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Presenters 

🎤 Jessica Walker - Founder & CEO, Care Sherpa

Healthcare growth strategist, keynote speaker, and builder of systems that drive measurable results from patient engagement.

🎤 Nick Fraunfelder - CEO and Founder, SureOak

Nick has successfully launched and led three high growth businesses. His current venture, Sure Oak, focuses on driving lead generation for challenger brands through Google Search and AI-powered brand mentions

🎤 Seth Turnoff - Co-Founder & Managing Partner, CMM

Consumer data-driven hypertargeted patient acquisition strategist, confusing bio enthusiast.

Transcript 

Jessica Walker — All right. Hey, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you once again for joining us for our recent series of GPT-related optimizations for practices. We're so glad that you decided to spend the afternoon with us and some of my favorite people.

Just as a reminder, if you are new to our series, we've been holding a series of experts related to what practices need to be thinking about when it comes to the evolution of GPT, and how this is impacting patient acquisition and patient conversion.

So, this series has been a wonderful addition to our partners, and I've had a great time meeting with my friends. We're gonna actually mix it up a little bit this time, and instead of having individual presentations, my friends Nick and Seth and I are going to open it up to more of a conversation fireside chat. So a little bit more on that in a moment.

But before we jump in, just a quick reminder that we do have a Q&A session, or Q&A opportunity. While we're talking, if something we say strikes your fancy, or it causes you to have an additional question, encourage you to submit that in the Q&A, and we'll address that at the end of our session together, or even live during the session. So we just appreciate you participating, being a part of it.

So, I want to welcome to the table today my friends Nick and Seth.

Just as mentioned, to kick us off, we're going to make this a little bit more conversational.

I'll let Nick introduce himself, and then Seth, in terms of our areas of expertise. So, first off, CureSherpa, as we support patients on their elective medical journey. We're very consumer-focused when it comes to what are the areas impacting a consumer's expectations to move forward with the practice, so I'll be speaking from the perspective of what we hear from patients. Nick?

Nick Fraunfelder — Yep, my name's Nick Fraumfelder, I am the CEO of SureOak, and we'll be, we're heads down on this. We're all about all things organic authority and getting inbound leads, and trying to acquire more patients from our web properties.

Seth Turnoff — Hi, everybody. I'm Seth Turnoff. Jessica, thanks so much for having me. Nick, it's great to see you. I am a co-founder and managing partner of a group called Custom Medical Marketing, or CMM for short. We are a patient acquisition firm, leveraged with consumer data and hyper-targeted marketing to attract and acquire the ideal future patients for your specialty.

Jessica Walker — As Nick gets sets up to share, he brought some data to help us guide the discussion, but you can see why I brought these powerhouses to the discussion in terms of their areas of expertise, and so excited to jump in.

Nick Fraunfelder — Awesome. Yeah, this is, this is fun, because, Jessica, Seth, you're two of my favorite people, so this is very easy, and when you said, hey, we can make it a fireside chat, I was very relieved. I didn't have to talk on my own the whole way, so… this is fun. So how to get more leads from ChatGPT. I just want to take everyone through a little bit of who I am, the journey that I've been on. I was very lucky, back in 2013, which doesn't seem that long ago to me, but that seems ages ago, probably.

In today's world of AI, but, I got to be the chief revenue officer and co-founder of a healthcare IT company called Clockwise MD. And at Clockwise, we had a revelational insight, that is nothing today, but back then, medical providers were undervaluing their digital assets.

And we found out that if we just put a simple call to action, and this was mostly for ERs and namely urgent cares, if we put a widget with a call to action, skip the waiting room, we were able to increase conversions of patient acquisitions by over 50%.

So, while everything, in the hospital, in the urgent care, in the clinic, was everything about operational internal focus, no one was looking at what is this digital experience, and how can that be important? The problem is, everyone figured that out as well. There were registration, it was galore, right? And so, the trust journey totally changed, right? So, the trust was all about convenience. Can you see me now?

And then now, if we fast-forward 5 years later was, why should I trust you? And then we saw the rise of content-based marketing, account-based marketing, SEO was the hot thing, and paid ads. And  now that we're moving into this environment now with AI—why should I click on your widget? How do I even find you? And what was that journey? Did I get to your homepage? Did I go to a specific service page? Did I go to a blog? So it really, really changed. And so that's framing where I've been, and that's gonna shape a lot of the conversational way, I think.

