useful for the podcast.” So, we recorded our chat.

I ask him about all kinds of different things regarding SEO – from what tactics are working, which ones are not, how do you know if your SEO is actually doing good without being an SEO expert and without spending hours every single month trying to figure it out.

We cover all this and more in this episode. I think you’ll find it highly beneficial. A lot of good tactical and strategic points that we cover throughout this conversation, so I hope you love it.

Take some notes. Listen to it twice, if you need to, and without any further ado, here is my conversation with Jordan Fowler from Moon and Owl Marketing:

All right, Jordan, what’s going on, man?

How are you, Troy? It’s good to be here today.

I’m doing good, man. I’m doing good. You are my go-to SEO guy when I have SEO questions. We were due for a meetup anyway, and I thought, “Hey, let’s chat a little bit, record it for the podcast.”

I’ve got a lot of SEO questions. I talk to my clients a lot, and SEO comes up fairly frequently, and I love having the right answers to those questions.

Because I know this is an area where there’s a ton of misinformation out there, I’m sure you can speak to that.

Snake oil salesmen, voodoo, swing a chicken above your head. Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yes. Definitely.

Yeah, 100 percent, man, and you know my feelings on SEO.

I don’t like SEO, I think it’s important. It’s obviously a thing. If I need to find a LASIK surgeon in Dallas, I’m not going to search cheeseburgers in Kentucky.

Google serves up search results based on the way people search, and we want them serving up our clients’ pages, number one, for those specific things that we’re searching for.

But I know there’s a lot more to it now, from what you’ve taught me, than just a few keywords here and there and hoping and praying, and snake oil like you’re talking about.

So I want to dig into some of that today, but before we get into that I’d love to lay some foundations.

We might have some folks who are listening who don’t know a lot about what SEO is, or maybe they have a general idea of it, but we can solidify that some.

I’d like to start there, and then we’ll get into some of the more complex and nuanced questions as we go, if that works for you.

Sure, sure.

Well, go ahead and just tell me, man. Give us a little, like, your overview of SEO. What is SEO?

Well, I mean, at its base level, if you don’t know anything about it, it stands for search engine optimization, right? And at its most basic level, it’s just getting people to discover you online and then to start to trust you and like you, and then from that journey where they type something into Google, or Bing, or something like that, to end up selecting you as the solution to their problem or situation.

In the case of your medical clients, right? Somebody says, “I’m sick and tired of these glasses fogging up when I go outside,” or, “my eyes getting dry.”

And so they’re going to go search LASIK doctor, whatever city they’re in. Or best LASIK doctor, whatever, and you want to be present there.

And a lot of people will say, “Well, I’ll just use paid AdWords.” And all the research is showing us that a lot of users are skeptical and they won’t click on the ads, and in fact, even the people that do AdWords say 59 percent of your traffic will never click on an ad.

They’re just skeptical.

Being ranked in organic’s really important, and so not only do you want to pop in on the search results, but you also want to be seen as the most credible.

You’re going to hear me use the word Google a lot, but yeah, there’s other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, all those, but Google also gets 90 to 92 percent of all searches, so it’s definitely the behemoth in the field right now.

All right. That makes a lot of sense. So, a lot of focus on Google, just because that’s where the volume is, then.

Yeah. Until they mess up more or get de-monopolized, or whatever, that’s where you got to play right now.

Right, right. Love them or hate them, they own the sandbox, right? That’s what I tell my clients. That and Facebook.

Facebook can make some stumbles, but Facebook is the place to be when we’re doing our social ads and things because they’ve got the biggest audience, the most traffic and companies like Facebook and Google are resilient enough and big enough at this point to stick around and to take a few hits, right?

So, if you want to play the game, then that’s where you need to be.

I’m not trying to take us off on a Facebook tangent here. Let’s stay focused on SEO.

I’m just curious, man, because I’ve known you for a while. You know, I know what you do at your firm for your different clients.

But I’m curious: can you explain a little bit about why you started focusing on SEO? Because I know that’s a big part of your business now. You’ve really grown your efforts there, so what made SEO turn into a focus for you?

We were really reluctant to get into SEO, and we used to do more of the other side of it, and we would just farm out our SEO to somebody.

