Build a Practice Brand People (and AI) Trust • A Training With Brent Stutzman

Greg (00:01):
Hello therapists, mental health professionals. Lately, everybody wants to talk about two initials, AI, artificial intelligence, specifically how do therapy practices get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Perplexity or insert your LLM of choice to recommend your therapy practice over the competitors. Because even though we still very much live in a Google world, it is changing rapidly. It is changing quickly, so much in the last few years, so much in the last few months. And I'm really excited to have Brent Stutzman here to chat about this, because there is no 100% this is what you do answer, because it's changing so fast.

But we do have a lot of, shall we call them What you can controls and best recommendations based on what's in front of us right now for how you can position your website to actually show up in AI search, and there's a lot of nuances and I thought hey who better than Brent Brent is the founder of brand your practice. He is the founder of TheraSaaS, a CRM for therapists, super duper awesome guy. I'm really grateful to get to know you and to have you here on the training session. And I'm kind of just gonna pass it over to you to chat. We might bounce a little bit, we might see where inspiration and the narrative takes us.

But the point of this is, if you're watching this, what you're gonna get out of this session is hopefully some takeaway items of what you can do right now to have the best chances of having your chosen and your dream clients chosen AI chatbot recommend your practice over your competitors. So I'll pass it over to you, Brent, introduce yourself and we'll rock and roll.

Brent (01:45):
Hey, that's a great intro. Thanks, Greg. Yeah. And so this conversation, I'm going to lay the foundation for how we should think about AI and then give a lot of tangible examples. And I have a lot of tangible examples because I'm still in the marketing game with a handful of practices, including my wife's practice.

And one thing that happened a few months ago, this is in the month of July, because we average about 20 to 40 leads a month for Kid Matters. It's my wife's practice here in Chicago. work with kids ages 2 to 12 and you know it ebbs and flows except in the month of July we only had 11 leads and I was like full like for alarm fire like what is happening. And so that caused me to go in a deeper like I already been doing a lot of SEO and I had to do a deep dive like what's going on is this an AI thing is this referral source thing. So I had to dig in a lot of data and as I was doing that I was doing a ton of research on like best practices when it comes to AI search because that's becoming a thing and people still go to Google.

to set up therapists near me. And Google's AI overviews has cannibalized a lot of those clicks. And so now it's a different game. SEO is changing faster. And a lot of the SEO practices we've been doing just aren't really working anymore.

But you know what's actually working? It's like 1980s marketing and building a brand. And so I'm going to share some tips on that. But also, first of all, what are those things that we can control as it relates to our digital foundation? So yeah, again, my name is Brent Stutzman, and I've been doing digital marketing for a long time now.

And so I'm excited to share part of what my keynote is that I when I speak at conferences, a little bit of that some bits and pieces, so your audience can get a lot of value that way. So I'm ready to jump in. And if you're I don't know, if you're listening, maybe it's better for you to watch on YouTube down the road, because I'm gonna have a lot of slides to be able to show a lot of infographics and data and statistics that you can take a look at later. So If you want to share the screen, I can jump in.

Greg (03:49):
We'll do. And yeah, please don't watch this while you're driving or anything like that, because we're going to dive into small text and some good words. And there we go. All right.

Brent (03:58):
So what I'm going to do is part one, I'm just going to lay the foundation here and we're going to, we need to define some terms. Okay. So what is an LLM large language model? So a lot of this like this is AI at the end of the day. It's trained on massive amounts of text to understand, summarize, translate, and generate human-like language.

And that human-like language is really important. And I'll talk about that in just a few minutes, why we have to be thinking like these computers want to think like humans. And so human behavior is going to be reflected in these LLM behaviors as well. OK, so GEO or AEO, this is generative engine optimization. Think of it as like this.

It's SEO, but for AI platforms or LLMs. So the other thing you need to know is there's really two critical pieces to when someone goes to let's say Claude or ChatGPT and put in a therapist near me. The first one is a recommendation. The second is a citation. What is a recommendation?

A recommendation is when the AI actively suggests a brand, a product or service as a choice inside its main response text. A citation is a background reference or a hyperlink where an AI credits a website or document as a source of facts. The gold standard where you want to be is in the recommendation. Citations are helpful, but you want them saying, I recommend such and such practice. I recommend your practice or being in that top three recommendation.

Okay. Lee talks about it this way. He says, here's how I see it: AI search is the category, AI SEO is the practice, AI visibility is the outcome, or say AI recommendations are the outcome. So I'll talk a lot about AI SEO in that context, a little bit different from regular SEO. But the one thing I do want to share is to think about traditional SEO is like products on a store shelf.

An LLM recommendation is like a store employee recommending what they think would work, right? You gotta go get a new pair of pants. Now you could go and do all the research yourself, look at all the colors, look at your try on, all these different sizes, or you could go to a store employee and ask, hey, I like this size, I like this color, this is where I'm going, I'm going on a date, this is the certain, like, what do you recommend? And the LLM will be, take all that context, and that's important, context. It's going to give an answer based on context, and then it's going to recommend what works, okay?

The other thing we have to really understand is that AI search is probabilistic technology just by its very nature. You do 100 prompts, you're going to get a ton of variation. And this is a guy over at AttorneySync, and this is really what he means by that. you can type in therapist near me or therapist in this town, and you could get several different variations where traditional SEO was deterministic, meaning we could, those Greg and I, we've made livings on, if someone types therapist near me, we can pretty much determine what that ranking is going to be in the top three. and that's totally changed.