So, at SureOak, we get asked these questions all the time, and that's probably the reason you signed up for this webinar, these are just 3 of the questions, you probably have 20 of them. And Seth, Jessica, I don't know if you have other questions that you would add to this list, but…

How do I get AI to give me leads? What's the secret? What's the hack to AI mentions? And what is hype, and what is real? I gotta tell you, I think about this a lot, and I wanted to be an honest broker when I came onto this, when I agreed to do this seminar.

There are a lot of vendors in my seat that are selling you, that they know it all, and that's just not possible. Dario Amade, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, they all say, we don't actually know how these LLMs work. We just know that we invest billions of dollars in them, and we make them bigger, they get better.
Right, so if the founders of these LLMs don't know what's going on, how are we supposed to know? So all I'm gonna say is, at Shiroak, Seth, I know you're doing some of the same work, Jessica, I know you're figuring it out, we test a lot of things, and this is what we know today. That's the exact same way that we approach organic and inbound leads.

Alright, anything you guys would add to that before I jump in?

Seth Turnoff — No, but I gotta say, Nick, this is one of the many reasons that I appreciate working with you, is because of the accountability and the honesty and, this is what we know right now. And anytime someone comes to the table, and I'm not saying there's a bunch of shade balls out there, but, when they're saying “we're the experts, we know we're the end-all, be-all,” it's kind of Oh, okay. So, Nick, thank you.

Jessica Walker — Hey, appreciate you, brother. We think it's a brave new frontier, right? Brave new frontier. It is. I mean, I said this in a prior webinar, too, that people are thinking, this AI world of how patients are using GPTs is that, oh, my cheese has moved. It's the same cheese.

It's just now in a different platter. And the platter's probably gotten bigger, because now you've got SEO, you've got GPT, you've got, all the other angles, right? And so, it's not an either-or, but it's an and, and so…

Seth Turnoff — There's more cheese, there's more cheese, and they're shredded, there's slices, there's chunks.

Jessica Walker — Gourmet, yeah.

Seth Turnoff — all different kinds of cheese, but look, the fact remains the same, and then, Nick, I'm gonna let you get back to it. Marketing, whether it's traditional, digital, or AI-related, it's all about showing up where the people who need you are. So, if that can be our foundation to build on.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, no, we're gonna be repeating that constantly. There are some fundamentals that we gotta focus on. So I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. We're here in the South, we have this term, don't overcook the grits. And that's a little bit what's happening right now in this market. People are asking, What game am I playing now that, AI and LLMs are here? And so we have these new strategies. It used to be just SEO, that was, hey, I want to get in the top 5 search results, because you have your ads at the very top of the Google page, and then we have the organic results, and those have up to 30% click-through rate, and if we get down to number 5, there's more a 5, 8% click-through rate. So that was the game that we were playing, but now with AI, we have these different goals, and these different acronyms. We have AEO, answer engine optimization, how do I get cited by, the LLMs, and we have GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. So when I'm having a conversation with ChatGPT, how do I get it to mention my brand?

At the end of the day, it's just search. It's just search. And what these, what these engines are doing to actually give the customer the actual content that they're looking for when they actually are sitting down and typing on their computer, so…

Seth Turnoff — Hang on, before you move forward, can you go back to that slide? I just want to ask a question. Okay, so when we're talking about geo, AEO, or SEO, do each one of these,

outcomes, Do they have a specific playbook when it comes down to implementing a strategy to show up?

Nick Fraunfelder — Yes, yeah, absolutely. So, the overviews, so, if you've ever been in Google nowadays, you notice when you type in the search results, and we'll get into more of this, but the idea is, there's a snippet that the LLM is now giving you. It's a very, what would you say, punctuated answer to the query. Very specific, right?

The idea is when we write content for those queries, we want to have punchy, very snippet-friendly content on our website. So that would be, an example of one of these strategies that you do. The other one is just, I need to get my brand all over the internet on all different types of content, so that when I'm having conversations, no matter what the conversation is, my brand shows up as, an authority on that.  It's just your authority. It's you consistently telling what you're good at? And these things should naturally happen, and yes, there are strategies, but yeah, 100% right. At the end of the day, it's about the right content to the perfect customer. And that's what this next slide was saying. Exactly what you were saying, Seth.

An organic lead is the result of great content finding the perfect customer. And what has really changed is the gatekeeper has changed. I always think of digital marketing as economics. There is a supply of content that we have. But, really, on the other end is demand. What is the demand? And the gatekeeper in the middle, which has been Google.

