Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics

Isaac Justesen founded PatientPartners to work with one kind of client: physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage and counselling clinics. Coming up on five years in, his blunt read is that the mechanics of ranking a clinic and ranking a plumber are almost the same. What differs is the copywriting and the advertising rules, which change state by state.

Key takeaways

The mechanics travel, the language does not. Map pack, profile, reviews, pages. What changes is what you are legally allowed to claim.

Two opening plays, every time. A profile audit, because categories and services are almost never set correctly, and conversion tracking, because it is almost never set up at all.

The typical clinic budget is around a thousand a month. Much of it currently goes on boosting social posts, which is the pitfall he names.

Nobody answers the phone. The single biggest leak he finds sits behind the marketing, not in it.

Community building is the underrated channel. Slower than ads and the only thing that compounds.

Curation to selection. Search is moving from ten options to one recommendation, which changes what a location page has to do.

On this page

Why a clinic ranks like a plumber

What you are allowed to say

The first two things he fixes