In fact, even traditional SEO is becoming more, is becoming less deterministic these days as in the last month at the latest. I think was it July? Maybe it was in July. The last core update. The last core update sent mobile rankings, like the, the research, it was like all over the place.

It's almost becoming less deterministic now. So I'm going to just stop there. By the way, this was a thing I did at a conference. I said, open up your favorite LLM and prompt. Do this prompt like everyone get out their phones.

And then it was like my nephew's 10 years old and anxious. We are we are. What are some child counselors in Hinsdale, Illinois area that you'd like recommend? And fortunately, Kid Matters came up most of the time, but it wasn't. So that's how it's probabilistic.

AI is going to give you tons of different answers. And it's going to pull from different sources. So I'm going to share this little part and then we can talk a little bit more. We can riff on this. So when I did this with Kid Matters, the same prompt several months ago, Claude was pulling in Google business information along doing its own search and stuff.

But it was primarily pulling in citing. Google Business recommending Kid Matters. ChatGPT was citing Yelp, but recommending Kid Matters. But when it recommended Kid Matters, we had, was it a 3.7? I think it was even less than that, which sent me into another conversation about Yelp.

Gemini, although it's owned by Google, and Kid Matters has 160 Google reviews, did not recommend Kid Matters at all. Isn't that interesting? And there was some biases behind it. I was having to ask, well, why didn't you recommend Kid Matters? Because it thought it wanted me to have more like a service based community clinic where you could get like, like scholarships or something like that.

It was really interesting. It was really interesting. And then Grok recommended Kid Matters as well at the top. But that was because we had a lot of good SEO foundational, I think, going on, which is part of it. But just so you know, it didn't always recommend Kid Matters and Kid Matters was recommended in different kind of spots.

I will stop there and then we can talk about if you want how people are discovering practices now, because it's not always just a straight line, but there's more like a loop involved. So yeah, I'll throw it over because I just said a bunch, Greg.

Greg (09:43):
Yeah, no, it's it's there. There's so much gold in in all of it and understanding how it works and just how. I think you said it was deterministic. Probabilistic, yeah. Probabilistic, right?

Because the answer changes based on so much, and I like to do those incognito, so it's at least a little bit not based on what it knows about you, but it is because everybody's asking the same exact question, what usually happens is that it is giving recommendations based on what the AI model knows about you, the searcher, the question asker, in addition to that prompt that you put in there. For example, if it knows me, I'm a mid-40s agency owner and I've got two kids and it's going to It's going to taint that towards all the things, all those questions I asked about, like, oh, I got this thing going on in my life or that thing or all those personal conversations I've had with it. It's going to pull from that.

Brent (10:44):
Not only that, Greg, it's going to if you were asking about insurance or doing like, I wonder if my insurance covers mental health. It's going to cut. All right. So maybe it's going to start recommending practices that are not private pay, but insurance based.

Greg (10:56):
Yeah. It's just, it's, it's so interesting how different it is, from, from user to user and all of these apps that we professionals use to track prompts, do their best to track prompt visibility. And when you have like a super clear prompt, like you're like the one, the one you gave us the example, it's like, yeah, that's, it's a clear recommendation, but when it's more of like a conversation piece from a 30 back and forth prompt conversation, you finally get to like, all right, fine. I'm ready for a therapist. Who's the best person?

There's just so much more context. And that's what's so interesting in trying to plan for all of this and trying to optimize for this is Why it becomes more, you know, we're talking about the brand and sort of this, with the brand, the dream client is you can't get it to recommend you for everybody on planet Earth. So who is that, that ideal client who is just gonna be like, well, every time this person would type it in, we'd come up first. But when the person with completely different information on the other side of the country is, it would never recommend you for that.

Brent (11:58):
That's right. That's right. Yeah. So the way. Yeah.

And so the way they do context. So this is really fascinating. I'm going to go back a slide if anyone wants to watch it. So whenever somebody does let's say what are the best EMDR therapists in this area. Right.

It's actually going to do a fan out query or what they call synthetic queries in nanoseconds. And so, and so in this prompt example here, what are the best kid therapists for ADHD in the Hinsdale area? It does this many searches at the same time that you just hit the enter button on the search. It's going to do average cost of child ADHD therapy in the Hinsdale area, CBT versus behavioral therapy for children, ADHD, child ADHD therapist in DuPage County, which Hinsdale is in DuPage County, not just Hinsdale. All right, so it's taking a wider context.

Does health insurance cover child therapy for ADHD? How to choose a child therapist for a child with ADHD? And it goes on and on. So that's going to give you like, all right, if those are questions that AI platforms or LLMs are asking, maybe my website should be addressing some of these things. Like it's like a whole, but not just don't put AI slop in there, but actually have your unique answers to those questions because AI wants to know.

So what it does is you do a, you do a search and then it's going to go out and do its own research. So it's going to check websites, your website, videos, YouTube forums. If you're on Reddit, good job, but most people aren't like therapists aren't, but it's going to check Reddit. directories like Psychology Today, other review sites. It's going to take all that information and synthesize it and then give you an answer.