It was an algorithm. That was the old one, right? This is the old model. The algorithm had 200 ranking factors. They worked for 15 years to perfect this.

Right? So everything from, the quality of your website, the quality of your backlinks, all of… and if you want to… I provided a link down here if you actually want to see what each of those are. Google doesn't release it, but we figured it out as,

SEO practitioners, hey, what are these ranking factors? What works? What doesn't?

And Google does a great job getting rid of, the spammy things, the things that used to work, keyword stuffing, all of that stuff. They got rid of that, and so the algorithm became very, very, very good about matching content supply with search demand.

But what's happened? Well, the algorithm has now just been dumped into LLM. There is no algorithm anymore. So what we have is an LLM, ChatGPT or Gemini, Anthropics, Claude, or…

These are the biggest supercomputers we've ever seen. Multi, multi-billion dollar investments. And so now we have this brain that is, the smartest human, or close to being the smartest human that's ever lived.

Right? And that's what it's thinking. So what Google is trying to do is protect the search experience. So, how can I provide content that really is going to be the most pertinent, the most trustworthy. And so what was happening now is these gatekeepers, they're our proxy for trust.
So, I was saying before, at Clockwise, it was very easy to build that trust with a simple widget. Now, it's all about, well, why should I trust you, and why, how do I get ChatGPT to be my proxy of trust. It's that referral, what doctor's the best? I asked Seth, hey, who do I see for my hip replacement? Well, Dr. Jones, he's the best, that's the one that you gotta go see. Now, my proxy for Seth is now ChatGPT. Which is very new.

Jessica Walker — Nick, we think about this, about how patients as consumers are being retrained to ask these questions. So, with SEA News.

I can optimize all day long for best fertility doctor near me, best fertility doctor St. Louis, right? Now, what's happened is the patients as consumers are, well, I have this condition, and this condition, and I have this concern about budget. Who's my best provider? And it's not limited to just St. Louis, right? It's going to be answering in a way that is going to take that local into account, but much bigger game.

Nick Fraunfelder — Oh, that's absolutely… we're gonna get… we're gonna get deep in that. So first, I'm gonna dive right into that, but, the 3 major changes that I want to talk about here, there's 20-something major, major quantum shifts now that have happened. But what AI has done, it has changed search behavior, it has changed consumer behavior, just as you were referring to, Jessica. It has included social media, as a part of what's happening, so this is very new for us as an SEO agency. We have to worry about things on social media, we have to worry about what SEO was not really pulling in, as the AI is.

And the last one is AI content saturation. , you'll be blown away how the internet is growing and how hard it is to now break out with your content. We'll dive into that. So the first one, Jessica, exactly what you were talking about.
is what is different now about the search, we've now taken this, technology, and we've totally changed the way that we interact with it. So, in the old days, in SEO, in the SERP, we would just do dentist near me, and we would get that traditional, Google search results, right?

Now, it went by pretty quick, but I have these conversations now, instead of just a pithy, .

three to five word, what we call keywords in the search bar. Now it's five times longer. And people are, before they even go over to what we call the SERP, search engine result, it is, now up to 20 different chats that will happen there before I ever transact on your webpage. That is a huge shift.

And so, what we're seeing is… okay, so what does that mean? So, I don't need to worry about SEO anymore? Not at all. So, what has happened? So, everyone thought SEO would go away. We thought the Google experience would go away. It has only lost less than 1% of all traffic.

well, then which is it? Is ChatGPT eating all SERP, or is Google gonna still dominate? The answer is both. The answer is both, right? Because now, if you ever notice Gemini or these AI overviews, people are flipping back and forth between traditional SERPs and chats.

That's really interesting to me. So, I think you've already seen this, before I ever go see somebody about my aching hip, I'm gonna do a big research, experiment on ChatGPT, and then I'm gonna go to the search results. People are interchanging between the two. So what do you want? You want both.

You want both, and how do we get both? So, when I say both, I mean the search engine results and the chat mentions.

Any… should I stop there? Any comments?

Seth Turnoff — I just want to make a comment, and, the rise of AI and AI search, I think that's what caused everyone to be , oh, SEO is dead, it's all AI search. What do you think about, and this isn't a channel or a strategy that we ever use, what do you think AI search is going to do to pay-per-click?