We kept getting people – clients that we would come alongside, and they would be working with an SEO agency or hire one, and then it would go sideways really quick and they would end up having to fire them.

We found out through that journey that there was about three different SEO categories of companies if you would, and the first one is like everything is a secret voodoo type.

They won’t be transparent. They just say, “Trust us,” they won’t tell you the action they’re doing on the site or the strategies they’re implementing each month.

So the client’s dumping all this money and saying, “What are you guys doing?” And they would always say, like, “It’s a secret.” You know, as if the client has the time to reverse engineer the SEO practices, right?

Anybody that has a medical practice or a business doesn’t want to be doing that. They just want the results.

The second one we saw was the rockstar type of agency.

This is where usually it has a very charismatic leader, and that guy or gal is more concerned about getting invited to speak at MAWS or one of these huge SEO conferences.

They would rather be seen as a guru among other SEOs, and so they’re really concerned with self-promotion, and usually as a result of that the clients take a hit for that because their primary objective isn’t like, “I’m going to drive traffic.”

Their primary agenda is the self and self-promotion.

And then the third one is, and this happens a lot with a lot of agencies that either won’t highly focus on SEO and just kind of have it as a side add-on or whatever, but they don’t really know what to measure, and we see this a lot.

An SEO company would come back to one of the clients we had and say, “Look, we ranked you on this term. You’re number one.”

And if you didn’t look deeper, you wouldn’t realize nobody’s searching for that term. It’s just, there’s no search, you know? Best left-handed LASIK doctor, with bald, New York.

Okay, yeah. You ranked for that. Nobody’s searching that, right?

What we like to do, too, is we don’t just want people to watch rankings. What we measure at Moon and Owl is traffic. Organic traffic that comes into the site, that converts into patients or clients.

And we actually try to keep our clients from what I call search watching, where all they’re doing is watching the search engine results and that kind of thing.

And really move up – move up a level to organic traffic, and is organic traffic going up because of these SEO efforts, and are you getting conversions from it?

Or, on the other hand, is it going down? And so we just worked with those three types of agencies long enough, and our clients kept going, “We’re sick of this. Why don’t y’all do SEO?”

And I would say, “No, no, no.” “But we trust you? Why don’t you do SEO?” And finally we just relented and we were like, “All right, we’re going to do SEO.” And my personality is if I’m going to do something, I’m all in, and so we went all in.

I mean, I’ve got guys reading Google patents to see what’s coming, and so we’re really, really deep into that environment now.

Seems like the kind of thing you have to be deep in if you’re going to do it right. I talk about – there’s a few areas of marketing where you want someone who’s literally a nerd about it, and then just consumes everything on it to stay on top of it. SEO seems definitely one of those categories.

For sure. Right. Like, some practice might say, “Hey, I’m going to do my own SEO.” Right? And yeah, there’s some basic things you can do in-house, but for medical clients, they’re in a category Google calls your money or your life.

Medical, finance, legal, health, and Google’s super picky about these kinds of sites, because your site can literally screw up somebody’s life, right?

If it puts out false information or whatever, and so one of the challenges to do-it-yourself SEO by a company that just says, “Hey, we’re going to do it,” is the Google bull’s eye’s always moving.

So unless you have just an inordinate amount of time to keep track of all the changes – you’ve got to be looking at patents, looking to have enough data coming in that you’re seeing algorithm shifts.

That’s why having a broader client base helps. And in a competitive market, to be honest, you’re just never going to DIY, do it yourself, SEO outrank somebody who has a solid expert doing SEO for them.

Just like me. I wouldn’t go, “Hey, I’m going to,” I mean, if I could save enough money I guess technically I could go buy a LASIK laser or any other medical procedure thing, and try to do my own eye surgery, or buy some dental tools and try to do my own tooth abstraction.

That would be absurd, and so typically, once you get to a certain level, you need to let a SEO expert handle your SEO.

And just make sure it isn’t one of those three types of bad SEO agencies we talked about above.

You talked about those SEO agencies, and you mentioned that you would have clients who would have relationships with SEO firms, and then they would go sideways, and I’ve had that experience as well.