So, a lot of the brands that are being recommended on AI, and these are changing a lot, but it's going to go to your website, ThriveWorks, Psychology Today, Good Therapy, Therapy Den, Zot Doc, Industry Publications, social media platforms, going to check your social media, Yelp, Google Business Profiles, Bing Profiles, MapQuest, Healthgrades, and Apple Businesses. It's doing all of these checks at once because at the end of the day, it needs to know if it can trust you. It needs to know if you actually exist. So I say you need to find where therapy brand practice brands are being mentioned on LLMs and get there and you got to get there. and here's the big takeaway, right?

Cause I, I shared earlier that, you know, humans have created, AI. And so there's this human element to AI and how they behave and think. All right, so AI and hurting people are looking for the same thing. They're looking for someone they can trust. All right, so trust is the new filter.

For consumers, trust drives actions like schedule an appointment. For AI, trust is driving recommendations. So you're not trying to game AI, you're trying to build a brand, your practice is trying to build a brand that deserves to be recommended, not just by AI and search, but also by people in the real world. And if you can get that brand recommendations, When people type your brand in, those are brand signals to AI and to Google that, hey, this is kind of popular in this area. Maybe I should recommend it more.

And I can we'll talk about like strategies to do that. But yeah, any questions what I just shared there and I can move on to this verification loop, which is really interesting.

Greg (15:21):
Yeah, totally. It's I always have one of my favorite things I say is this weird world. It's like, how do you get the robots to trust you enough to send humans to your website where you have to write you have to write words on your website that the robots want to read? But then when the human gets there, the words also need to resonate with the human to make them do the most important thing, which is reach out for help. And I know it's a lot more complicated than that, but it is it's like this weird this weird world that we live in of trying to make robots trust humans and trust businesses.

And it's, you know, you always hear like, oh, GEO and AEO is just SEO. They just slap different letters on it.

Brent (15:59):
Yeah.

Greg (15:59):
You know, the way I think about that is like, to a certain extent, it's true, because we've always wanted to make sure you have your listings out there and that, you know, Google or whatever can trust you. And it knows that you are who you say you are and all of that. And because AI is thinking more like a human brain than traditional search, there's all these added layers of complexity on top of it, which is why the people who are just saying like, oh, don't even worry about it. Just keep doing good SEO. It's completely misleading.

And yet at the same time, like we've seen practices that we work with who are showing up, you know, they're seeing like clients are coming in, we're looking at the Google Analytics data, clicks and leads are coming in from ChatGPT and other AI searches. And these are clients, these are like people who haven't even, haven't done extensive SEO, GEO on, because it is still the foundations of good solid SEO. And it's like, but it's not enough anymore, because it's getting to the point where it's like, well, how do you do that? And the new thing, how do you live in a Google world, while future proofing yourself in an AI world, when the bridge is quickly expanding, without getting left behind, but still being able to get clients from Google, which is still very important. And knowing that the things that the experts are saying, you must do this right now, may very well change next week, next month, next year.

And so what are these solid foundational pieces that are going to withstand the test of time, just like good SEO has withstood the test of time and has, without any extra effort, led to good GEO? acknowledging that there's still tons to do on top of that, right? Because it's still like, at the end of the day, it's building a foundation. That's what we always talk about at Goodman Creatives and with our clients is like, how do we build you the most solid foundation that is going to do what it needs to do regardless of what technology is doing out there above it?

Brent (17:55):
That's right. And I love it. And I was writing down that quote, you know, I, I got a quote from, I did my Google ads for practice owners and I quoted you on, I'm going to have, I'm going to have you another quote, that whole idea of robots. How do you get robots to trust you to recommend humans? And I was just thinking, and I was like, you know what, that's absolutely right.

And the best way to do that is with video. So like you still have, I think we're going back to copywriting in a little bit. It's like, you kind of almost go back to, robot-sounding copywriting on your website. Now when I say robot, basically it's very clear. It's kind of rigid.

It may not be clever or cute because that can confuse robots. But The power of video is that video is the fastest way for someone to know, like, and trust you. So if you have a video on your page, that's the powerful human connection that you need, Greg. And I'm like, that even more, even more is like why people, you guys open up a stinking computer and just talk about how you help people. Be very clear.

Put it on YouTube. YouTube wants it. It's hungry. It's hungry for videos. And you're maybe your unique way of how you help clients.

Put that right on your homepage because you do need that human connection. As soon as that robot makes the recommendation. That's right. To trust you as a human. You need to now make that human connection point.

Greg (19:15):
And I want to just double down on that advice. For anybody watching this, because I know I get so much pushback from therapists about making videos, and I know there's a lot of internal beliefs and things that are stopping folks from doing it, just embrace that imperfection. Just go in your backyard, go wherever, just take out the phone, do a quick selfie video, anything is better than nothing and then put it up there and maybe that'll inspire you to do the more polished thing and what you want because it's true like that human like seeing a voice seeing a face having someone look you in the eyes even if it's across the screen and making and you'll I got you. You're safe. This is the person you're going to be working with.

I'm not words. I'm a human being. I'm taking the extra seconds to talk about it because I think for anybody watching this, yes, of course, take away AI stuff. That's the number one takeaway that you do from this video is you go record an imperfect video and put it on your homepage. That's a huge win.