Nick Fraunfelder — That's a good question. So, will… so, great question. So, Google's already started experimenting with ads within, chat itself.

what is that? Is that… is that moral high ground? Is that a cash grab? , tons and tons of… billions of dollars of their revenue comes from ads. So, they're not gonna really give that up. So, we will see ads at some point within these, chats, but they're gonna have to really call it out, because the reason people love LLMs

is because this is organic authority content. And so, that's why people skip the ads, or… not all, right? But, they'll skip the ads and they'll go down to the organic results, because those are the ones that are deemed most trustworthy by my trusted source, Google.

Jessica Walker — Yeah.

Nick Fraunfelder — believe that or not, but that's the reasoning behind it. And they're going to… they're in subscription models, so I think, Seth, to answer your question, what's going to happen with subscription models? Can they sell enough subscriptions to keep that?

Nobody knows.

Seth Turnoff — Nobody knows.

Interesting. Great answer, Nick. I knew you'd have the, the insight.

Jessica Walker — Also, it's gonna be interesting, I had some prior guests, from, RatingsMD and the partner about, the rise of how their content is being used, and you talked about it, Nick, right? It's a trust factor, too. So we as consumers, we've already started to, get in this environment and shift. I know, personally.

I start with a GPT before I go to Google now, right? And so, I might still go to Google, but I'm 99% of the time there. But it's the trust that I trust those results more, because it's not fed to me, right? It's a public-related score, and not just a.

who Google wants to rank, because we all know, let's be real, those of us in marketing, we know that it's been Google's game for a long time, and we just had to pay for it, right? So if you, magically, you paid for Google search ads, and then all of a sudden your SEO gets bumped too, right? And again.

Nick Fraunfelder — Magic how that happens.

Jessica Walker — That's amazing! So, and it seems, let's be real, it's in meta as well, right? So this is all that. So, I think that as a consumer, the trust that I have in what GPT serves me is already going to be a higher outcome. So, I agree, it'll be interesting over time when we add in a paid component.

Seth Turnoff — Consumers also know, when we're being sold to. And for certain things, choosing a specialist, that's not really a book-now scenario. This is more of a research play where, I don't want sponsored content. I want to know the capital T truth.

to what it is I'm asking, or I can dive deeper into, validated statistics and data

Related to what I'm looking for.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, that trust one's different. , what do we trust content-wise in AI, right? So, but, I mean, that is a known issue. Y'all, what's happening with ads? You asked, Jessica, I put a note on here, because I told you to remind me not to mention this, but,

As of right now, AI is not touching local.

So if you notice, dentists near me, what we googled before, that map, that 4 box, that is not being messed with. It is not good with geolocation data right now, so…

keep doing your reviews, keep getting your Google Business reviews, you have to do that. That is still super powerful, and there's not a real good alternative, AI-wise, to replace that, I don't know if you ever mess with.

Jessica Walker — plate is bigger. We can't… we can't just say, oh, I'm just shifting to just GPT, or just… it's now your plate. Fortunately, marketers on call, right? You all know, god darn it, now we have another strategy to think about, but that's the reality of it.

Seth Turnoff — But every marketer who's on this call understands that there is not one universal source of marketing truth that you can just put everything into. It's a comprehensive play, and everything has a different, nuance, or strategy, or outcome, or, maintenance that's required of it to get the outcomes that you want. You put them all together, and now you're cooking with heat, right?

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, yeah, and so the ads that are working, Seth, these local service ads, the Google Guarantee, those are still crushing. I think people on the traditional pay-per-click have seen a decline. I compete now with a lot of paid agencies, I focus more on organic. I've never seen more AI experts come out of the paid world back

I ever have. , people are shifting. So it's made my job a little bit more difficult, so…

Seth Turnoff — Well, the.

Nick Fraunfelder — Anyway, so focus on local, particularly as it matters to a lot of people's practices on here. That is so important.

Let me see if I can advance the slide.

Okay, so, Jessica, you were alluding to this before, so how do I rank on both?

So, this is a fun exercise if you ever want to do it yourself. So, you have your keywords. So, I'm using the example, teeth whitening. So, I want to rank for teeth whitening as a service for my, dental practice. So, that is my pillar keyword. And if I type, hey, ChatGPT, give me an SEO fan-out, keyword fan-out, for teeth whitening.

And what it does is really, really great, right?

This is the easy part, writing the content's the hard part, but what it does is it breaks it down into subcategories, and these are just 3 of them, there's probably 8 or so. But for teeth whitening, there's products, there's concern questions, and there's demographics.

And this is what any good journalist would do. They would look for angles. They're looking for angles to write about. And I want to cover all the angles around teeth whitening. I can do it in one piece, or I can do it in multiple pieces of content.