I’d love for you to dig in a little bit and explain why SEO firms either fail to get results or why SEO can seem to change overnight.

Because I think those are kind of two sides of the same coin, right? Talk a little bit about that.

So a lot of times, what happens is these SEO agencies become one-trick ponies. They will find one tactic that works, and yeah, it works great maybe for a really short season, and then the algorithm switches or updates.

The next thing you know organic traffic’s tanking, rankings are tanking, because they’re really one-trick ponies, and so one of the things we’ve done is developed something we call the SEO wheel.

And the SEO wheel has 10 different elements to it, and they’re pretty broad, and they’re pretty unique. That way, let’s say Google de-emphasizes one element. You still have nine supporting elements that are really, really strong, and while we figure out, “Okay, they kind of replaced element number two with this, or they changed their waiting,” you don’t just fall apart because we’re not a one-trick pony.

In fact, we’ll put together a YouTube video for your listeners that’s kind of exclusive to them, and we won’t really put it out publicly because we don’t want other SEO agencies stealing our methodology.

We’ll get something on our site that talks about the SEO wheel and give them a video overview of what it is, and we can put that at moonandowl.com/pgm, and it’ll be accessible for your listeners there.

We haven’t found many agencies using this holistic approach. When we presented this to one doctor recently, his mouth dropped and he said, “I’ve never seen such a clear presentation of an SEO strategy.”

And this was actually a surgeon who knew a lot about SEO, and that makes me happy for us as an agency, but it also makes me sad for the state of SEO that it’s not approached as scientifically and as data-driven, and it is a little more of the snake oil hype kind of thing.

It was both exciting and kind of sad for us to hear that “Oh, I’ve never heard it presented like this before.”

Yeah. That brings up a good question because part of just my goal in my consultancy is – I mean, we do services for clients, but we do a lot of advising as well, and I want to empower my clients to be able to ask the right questions and understand, like, I don’t expect my clients to be SEO experts.

But they need to be able to ask the right questions when they’re choosing an SEO firm or speaking with whoever’s doing their SEO so they can understand if it’s working.

I’d like to dive into that, as well.

Why don’t you go ahead and, well, just tell me: let’s just start with, let’s say someone’s going to select an SEO firm, right? What are some questions that they can ask, and what answers should they expect so they can very quickly understand does this person or does this company know what they’re doing as far as SEO goes? Or do they fall into one of those detrimental categories that you talked about earlier?

Right, right. I mean, the number one question I would ask is how are we going to measure success? And if they answer anything other than getting patients into your practice, that’s not the right focus.

If they start with ranking, if they start with brand awareness, all that’s great, but the end of the day, the measure of success for any medical practice is patients through the door.

And then my next question would be, “And how are we going to measure that?” They need to have a deep enough understanding of Google analytics, conversion funnels, et cetera, to track that, and I know, Troy, you coach all your clients to, when they get a lead or a call, to be like, “Hey, how did you hear about us?”

We like to correlate that data that the practice gets with the hard metric tracking tools that we have in place to cleanly measure that.

And then my next question would be, “Well, what are you going to do tactically to help increase traffic?” And that’s where you’re going to discover how transparent the agency is going to be.

Like, if they’re going to be a voodoo agency, and they’re going to be like, “No, we can’t tell you. You know, just, traffic’s magically going to show up on your doorstep.” That’s not our approach.

We walk a client through the SEO wheel and we say, “Here’s exactly how we’re going to do each element specifically for you. And even our budgets or line items” so they can see exactly what they’re getting.

Again, nobody wants to reverse engineer this. Right? A physician or a dentist, they don’t want to reverse engineer it, so I’m not worried about putting that information in their hands.

The next question I would ask is, “What is your track record for increasing traffic and what case studies do you have?”

Whether they have them formally written out, or can simply share them verbally, and you want to say, “Hey, what tactics did you use to get those results,” and, “Hey, are you going to be using those on our account?”

And of course budget is a consideration, right? If they pitch out a case study on somebody spending $15,000 dollars a month on organic SEO, and your budget’s $2,500, you’re obviously going to see some difference in results.