Brent (20:17):
I'm going to, maybe a shameless plug, to go to my TheraSaaS channel on YouTube, because I'm going to be doing a video on this on like all the different ways you can use video all over your website that's going to help convert. It's a good channel. Yeah. There's the verification loop. So, this is something that Damien did.

This is just September research they came out with. He said, it's not as linear. People don't shop as linear anymore. There's like this loop. So he says, local discovery, like therapy practices, has become a loop, not a funnel.

Consumers now rotate between search, social, AI, and reviews to corroborate a choice before they act. So the brand that wins is the one present and consistent at every station. not the one that ranks first at any single one. I used to be really down on social grade. I was like, you don't need it.

Maybe just have a social, like a proof of life thing. And I'm like, not anymore. Cause like even Google's like, give me all your social profiles. I want your Facebook, your TikTok. It's just aggregating everything now.

So we've taken that Omni approach, you know, what Gary Vaynerchuk's literally been talking about for years now. And it's like legitimate. So this is the verification loop. You can see someone starts at AI, then a therapist near me, and then not because everyone trusts AI still, they're going to take those results, those recommendations, and go to Google to verify it. And then from there, they might read your Google business review profiles.

They might go to a social page and look at your post there. So it's not as linear as just click on the link and go right to the page. They're going to start to read and take more things into context. And I have another site in here that's going to add word of mouth. So they're going to hear from a friend or a neighbor, pediatrician, doctor, and then they're going to go to Google.

They're going to read your reviews. They're going to go onto your website, watch your videos like there's all these touch points that are going to happen. OK. All right. And then I shared some research about that with Kid Matters, but we found that many of our leads that said they heard us on word of mouth.

came through the Google business profile. So we know that people were Google searching when they heard about from a friend, they went to Google because they self attributed. I heard about you from a friend. And then we saw that there are other link attribution is from Google business. This is really fascinating.

Greg (22:41):
Well, that's that's always been the thing. Like, you know, long before I was a marketing doing the full stack marketing, I was a web designer. And we would see it time and time again, is like the importance, even today, even in this modern AI era with all of these different arrows and circles and just stick figure in the middle. Like to me, the website is still the heart and soul because however somebody finds out about you, the place that you have to make that impression, to tell your narrative, to tell your brand story and to put your video on and all of that, like there's no, notifications, there's no bloop bloops, there's no like swiping next on a website. It's like it's a safe space to be you.

And we just saw it so many times, like therapists who had traffic coming to a website that didn't speak to anybody, that didn't own their brand. the traffic didn't convert. We do a website, you change the words. I know you love story brand. We put a little story brand methodology into it.

And all of a sudden, same traffic producing leads and clients without doing all the other stuff. Just the importance of that, especially word of mouth, like even word of mouth, they're still checking you out. They're still Googling you, everything you said in that circle. Don't sleep on the website in this era of social media and Google reviews and everything. It's still the home.

What is it, the center of the spokes of the bicycle?

Brent (24:03):
Yep, that's right. That's right. So what I would say is, let's talk about some strategies now. So like you just said, your website is home base, like that is your brand. You have to have that dialed in.

And I'll just go through a couple of these slides here pretty fast. So when it comes to how, let me go back here. Like we were talking about the old way to rank. You know, the old way was a keyword and query optimization. That's like the old way of doing things.

And now we're starting to take context in. So AIs take in like, what is the best answer for this person right now, in this very moment? And the signals that AI systems weigh, these are all these different signals, contextual signals, they weigh before even ranking begins. And so the goal is then how often does my brand show up across kind of a finite set of conversational paths? So like, for example, like, can you recommend a therapist near me?

That's one conversational path. can you recommend a therapist near me who specializes in anxiety? That's another conversational path. Can you recommend a therapist near me that specializes in anxiety? that came about because of a really narcissistic relationship that I was in, right?

Those are different conversational paths. And your goal is if it's true to your brand, how can we maybe start to show up in those? so, one of the things is for local private practices Insurance, like we were talking about, insurance and accessibility. If a user asks, who's a good counselor near me? The AI will consider the previously stated insurance provider or prioritize practitioners who are in network rather than just showing the most popular office.

And so what that means then is, do you have on your website which specific networks or plans are covered? Are there evening or weekend appointments available for those who with nine to five jobs? Do you offer in-person sessions? Some of the things we have, but now, you know what I'm doing, Greg, on website design? I'm putting the insurance information like really close to the top.

Because that is a huge like you I see from the fan out queries. I see and just also people too like that's a big buying decision. So we just put towards the top like we're insurance friendly practice and here's all the logos that we're in network with.

Greg (26:25):
That's been an interesting shift too. We work with a lot of private practices and for years there was this belief of like, oh, we don't need to talk about that we don't take insurance because you get the right person on a call and you have this beautiful connection. It's okay that they didn't plan on, they wanted to use insurance, but they'll go private pay. And just, you know, this is a moment in time in American history, but the economy and all the other things going on, that's no longer the case. And I just hear so many therapists are just frustrated that this you know, this marketing strategy that used to work.

So I think it's a great reminder, not just to have the insurance information buried in an FAQ accordion at the bottom, but to just front and center, like, hey, if we're not for you, we're not for you.