And so, if I'm, hey, I want to write about the difference between the different products, strips, gels, toothpaste, pens, LED lights, professional-grade services, right?

That is a whole, great blog post I can write, and will help me rank around, if I'm selling only mufflers, I want to write about the whole car.

And it just gives me more, content authority from Google's point of view. So, think about these angles when you're writing. This is hugely important. So, any comments on that? So, Jessica, you were nailing that. So, if I'm an orthopod, I want to talk about golfers, I want to talk about age demographics, I want to talk about all these specific things that are happening in my locale.

Because if I don't, and we'll talk about this also, ChatGT is not gonna give me credit. It's not gonna give me credit. If it's derivative content, if it's commoditized content, I'm not gonna get credit. I gotta be unique.

Jessica Walker — And I think one of the things that we've seen, so we've been working with some of our clients on a strategy, so again, remember, I don't do anything for Sherpa to help you all impact it, but I definitely can bring you the data to help you understand what, on the actual consumer buying journey, what's top of mind. So we've been tracking how people are using GPT, and , we've double-clicked on that with them and straight up asked.

out of curiosity, what's the query you used, or how did you find us? So, one of the case studies that I've been highlighting in this series is an example of a fertility doctor that we work with, where he found this really amazing success story. This woman came from New York to St. Louis, Missouri, to come and see our fertility doctor. Well, how'd she get there? It was through GPT. How did she find them? It was because we had great content out there specific to her

her situation, specific to her condition, and then he spoke to her financial concerns. We also doubled on everything second opinion, because of him wanting to be that second opinion provider. So all those things happened that he then popped and presented, right? So what did we learn from that? It was, to your point, right, demographics, concerns, questions, and then how do I serve those needs? And it was very specific and detailed. And now, where some of our content friends on the phone are probably, about falling out of their chair, thinking about that's a lot of content to be hyper-focused. And we believe maybe you can't cover the whole macro, but let's be very micro with, who is your ideal target? He was, in this case, this fertility doctor was very defined of, this is the audience that he knows he can serve very, very well, and we're seeing it come in.

Seth Turnoff — I think… I think this exercise, though, basically reverse engineering the fan out as, as, really looking at the ecosystem of

what and who, and the concerns, I think it gives the practitioner, right.

kind of a real intentional 360-degree view of what they do, and looking at it from the consumer standpoint, I think this only strengthens their brand, when they can not only look at this with, real high visibility into all of the products and

Concerns and demographics, these are the big three, in my mind, in terms of, what your future patients are, what's gonna get them? It's gonna be one of those. It might be a combination, it might be all three. But to have an orthopod, or to have a fertility doc, really understand these components, I mean, that is Brand Building 101.

Jessica Walker — And Nick, we talked…

Seth Turnoff — I've yet to read a marketing book where focus doesn't help.

Jessica Walker — We talked about this content, writing to, give our friends that are following along at home, the top 5 things they can do today, and would you agree that if we just stopped the recording right now and ended the webinar, if they just took this one away, this is where you start, right?

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, no, that's why we started with it, that's fair. That is absolutely fair, so…

So hey, I hope we added value right away, if anyone.

Seth Turnoff — Out of the gate!

Nick Fraunfelder — People already turned off the video. Alright, next part. Big change, disruption number two, impact of social media. Okay, so the old model of Google was that it would crawl the entire website, or the entire internet.

it would, index your site, and it would give it some kind of domain authority, and it would rank you, as whether or not. What has changed now is this concept of pre-training and post-training of these LLMs. And so, what the…

So LLMs are trained on all known data. We're basically out of data at this point to train these models. That's why these computers are so big. And guess what is… guess what? 80% of the web traffic is? Social media.

And it's not just… and they're LLMs, large language models, right? So not only are they reading, but they're watching video.

And they can digest that, and it can be trained on video. So, what has happened is, and I think you've already seen that, particularly Grok, since it, XAI bought Twitter, or X, right? What we've seen is when I actually do a query in one of these, it actually references social media data.

And largely a lot Reddit, because people are asking consumer-type questions on Reddit.

You might see the same on, other review sites, such as Clutch, or, I don't know, people are on WebMD, so, where these conversations are happening. So anytime where your customers are gathering, they're having conversations, it's getting, mixed in with the training data and a part of the output. So.

Jessica Walker — Nick, we note, that the reason why LLMs are using… so Reddit is a great example. So many of our provider friends that are on this call probably haven't even thought about Reddit. Very few of them that I know, my clients, even claim their own Reddit, handle, right? Or kind of been following the subs related to their content.