And then the final thing I would kind of ask is, “How do you stay abreast of the changes going on in Google and other search engines?” For us, we’re in these exclusive mastermind groups. I can use no other term to describe it but the nerd of nerds.

These guys are literally reading and dissecting Google patents to see what’s coming, and so you want to kind of know where they’re getting their information from and where they’re learning.

And for our clients, we always run the full SEO wheels. So the only difference is the cadence at which it happens, so someone with a huge budget might get 10 articles optimized per month, and somebody else with a lesser budget might be getting on one a month, but they’re still getting great articles, et cetera, and it’s still running the whole wheel.

The only question is cadence. A lot of other SEO agencies won’t do this. When they get a smaller budget, they start truncating the wheel, which is not a good idea because it leaves you vulnerable to algorithm changes.

Okay. You’re still doing all of the pieces. It’s kind of like, “Are you doing those pieces with a nine millimeter or a bazooka?” In a way.

Yeah, the frequency. Really, the frequency which we do them, yes, but they all get done. It’s just some get done over a longer period of time.

That makes sense. Well, let’s talk about subject matter expertise because this is a big one that comes up, right? You’ll have agencies or people who are focused on a specific subject matter, or a specific vertical.

Maybe it’s medical, or LASIK surgeons, or plastic surgeons, or what have you.

And that’s what they do day in and day out, all day long. Then you’ll have others, and I think this is more of your firm.

You can confirm this, but you know, I think you guys have different clients, and different verticals, different cities, different products, high ticket, medium to low ticket, all kinds of different things.

And I think there’s value to both depending on what you’re trying to do. As it relates to SEO, is subject matter expertise on a particular vertical, is that an added benefit, or in a way could it even be detrimental to the results that you’re trying to achieve?

Yeah, and that answer is not definitive. It kind of depends, right? I know of a company that only does LASIK doctor SEO, but if we analyze what they do, it’s like it’s 2005 – what they’re doing for tactics.

So yeah, it helps to have some experience in a niche, but it’s not crucial because, again, I would rather know, as an SEO, I would rather be an expert on Google and learn the subject matter than be an expert on the subject matter trying to learn Google.

That makes sense.

Yeah. No matter what, man, the SEO wheel approach works no matter what you hook it up to, because it’s what the bot and the algorithm are looking for.

So, I was at a previous agency, we did all medical, and then I left to start Moon and Owl, and I wanted to diversify the client portfolio.

And what’s been cool about that is there’s also cross-learning that applies when you have a diverse portfolio of clients. You can say, “Wait, that worked great on this energy oil client. Let’s utilize this in medical and track the results and see what happens.”

I would much rather my SEO firm be a Google expert and learn my subject matter, or bring in parallel strategists for my subject matter than get somebody like that other agency I was talking about who knows LASIK inside and out but doesn’t know Google as well.

That makes sense, that makes sense. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about on the client side, right? Let’s say that someone has an SEO agency or they’ve hired someone and that agency’s been working for a few months.

If a client wanted to quickly go and check their SEO, what would be the best way to do that?

Because you talked about not just going to Google every day, and googling key terms, and seeing where you are as the only measure of success.

What would you say to a client if you said, “Hey, look, you got five or 10 minutes. Do this once a month and you’ll be able to keep pretty good tabs on your SEO without having to learn a ton of SEO things yourself, and without having to take just hours and hours out of your life.”

Sure, sure. Google analytics, right? You should have that hooked up to your account. If you had a website built and that developer didn’t hook up Google analytics to your account, never use them again.

Because that’s just 101, to have it hooked up, and you don’t have to have a ton of goal conversions and stuff set up for that.

Literally, you go into your Google analytics, you log in, and then on the left-hand side there’s a little button that says acquisition, so click that and then there’ll be a dropdown and you click all traffic, and then you click the word channel, and then organic.

And that’s going to show you your organic traffic, and you can go up in the upper right-hand corner and dial in you want it for the last month, whatever, and there’s a little button you can click, and you can either set it to compare it to the previous month or the previous month a year ago, and so you can see how much you’ve grown kind of year to year.

That’s super easy. Google analytics, acquisition, then traffic, then channel, then organic. You know, what is that? One, two, three, four, five clicks and then you’ll have a great view of what’s happening in the world of organic on your site.