Brent (27:12):
And I will say there's going to be more, with all the insurance things happening, there's going to be more private pay people coming out. There's going to be more, I should say more practices are going private pay. Because insurance, it's getting so bad for practice owners. But going back to the digital foundation, so like website companies and builders like yours, you have to have your SEO dialed in. Because robots don't want to guess.

They're very literal people. So, like I'm saying, my inspirational writing is like, I don't care anymore. Like, I'm just going to say, I'm doing individual counseling for adults in Ocala, Florida. You know, it's like, I'm just like, very straightforward. Then you can get flowers somewhere else.

But like, your H1, your title tag, you have to dial that in. Be very literal in that. And I know that's stuff that you do. So, let's talk about listing your businesses. I think your essential tiers, again, we're talking about owning your digital foundation.

You got to have a Google business profile with four to five more five-star reviews than your competition, your nearest competition. Get on Bing because the reason is, I think, what was it? Microsoft put in, I don't know, $13 billion investment into OpenAI. So that's ChatGPT. So ChatGPT is not going to pull information from Google Business Profile.

It's going to pull from Bing. Bing's owned by Microsoft. So if you have a Yelp, OK, let me talk about psychology. I think it's kind of a tier one still.

Greg (28:40):
I was hoping to get rid of it, but I still I still have that as a essential because for better or for worse, it's if you don't have like and this is just me putting into the brain of a robot. But if I may, I and I don't see a verified psychology today, preferably linked to from your website, even if it's in the footer that you can make that struggle with that.

Brent (29:02):
I struggle with I. I'm like, it's just a stupid SEO play that Psychology Today did, and they won. And they crushed it. They crushed it.

Greg (29:09):
That's why Psychology Today exists, because it built its backlink network on giving you that little verified badge in the footer. Bless them, they did it.

Brent (29:17):
They did it, and it didn't mean a single thing to prospective clients.

Greg (29:21):
Not a thing, but it made them the number one result for every search.

Brent (29:25):
But now I'm like, do we put it on the link of the clinician's page? on the individual clinician page, not in the footer, but do we put on the clinic?

Greg (29:35):
I'm like, I think we probably do. We do. It's it's debatable, but I think it's, you know, our goal is like, how do we just make it as easy as possible for the robots to connect the dots? Yeah. Right.

Like every link to a verified thing on the clinician page is what they want to see in the schema, like everywhere possible. Just connect the dots, make it easy.

Brent (29:59):
I feel like I'm just. Okay.

Greg (30:02):
Anyway, so let's go.

Brent (30:03):
Yeah. So I call it your Apple business profile. Apple maps is going toe to, wants to go toe to toe with Google. And so they're starting to sell ads on Apple maps. And so it's a free profile.

Get it on there. But guess what? If you're going to do Bing, you're going to do Apple. Guess where they pull the reviews from Greg.

Greg (30:25):
It's Yelp.

Brent (30:26):
It is Yelp. A hundred percent. It's Yelp. Why do I know it's Yelp? Because I found it.

So my wife's Yelp had a 2.3, three stars review, two point and versus our Google business at 169 reviews at the time of the screenshot and why Apple business pulling in the Yelp. You can see on the slides here being pulling in the Yelp score, right? A MapQuest pulling in the Yelp score. All right. So.

Greg (30:52):
So here's the question, and if you're going to address this, you can do it later, though, and this is the struggle. We have these wonderful human beings who are online practice only, and without publishing your home address, you can't have a Yelp page. You can't have those. What are these folks to do? We have our own hacks and workarounds, but there's not a particular winning formula.

Brent (31:16):
Way, way harder. That's where you have to build a brand. And I have a slide for this, but you need people typing your brand name into search as opposed to counseling near me. It's way harder. And even as far as six years ago, I went and worked with really anyone to scale their practice if it was online only.

I'm like, look, Google doesn't care about you locally, and it's really hard. So you need to have a plan. We were able to get it back up because we were asking friends and family to do it. There's a whole strategy around this. Actually, Greg, I'm going to do a video based on your blog post because it was so good, and now I'm going to talk about this.

Cool.

Greg (32:01):
Yeah. How to get ethical Google reviews?

Brent (32:05):
No, Yelp reviews.

Greg (32:07):
The Yelp review. Yeah, that one too.

Brent (32:08):
Because you need a whole Yelp strategy. It's a little different. And you have to be way more strategic. Yep. But if you don't have a Yelp, don't get a Yelp account unless you have a strategy to get reviews.

So look at Greg's. Put in the description, Greg. You have a great Yelp article on that. Okay, so I did some research and there's really the three main pages is this, you have to dial in. The most visited pages on your website.

So I did, when I say I analyzed, Claude did 22,000 page views over three months, three different practices. Three different, yeah, three different practices against the country, different areas of the country. And so your homepage obviously is the most visited. Then you have your clinician bios and your service pages and your pricing pages. Those are the pages you need to be focused on the most.

Dial it in with SEO, but also your best content and videos. Don't worry about blogs. I say this. Google doesn't care about your blogs anymore. It cares about newsletter.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great one. Doesn't care about your blogs. It wants expertise.

It wants it coming from you. There's that. Okay, so I will move through a few more things here. Okay, hyperlocal. So now we're moving in from the kind of digital world into the real organic world, okay?