But we know that LLMs love this because it is consumer-driven conversation. It is unfiltered, it is unmasked, right? And so, when you have another patient, right, this is the ultimate word of mouth. You have another patient going on Reddit and either putting you on blast, God forbid, or seeing your praises, that's why the LLMs absolutely are using social media in a new way.

And so we've been talking with some of our client partners, we monitor, that social listening to know, because if you're getting put on blast, I want my, team to know how to help recover from that issue, right? But if you flip it, now say, let's use this to our advantage, and not only monitor and see what people are talking about.

AKA, that's gonna influence what great content I'm gonna get out before my competitors do.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, absolutely. I'm not saying go on Reddit, I'm saying go where your customers are talking.

Nick Fraunfelder — So go where your patients are talking.

Seth Turnoff — I'd be part of the.

Nick Fraunfelder — For us, I'm an SEO firm, I… I… we do mostly, a lot of, business services, a lot of work that. I, Reddit's kind of a scary place.
Jessica Walker — happiness.

Nick Fraunfelder — Talk about Discord. There's a lot of, garbage out there. A lot of my customers are on LinkedIn, so that's a lot of where, we'll do, we'll post blogs there, and that's where we talk.

But go… but there are these, sub-communities where people are talking, and it's getting pulled into these results, and that's very, very new. I'm gonna ask for your feedback on this too, Seth. So, how do I get into social media? Well, the most practical way is…

To keep your website dynamic and updated, and then to use the content, so if you're doing a blog or a video, put it on your website, and then make it travel.

You can't be… it's the world of the omni-channel. I mean, it used to be, I could pick one channel and I'd be fine. You at least probably have to have two or three. , Facebook, Insta, guaranteed your customers are there. Your patients are there, and they are having conversations there.

Digital PR, super important. LinkedIn, YouTube, they are there. So, the idea is that we want to take this content, we don't copy and paste, that is a big no-no, because you don't want your blog that you reposted on LinkedIn to outrank your website. You don't want that, but you want to, curate it so it can go over to that audience, so you want to change it up a little bit.

Seth, you are our master at this stuff, so if you want to say anything, hey, how social media has helped you personally, I mean, you've branded the mustache. I mean, I think you're, .

Seth Turnoff — Actually, it branded itself, actually. I really had nothing to do with it. But thanks for noticing. So I think when it comes down to social, you hit the nail on the head, Nick. You don't want to just take a piece of content and just, .

just broadcast it on every channel. The users are different, and you don't need to do a deep dive on really understanding the mindset of each YouTube user, of each Facebook user, but they're slightly different. And I think when you create content that is…

A little more intentional for that.

user, or 4.

Seth Turnoff — platform, it becomes stickier. And, yeah, there's a case for, if it's just fluff content, to get it out. I'm not saying that you should always do that, but, sometimes you…

It's better to have something on your profile than to go 2-3 weeks with nothing there. Because if someone's clicking, and if someone's researching, and they go to your page, and the last, update or anything was from August 2nd, almost 2 months from the date that I'm looking, it's kind of , alright, maybe they're asleep at the wheel. Does that matter when I'm researching a specialty service provider?

Probably not, but does it… does it register in my mindset of, .

Does it make me want to run and call them? Right now? It's , when someone is keeping all of their stuff current, it's , okay, they're involved, they're with it. And, to get Jessica involved in this, when I pick up the phone and I call them.

If all their stuff is current, I'm expecting a certain type of experience when I pick up the phone. Now, the best ones are the ones that can deliver on the promise that all of their marketing makes when I pick up the phone, and not letting me get off the phone until not only do I have that consult book.

But I'm, really excited, and I feel , oh my god, I'm so glad I called them. They were great, this is gonna be great. It's gonna decrease the no-shows, it's gonna get patients to do their research and be compliant and show up ready for the consult, instead of, being flighty and flaky.

Nick Fraunfelder — That's so good, that's so good. So, I'm gonna plug a book. There's a book called Tribes by Seth Godin. We don't even use the term ICP anymore at my company, we just talk in terms of tribes.