Okay. And you like looking at it from that holistic approach more so than just one individual keyword, I think is what I heard you say, is that right?

Yeah, because it all works together, right? I think 80 percent, I’ve heard different statistics, but anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of Google searches, and this is absurd if you think about it, are unique.

In other words, they haven’t been put together in that construction before. Right?

And so what happens, if you just watch the keyword, LASIK Dallas, but you might not be then picking up on, “Hey, because we rank for this, we’re also ranking for LASIK surgery options Dallas.”

That’s a longer tailed keyword that not near as many people are going to use, but people are going to use it, and so I want to see what’s coming in, total from organic, and then I can break it out into branded.

Like, people that already knew our practice name, and unbranded, like, bridge, ICL, those more transactional, informational terms, where they don’t know the brand name. And they come to us that way. Because those are important, too.

Okay. All right, that’s good, man. Let’s talk a little bit about the SEO tactics, again, because I had a question on how people do SEO.

And it seems like a lot of SEOs focus on activity on the client site, whether that’s building links within the site, or using a bunch of different keywords to try to get rankings, and maybe this is where your explanation of the wheel comes in a little bit.

Should SEOs be focusing a lot on the client site activity, or is there more to it? Are there more areas where SEO should be conducted offsite?

Yeah, so on-page SEO is what you’re talking about. That’s what it’s called – is when you’re working and trying to assess, so on-page is like building your foundation of your house.

If your foundation is bad and your site’s not done well, no matter what you throw at it off-page, it’s just not going to, first of all, rank as well and perform as well.

Second of all, it probably won’t convert as well. And so if I can borrow a biblical metaphor, you want to build your house on the rock, not on the sand. Basically, there’s the new frontier in search, and it’s called entity strength, and let me kind of explain what that is.

Because this is where a lot of SEO agencies are missing this, with this shift to entity. Back in the stone ages of SEO, the way you ranked a site was you just built a billion backlinks to the site.

It didn’t matter what the quality of the page the backlinks were coming from.

Basically, the site with the most links was going to rank best, so guys would build link farms and all that stuff. Well, obviously, Google got smarter.

They changed things up and they said, “Hey, we’re going to start giving a rating to the page that links to you.” The stronger the page that links to you, the more that link is going to count.

So, obviously, a link from Time Magazine or Huffington Post became better thank a link from Billy Bob’s medical blog. And then another thing started happening a few years ago. Guys started to try to game the system by creating lead gen sites, so for example, there wouldn’t even be a real practice.

They would just try to rank Chicago LASIK surgery, for example, and then they would take you to a landing page, capture you as a lead, and then sell you as a lead to other docs.

That happened particularly in the blue-collar, service home industry, happened a ton, but why it didn’t happen near as much in medical and it happened in house services?

Google made a kind of across the board big shifts. Now Google’s looking at your practice, and it’s saying, “What is this as an entity?” In other words, is it a real business with multiple online presences?

And they’re looking to see how strong and legitimate your entity is. In medical, it’s looking at something it calls the EAT score, which stands for expertise, authority, and trust.

And Google’s wanting to see that. Obviously, your physician is highly credentialed, that they’re active. So there’s a lot of ways we can work to do EAT score, but the best way to do EAT score and to get that on-page strong is schema.

Schema’s huge now, and schema’s some code that goes into the header of your site and it does two things.

Number one, it disambiguates you as an entity and says, “Hey, we are the real entity, and we’re credible, and we’re going to tell Google bot all these things about us.”

I like to use this analogy. If you’re old enough to kind of remember going to the library, I’m 50, so I had to go to the library, and there was a card catalog.

And when I walked up to the card catalog, each card told you basically more about the book before you ever went to the stacks or the bookshelves and got it.

Who the author was, what year it was published, how many pages does the book have, where was it published, does it have color pictures in it?

And then it has a number. The Dewey decimal, where you can go find it in the stacks. So even without having the book in hand I could tell a whole lot about the book, and is this the book I’m really looking for?

Kind of like the card catalog of the website, so when the Google bot calls it, it says, “Hey, this is where this is located. This is the physician’s credentials. Here’s their other properties they have.”