A handful of years ago when I was doing these partnership plans with clinicians saying, hey, long-term contracts, we're gonna scale you up. I know you can't pay me a lot right now, but we'll do like a revenue share thing. I eventually wrote in the contracts that they need to be doing two to four hours a week in organic marketing because I saw the science like SEO just got harder and harder to rank. Right. So I'm all on this.

And here's why. Oh, by the way, Eric Schmidt said this brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. So there's like all the competition out there, right?

Greg (34:11):
If you can't read the small text, that's the formal former CEO of Google is who said this. This isn't back in 2008.

Brent (34:18):
Right back. And just imagine the cesspool today of everything, the the good and the bad. Right. It's all mixed together. Brands are the solution.

So factors that correlate to brand appearance and overviews. Brand web mentions, brand anchors, brand search volume. What do I mean? Is your brand being talked about on the web? Is your brand, I'm talking about your website and your brand, right?

Is your brand being linked to on the web? And is your brand being searched for on the web? Those three things are sort of like the highest, Let's say important things when it comes to getting recommendations on AI overviews, and that's Google AI, but it's also going to correlate to others. So for example, when someone's buying a pair of shoes, an unbranded search is best running shoes for men. A branded search would be Nike Pegasus 40.

All right, when this comes to counseling, and an unbranded search would be severe anxiety symptoms, a clear branded search would be, does ClearPath Counseling treat panic attacks? Does ClearPath Counseling depression specialist? You see how your brand name is now in the search, and that's why it's going, and here's why it's important. When your brand is in the search, you own the page, you own the results, you own most of those recommendations. So when I type in Kid Matters Anxiety Counselors, you could see that Kid Matters is number one in the AI overviews, the website's next, Google Business, Yelp is up there, Kid Matters Facebook page is up there.

It's all branded. It matters. That's where you want to be. That's why building a brand is so important. You own the page.

And so again, my strategy is get people talking about your brand, linking to you, and search for. Now let's talk about. And then we can talk about hyperlocal and how to get that done.

Greg (36:19):
But go ahead. I'm curious. There's something that popped into my head. Ideas are always popping into my head. When people are doing in-person, obviously one of the best ways to get brand mention, which is tough, especially as a solo practice owner who's just out there at networking events, is everybody loves the QR codes these days.

And we send it to the website. What if instead of sending it to the website, you sent it to a pre-populated Google search with the brand name in it. I don't know if that would actually work, but I don't know if this is a hack we just came up with here on this call.

Brent (36:51):
I heard about the, you know, I'm sure Google would probably figure that out, but it's sort of like a predetermined URL that they're going to. So it's like a query URL screen and it's not like an organic, it's going starting from Google zero. however, that's not a bad idea where you can have a QR code where, it just doesn't go to your website. I don't know. Like, I think it's still, if you want to get brand awareness, there was a, there was somebody did something at a bus stop when they did.

Oh, this is what they did. I think this is what they did. They had a predetermined brand query, like best or what are the top real estate agents in this town? And they already had a really good SEO. And so it sent to that brand query and like their brand was already kind of towards the top.

And so people would click on it.

Greg (37:49):
So that's like a reverse. It's a little riskier. If you've got billboard money in the pocket.

Brent (37:54):
Yeah, so I have a story to go with this one. So our kids elementary school, they have a weekly email from the parent teacher organization, highly involved, like very involved parent teacher, the PTO. And so I said, hey, could we sponsor your newsletter? And she's like, yes, we were looking for sponsors. And she's like, hold up.

I never knew you existed. I'm so happy I found you. My kids need a counselor. All right. So that was lightning in a bottle.

Here's what this told me, though. We functionally, nobody knows we existed. And why is this? We've been going to school with her kids for over five years. And so like, no, she had no idea Susan was a child therapist and she had a group practice.

So we sponsored this thing. Let me break it down. $2,000 for a year. Sounds like a lot, but let me break it down a little bit more. 470 subscribers, parents, in the town that we are in.

It's a weekly email and for nine months our brand is going to be on that weekly email. 16,920 impressions approximately. That breaks it down to almost like eight cents an impression. Not bad for market. Highly targeted.

And what does that get? What is our goal? Brand awareness, because nobody knows we exist. We get a link to our website, a brand mentioned link, which was a ranking factor, and brand anchor links. So Kid Matters counseling is going to be associated with that, right?

And then brand search volume. People will search for us. So that's one example. The other one was Monroe Elementary Movie Night. So this is basically you get every kids, all the kids and families going along.

There's about a thousand kids. So what do we do? We sponsored the sugar table. We get candy and water. It was, you can see I'm showing pictures of like long lines with kids and they're lining up and there's the Kid Matters signs.

Greg, that sign, that Kid Matters Counseling, free candy and water, that was in the parent's pickup line for the entire week. just out there. So, everyone driving by to pick up their kids in the line are seeing Kid Matters Counseling. All right? Just, I didn't even count those impressions in that, but let's say that was only $500, 750 impressions for that night, and 7 cents per impression.

So brand awareness went up, brand mentions, PTO, they had more social posts around that. And people are gonna search Kid Matters Counseling after that. All right, what else? We're going, Greg, we're going all in. The local gym, we saw that there was a space available.

By the way, just go ask. Just go ask these places. They have banners up. We're like, can we put a banner up there? They said, yes.