Seth Turnoff — to adopt that, that's, that's.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, so think in terms of your tribe. Who is… and you want to lead the tribe. You want to be an active voice for your tribe. And so, when we talk about social media, or your blog, or any content whatsoever, you want to add value. So, don't just do, derivative content, just, anything I can look up on Wikipedia. You want, hey, this community, what adds value to them? So add value, do it consistently, and it is social media at the end of the day, so have fun. Have fun with it. , make it enjoyable. So, don't take the social out of social media, so…
Seth Turnoff — Love that.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, yeah, and no one cares about you going to a conference. I'm just gonna say that, right? So, if that's what you're posting, Happy Thanksgiving, nobody cares. That is adding zero value to me and the tribe. I want to know about the service that I'm going to get from you and how that's going to be great. So, that is really the intent of it.

Seth Turnoff — I think we get caught up in the wrong intent of our content sometimes. Social isn't something just to post for no reason. But Nick, to go a little further into the tribe, thing,

I think that anybody who markets themselves or their business needs to really understand what… who their tribe is. Not just who they are right now, based on your EMR and what type of patients you have in your system, but who you are looking for, specifically. And I hear this all the time, when it's , okay, so who's your ideal patient? oh, we'll treat anyone with this, and it's , no, no, but who's your ideal? Who are you looking for? Who are you best suited to serve? Oh, you do regenerative medicine, non-surgical pain relief for arthritis? Okay, so you need to be talking to people ages 32 to 60 who have active lifestyles, and former athletes, or who are purchasing sports equipment, Golf, yoga, Pilates, CrossFit, that type of thing. So, I think getting super crispy with who you want in your tribe is only going to help you as a business treat more of those patients that you can actually help, that it's , it scratches your itch of clinical satisfaction, and, every provider, and I hate using that term, provider, every practitioner has that strike zone where they're like, oh, I love these patients, they're the ones that I can really help the most, and I love working with them because I cut whatever their why is and how it relates. I feel it's okay to get picky. And this is where you should be real picky.

Jessica Walker — And I'll add, too, we have conversations with our clients, not all leads are the same. That is just because you can pump a bunch of, oh, people know my brand, people are now all of a sudden picking up the phone, I don’t want CareSherpa to be your garbage person. You are spending money by having me sort through 250 leads because you turned on some initiative that brought in folks who have no real intent to move forward, who have… are not, to your point, Seth, are not your ideal target. Or even, let's be honest, you're not an ideal payer, either. And so, all of this, what Nick said previously, keeping that mindset of, do I have my persona, do I understand who is my ideal conversion factor, and then how am I writing the content, how am I doing my SEO optimization, is my AEO GEO optimization aligned to who they are?

Nick Fraunfelder — No, 100%. Totally. And just to put a cherry on top of this sundae right here, is that, we said a lot, oh, you're just trying to sell me services. Yes, I'm trying to sell you services, but you can do this yourself. The idea is, pick one topic a month. Make it travel, right? You don't have to write about every different topic every day, right? And so the idea is, if you picked a really good blog, I want to write a really definitive guide on this, then it's Thanksgiving dinner. Just take some of the sides off.

And then, and reuse that content in other places. So it doesn't have to be as overwhelming as, trying to eat the whole car at once. Just start with the bumper. Alright.

Seth Turnoff — Sounds a terrible Thanksgiving dinner. I'm not coming to your… No more analogies that. It's so crunchy.

Nick Fraunfelder — Okay, big change, number 3, disruption.

Every month, there are 5.4 million new web pages. Why is that? So, I mean, that's close to 200,000 new webpages a day.

And why is that? It's because we're able to write novels now in, minutes on ChatGPT.

everyone and their mother now can write content. And so what is… has given rise to this term, AI slop. I don't know if you've… Jessica, Seth, have you heard that already? Yes.

Seth Turnoff — I love it, it's so true. And since I learned that phrase, I can spot it.

You can spot it. I'm dialed in, yeah.

Nick Fraunfelder — It's got, it's got too many emojis, it's, it's just… Oh, yeah, yeah. It just looks…too perfect. So funny, resumes don't have grammatical errors anymore, right, all of a sudden, it used to be, a thing now.

If we're writing with AI intent, the AI cannot write anything new. It's synthesizing in maybe new ways, but it's taking existing content and just repurposing it. And so if you're only going to be repurposing content, even our own content, it's gonna be… it's gonna get cannibalized in what we're calling the zero-click environment. So, I got the information I needed on ChatGPT, I never actually transacted over on the provider's website.

Right? So, we have to stay away from that. So, so, derivative content, it's getting eaten, it's getting cannibalized. So… so the fix is, Google from day one, this is that long-term outlook I was telling you about, gave us this EEAT guidance, and it's 100% guaranteed to help you.