And most other SEO agencies, right now, we’re finding, they’re doing very minimal schema work. We’ll look at a medical site and their organizational schema might have like five or six things in it.

And we’re putting like 30 different things in there to really strengthen that entity.

Oh wow. Okay.

Yeah, and so that credential’s your expertise and uniqueness, and then Google just gobbles that up, because now they’re shifting away. Backlinks still matter, but it’s looking for that entity strength.

And then what you can do is start to do your off-page stuff, with syndication networks and some other things like that, that are basically amplifying, if you would, the strength that you have on your page.

I always use the illustration, if I sit in my living room with an electric guitar not plugged in anything, and you sit two feet from me, you’ll hear me play it.

It’ll be kind of changy, but when you get the off-page right that correlates to the on-page, it’s all of a sudden like you took your electric guitar, and basically turned it into a Marshall amp stack, and cranked it to 11.

Everything starts to gather steam, and so we always start with on-page to make sure it’s strong, but we’re always paralleling things off-page as well.

Okay. That crank it up to 11, I like that. That’s a good one.

Yeah, man. Spinal Tap, Spinal Tap.

Spinal Tap, yeah.

It goes to 11.

All right, so you mentioned that Google doesn’t pay as much attention to backlinks, that they’re still important, but that sounds like it was one of those one-trick ponies at one point, where it’s like, “Well, let’s shoot a bunch of links at this site and rank it.”

And now I’ve even had clients who’ve gotten in trouble because they had backlinks that are coming, I guess, from low-quality sites, and they’ve been penalized from Google for that.

Are there any other things that maybe are more old school SEO thinking that folks tend to say, “Well, man, we really need to be doing X, Y, Z for our SEO,” but in reality they just don’t matter as much if at all, or they could be actually hurtful?

Yeah. I think, like keyword stuffing, right? And we still see some people doing this, where they’re trying to – there’s one company that works with a lot of medical practices and we still see them keyword stuff. That died a long time ago, of just cramming in every variant of a keyword that could pop up.

You know, LASIK doctor Dallas, Dallas LASIK surgeon, LASIK, all crammed into one article with the headers. Google’s way smarter than that now.

So you just have to make sure your SEO agency isn’t stuck in a time machine. You know, are they reading the newest patents? Are they in leading-edge think tank groups that are front edge and tracking algorithm changes?

I mean, as an agency, we do that, and so we know when the trends shift.

I got a couple more questions as we wrap up here. We got a few minutes left, but I wanted to ask you about the terms black hat SEO and white hat SEO.

That’s something that I’ve heard a lot. I’m sure some of our listeners have heard that as well.

What’s the deal with black hat and white hat SEO? What does that mean? I mean, what do we need to know about that?

Basically, the premise is that white hat is good SEO stuff and black hat is bad SEO stuff. But as an agency, we don’t use those terms. We just refuses to use them, and here’s why: they just aren’t applicable.

Google has a policy, and it basically says this: all you’re allowed to do is to put content on your website. That’s it, and then it has to get naturally discovered.

Technically, the moment you publish a blog or an article, and you go on your Facebook page and say, “Hey, go read my blog,” and you put a link to it, according to the letter of the law you’ve technically broken Google’s terms of service, because you’ve just promoted your content in some way that wasn’t finding it.

Now, everything instantly has – there’s no such thing as white hat. Everything’s already moved into gray hat, right? At least.

Okay.

You know, basically, by everybody that’s doing any SEO is, by definition, using a black hat technique, so we just got rid of those terms.

Instead, we use the term, instead of black hat or white hat, we use the term work hat, and we ask these questions.

Anytime we’re going to try a tactic or a strategy, “Does it work now to increase results?” That’s our first question. So we’re thinking how’s it going to work, this is how it works. Yes, it works now to create results.

Number two, “Do we think it will work into the foreseeable future based on what we already know about Google and what it’s saying in its patents?”

That’s why it’s kind of important to know what’s coming and look forward and to understand natural language processing, artificial intelligence, those kind of things to go, “Yeah, it works now, and even if they do this, this, and this, this will work. This is a good strategy.”

Then the third thing we ask is, “Hey, is there any current risk to using this tactic, and if any, to what degree?”