In fact, I'm gonna put a TheraSaaS QR code on that. as well. So we just have a big mental health for counseling, kids for counseling, big banner in the gym. Look at how big this gym, there's three basketball courts in this thing, Greg. All right.

400,000 annual patrons enter in to this gym and to this every year. Thousands of kids, basketball camps all year long, every single week. It's crazy. It was $1,250 for the whole year. And you know what they did?

They actually made the banner. We just sent the stuff. It was less than one cent per impression for the whole year. I mean, you can't get better money on that type of stuff, right? That brand awareness.

And we sponsored another, the District 181 Foundation, anchor links all over the place, right? And how much did that cost? $750 for the year. hyperlocal targeted Advertising, $4,500 for the whole year. Let's say nine months.

Let's say it's a school year, but all those go longer. It's $500 a month for nine months. For all of that. For one elementary school, and we have seven in our community. I'm going to share some other things.

Other things my client, I have it written down for Hyperlocal. Trunk or Treat. She's doing this out in Utah. 6,000 kids come through a Trunk or Treat. It cost her $500 to get set up and get candy.

There's like a festival Christmas, the Boys and Girls Club Gala. She was invited. It was like a few hundred bucks to sponsor a table. They get a backlink on the website. She's going to do daycare training.

She's trying to do one in-person thing a month. one in person. So, that's my new playbook now. I was like, you gotta get in the community.

Greg (42:30):
Now, it sounds like, oh, it's so old, Brent.

Brent (42:33):
Yeah, it's 1980s marketing. But you want people going to your website and typing in your brand name as opposed to counseling near me, right? You don't want that because of the cesspool. Brands are the way that you differentiate yourself.

Greg (42:46):
And that's why Budweiser and all these other companies spend billions of dollars, it seems like, every year on advertising.

Brent (42:51):
Well, it works. But the therapists now have to think about this. And you don't have to spend $4,500 a year. You can spend less. You just have to get really creative on it.

But there's opportunities in your community. There's opportunities. OK. I'm going to stop.

Greg (43:04):
That was my... No, that's a really great reminder, too. You know, not everybody, but so many folks are out there still trying to get the therapist with the waitlists and befriend the other therapists as the part of the networking. And, you know, sometimes that still works. There's definitely still plenty of therapists out there with waitlists, but it is, and it's like time and time again, we see the success stories also of like, How can you get creative?

How can you not just go to the physician and the other therapists? Like, what are these? And this is why niche, right? That word that so many folks don't want to go near is like, why was all of that possible? Why was it so successful?

One of the many reasons was because there was such hyper-clarity on who you serve, what the messaging is, what the services are. You didn't go to, you know, anything other than places where kids and parents and schools go. So that's one of the advantages, a big advantage of owning your brand, knowing your dream client, knowing who your messaging is and knowing who those less commonly approached folks are, that you can pitch these out-of-the-box solutions to, even if it's one a year, even, you know, whatever the marketing budget may be. And I just also know that I remember, you know, I've been working with therapists for 20 years, and it used to be that everybody was getting out in the community and doing it. And then online digital started getting more popular.

It was like, oh, maybe I don't have to anymore. And then people just, COVID, everybody just stopped. And a lot of people have not even started again. So it's actually a competitive advantage is having the courage to, or the, you know, the willpower, whatever word you want to use to go out there in the community, to do things the old school way that has been working, you know, for hundreds of years for businesses, not just practices. Like how did you see the town crier going like, eggs for sale, produce for sale, right?

Like going out and talking to the humans and letting them know, hey, my business is over here. If you need what I've got, Here I am. And that's memorable. That's more memorable than a swipe on a phone, which is what most people are stuck in right now.

Brent (45:08):
So I think you're absolutely right. I think Hyperlocal is kind of the new SEO. They hire you to do the technical SEO. You got to get that fundamental, your digital foundation right. But the ongoing blog posts, that's kind of going along the wayside.

You want to get your service pages dialed in. Work with you to get those service pages dialed in and that unique voice that you have. You've got to get a YouTube channel now. You just can't. You've got to have it.

You've got to have it. Because AI wants it. They want the transcripts of those videos. And it's also going to allow you to host those videos on your site to kind of provide that human-human connection. Yeah, so I think, I think that's, you know, we talked about this Google ads, you know, the ROI on Google ads is horrible.

It's horrible these days. It's trash. And people are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on that every month. I still think you can have some Google ads, dial it back a little bit. But reinvest that in some of these hyperlocal ideas, like just get local, you know what I'm saying?

Greg (46:05):
That was the first thing that popped into my mind when you showed that $4,500 budget. I was like, that's like, you know, a month or two months Google Ads budget for practices easily. And I guarantee you, you got insert multiplier, more high quality leads and clients from that $4,500 than you would have if you put that $4,500 into Google Ads. And we still do Google ads and they work, but like you said, it's tough these days out there in the world of Google ads, especially if you don't have that brand or that niche. The generalists, private pay generalists are, it's tough.

Brent (46:40):
And even SEO is getting harder. The SEO companies, they're still not thinking outside their box on like, you know, when I see what they offer a lot of times will, You have your foundational fixes, right? You got to get your digital foundation right. But that ongoing SEO, a lot of those things aren't really paying off because what are those things that really move? You got to get backlinks to your website.