We want to know that, and “Do we foresee any possible risk in the future based on what we know?” So again, yeah, this could work, but it could be very short term.

No, we don’t want to do that. We want to have foresight and then what we do, obviously, there’s, again, everything’s gray hat at least, so there are some risks to anything that you do.

But what we ask, the fourth question, is “How do we neutralize or heavily mitigate any risk that might exist?” “Does it increase results now?” “In the future, are there risks, and how are we going to mitigate those?”

And that’s how we define work hat, and so, we don’t bow down to everything Google says, because at the end of the day, here’s the one thing Google wants to do, Troy. And people have to understand this.

They want to make money, and the only way they make money is through paid search. They are shifting things around to where they make money.

And when they give SEO advice, they’re not giving it out so your organic rankings will come better. Do not take these glasses off; they are giving out that advice so that their revenue goes up.

We don’t buy everything Google says. We prefer to go in and do heavy testing, obviously on some testing sites and some safe sites.

We don’t always bite whatever fruit Google hands us and says, “Go do this.” We want to test and see if there’s ways that we can leverage Google to our advantage.

That’s excellent. So, you go out and you’ll test new things in low-risk scenarios, and then you figure out if it’s working or not, and then you’ll go and apply it to your client.

Yes, and those mastermind groups that we’re in is where a lot of that happens, so we’re able to cross-reference with other high-end thinkers in SEO and be like, “Hey, we’re seeing this. Are you guys seeing this?”

When two, three of us can repeat the experiment, we say, “Yeah, that’s the way we’re going to go now.”

Nice. That’s awesome, man. Well, look. This has been super helpful for me, dude. I appreciate you making the time to come on.

I learned a lot today. I’m hoping everyone who is listening took notes on this. It’s definitely worth going back and listening to again.

Jordan shared a lot of just straight up, tactical information, and things that could benefit you, whether you’re trying to find someone to do your SEO, you’re trying to make sure that your current SEO firm is doing what they’re supposed to do.

I really appreciate you sharing just your different approaches to the way that you attack SEO testings, validate them, and determine your results.

One thing, just to summarize here, that Jordan said is focusing on patients getting in the door and having surgery is the ultimate focus point for any marketing that you do for your practice.

I mean, yes, of course it’s important to rank. It’s important to have a website that shows up in the search results.

But ultimately we’re not just trying to get you to rank. We’re trying to get people in the door to come in and have surgery with you.

So whether you’re doing SEO or any other marketing services for your practice, just make sure that that is the north star because that’s the only thing that matters. You can’t take clicks to the bank and do your payroll.

Like, you can’t make your car payment with website clicks or traffic. You do it with patients who come in and give you their hard-earned money for your expertise, so Jordan, man, I really appreciate the time today.

Where can people go and find out more about you, what you guys do? Give us some websites or whatever you want to share.

Sure, sure. Yeah, we’re happy to help in any way we can. A lot of times a starting point for us with someone is they want us to do.

We call it the lucid process digital audit, and we’ll go in and do a full SEO audit of them and their competitors, and find out the “you are here” point on the map, and here’s where you need to go.

And you know, even if you just have questions, we’re glad to answer them. The best way probably to reach us is to go to our website, which is simply moonandowl.com, so moon like in the sky, and spelled out, owl like a hoot owl, dot com.

Moonandowl.com, and then we’ll also, Troy, put that SEO wheel video up at moonandowl.com/pgm so your viewers can come take a look at that.

That’s awesome, dude.

We’ll help out any way. You know, any way people need help, we’re here to serve. We don’t really do packages. We tailor to what the client needs, so we’re happy to help in any way we can.

Awesome. Man, I appreciate it. Jordan, be well. It was good to talk to you, brother. I will talk to you soon.

All right, talk to you, bro. Bye.

All right. I hope that was awesome for you. I learned a lot throughout that conversation. I hope you did as well and remember to head over to moonandowl.com/pgm for practice growth machine.

Moonandowl.com/pgm for the free video that Jordan mentioned during our chat. All right, that is it for this week’s episode of the practice growth machine podcast.

I wish you well, go out there and grow your practice.