You got to get your brand mentions. You got to get Google reviews. All those necessary SEO things, I think now in those local connections like we shared, it's not scalable for SEO companies. It's very difficult to do that. If you were to spend thousands of dollars, I'd actually hire a PR company.

Where they would like surely they would get your name out there and get you links because that's the most important thing So that's okay. So that that's kind of in a nutshell. Hopefully that was helpful and all the things we talked about I'm sure a couple things about TheraSaaS And then you know wrap up if we could rip a little more

Greg (47:40):
No, do it. I mean, I just I appreciate everything you're sharing here. There's just there's so there's so I was joking before, like if you get one thing out of this, put a video on there. But it's it is it's like everything. And it's this is the advice.

And this is when folks sign up. at Goodman Creatives. I say to them, look, we're going to manage the heck out of your digital marketing. We're going to do these things, but we will not be successful if you don't do the things that only you can do. Exactly.

As you've been saying, at the end of the day, the best digital footprint ever is only a fraction of the battle these days. You've got to get those brand mentions. You've got to get out there in person. You've got to ethically get non-client Google reviews and Yelp reviews and all of these different pieces and be active on Reddit. Go out there on Quora.

This is what it takes. And yeah, it is. Digital marketing has become the job of a PR agency. And that's probably sort of the wave of the future are more of these hybrid, but you have to have a large enough group practice to be able to afford a digital marketing agency plus PR agency.

Brent (48:39):
And ironically, the practice owners really becoming the head PR person for their practice now. to like get the word out there. I'll say this and I'll talk about TheraSaaS. I was at a conference and this young lady she's like, yeah, I hired an SEO guy and he got us like we're getting so many more leads after three months and I'm like, hold up. I've never heard of SEO being that good where you're getting all these.

I'm like, how do you know they're coming in from SEO? He's like, actually, I really don't know. I said, well, tell me. What are you doing organically just to get out there? She's like, I'm doing all these things.

I'm meeting people. I'm going to I'm like, yes, that's and that's why the SEO is working. And your SEO manager loves you because SEO is only strengthened by the amount of work that you're doing to get those local recommendations and get people typing your name in. Like you need both.

Greg (49:26):
Say that one more say that one more time. It's so that's just so critical. Really?

Brent (49:31):
Well, I was so skeptical that an SEO was able to rank so well that they get all these leads after three months, not know that I've never seen that now, like six years ago. But SEO works the best. SEO managers love practice owners. When you can do the technical SEO and dial in your website and the practice owners out there talking about the business and getting those brand recommendations, those work hand to hand. You have to have both good SEO and a practice owner who's getting the Google reviews, who's getting the name out there.

So people are typing your brand into Google and AI search at the end of the day.

Greg (50:08):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, share whatever you want to share. Please share how folks can get in touch with you. Definitely talk about TheraSaaS. It's a super duper awesome product.

Brent (50:18):
Yeah, so that was, let's see, are we at five years ago now? 2021, five years ago. So my wife has a private practice. This is the exact Google Sheet we're using to track leads. And of course, the Google form was always breaking the connection to the Google Sheet.

And it just got unmanageable. We're getting lots of leads every month. Client leads are falling through the cracks. So if you're listening to this and you think client leads might be falling through the cracks, you're wondering, are we actually following up the best as we can? Or did we ever actually respond to that one person?

And you're waking up in the middle of the night thinking. Did we actually have follow-up? And you actually don't know how well your intake team is doing. There's no transparency because your conversations are on one platform, your emails are on another platform, and they're scattered. And you just, it takes so much time just to kind of do an audit to see how things are going.

Then you might want to consider a CRM. A CRM is just simple a customer relationship management tool. Just like you have QuickBooks for your finances and EHR for your operations, a CRM like TheraSaaS is there for your sales and marketing. It becomes the hub for you. You're able to use forms to be able to capture leads, you can qualify them, and then you can work on closing them through automations.

And you can centralize your communications with your intake team. There's just so many valuable tools in there. And practice owners have to take their sales and marketing way more seriously now. for all the reasons that we talked about today. So, if that's you, and you think client leads might be falling through the cracks, just go to therasaas.com.

T-H-E-R-A-S-A-A-S dot com. Look it up. read all the things and schedule a demo call with me and we can have a conversation to see if it's a good fit.

Greg (51:57):
In fact, you should type that into Google. Don't type .com, type into Google TheraSaaS and help out Brent's hyperlocal SEO.

Brent (52:06):
Yeah, just type, everyone right now, just type in TheraSaaS CRM and then click on it.

Greg (52:11):
Why is TheraSaaS the best CRM for therapists? Type that into Google to really hook it up.

Brent (52:16):
That's right. Well, Greg, thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

Greg (52:21):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Brent. I really, you know, this is what I was so excited about this is I really feel like the more information that we can share for folks and that people can get without. Obviously, we're both business owners, we help therapists in our own ways, but at the end of the day, how can you grow your practice? How can you increase your reach, your impact, make the world a better place as a therapist with whomever you have guiding you and helping you?

And I really believe that you got some incredible value from Brent today. So thank you so much for just so willingly and openly sharing your knowledge and your experience and You know, giving it away to folks, however they may use it. And yeah, everyone go Google TheraSaaS. And thanks, Brent. Appreciate you so much.

Brent (53:06):
Yes. Oh, you're absolutely welcome.

Greg (53:08):
All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.