It is the idea that we, it's a principle, but for each of these buckets, experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, if we turn that into a program, if we make programmatic authority our goal using these principles, we're gonna rank better.

We're gonna rank better. So experience, show how firsthand. Expertise, demonstrate your knowledge and skill. Authority, establish your reputation as a trusted source. Not just you personally, but your website has this digital authority that you have to protect.

what's linking to you? What do you say? How is it organized? And then your trustworthiness. Is your… does it prove that your website is reliable and honest? Are you an honest broker? Are you saying right things? Are you citing sources? This is all really, really important.

The unique part…is what we… we don't use the term eat anymore, we say neat, and the N now stands for new.

So, if everything's derivative, this is the hard part of marketing. I'm sorry, y'all, this is where the second, this is where, you do the extra rep in the weight room, right? This is the hard work. We have to come up with novel content.

And so, it doesn't have to just be new, it can be niche, right? So we were talking about the fanouts and the breakouts, that's super important. But some of the easiest things you can do is, do expert commentary. , a good 2026 guide for, dental care. That sort of…

idea that if you write the most definitive guide possible, that is helpful. And so, maybe that's a little derivative, but, if you are the go-to source for AI better than anything else that's out there, you have to look for those opportunities. Who's not writing commentary that's, as in-depth as what you can provide?

The other part is surveys. It might be hard for local service providers, but the idea is, survey is unique content, very apropos to your market. So, most common sports injuries for golfers, or a certain age group, your locale, these things go a long way, and they travel.

And then demonstrating your track record. No one can replicate your track record. They're your patients, they're your testimonials, they're your case studies.

you get to own those. No one's gonna be able to replicate that. So if you're able to do that, that is gonna be huge. If you could talk about price, no one seems to talk about price in healthcare. It's a huge opportunity.

Jessica Walker — Don't hide behind your credit for that.

Seth Turnoff — Yeah, and trust, and save time for the folks at CareSherpa who are handling your phone, not to get a bunch of tire kickers. Nick, can you do me a favor? Go back to the previous slide. I want to touch on something.

Alright, so your programmatic authority is just that. It's yours. And this is Brand Building 102. This is figuring out who you are, who you are uniquely positioned to treat, and why.

And what your expertise is, where your authority comes from through all of these things, and I think that so many, at least physicians and specialists.

They open their doors, and they practice medicine, without, kind of.

going inside and establishing their brand, who they are, who they're here to serve and treat, and why. , I think patients connect to people and the story. Real quickly, I have a client, and…

He put out a post, he's a, he's a neurosurgeon, and…

He made a post about where he and his family to… the barbecue restaurant that they .

And at first, I was .

what are you doing? , no, what is this? And this is a couple years ago, before, we were really, headed down what we should be talking about. And and I quickly changed my tune, because when you can remove the white coat, and you can create access and a connection between a potential patient, .

I know that restaurant, I that restaurant too! Oh, this is a real person, this is an actual human being who happens to barbecue as well. I barbecue.

Nick Fraunfelder — And it's.

Seth Turnoff — It's not, the end-all, be-all of connection, but it shows, .

The reality of, okay, this person is a specialist, and they have the authority, but they're also a human being.

Jessica Walker — They're approachable.

Seth Turnoff — Exactly. And I think once you can do that, patients tend to become less anxious, and lean into the solution, as opposed to, whoa, I don't want to see a neurosurgeon, because I'm definitely getting back surgery, and I don't want back surgery, . So I think that takes a lot of it away, but this, in its core, is branding.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, yeah. My dad always says, if who you are, what to do.

If who you are, and this is your competitive advantage. What you're really experienced at, what you really differentiate yourself with, you said, the patients I serving, because I have the best outcomes, you really have to lean into that. So there is a danger in marketing to go chase clicks or impressions.

But that's not who you are, you're just chasing vapor. So, knowing who you are and knowing what to do is so key, Seth. I'm glad you said that, so… Jessica, anything from you?

Jessica Walker — Yeah, the next slide you had too, Nick. I want to say an example. So, in practice, what this looks is, going back to the example I shared of the hyper-localized persona, right? So, who's this person, and, what are these things, and how do we track them? So, one of the ways that this is an action is we work with our clients to understand what is the compelling event, what is the trigger that made today the day that this person picked up the phone and said, I am looking for a solution, you have the solution.

So, if I understand that, right, so let's use the example of a fertility, example. So, did they have a recent loss? Did they have a recent unsuccessful cycle? So, they're looking for second opinions.

Whatever that mindset is, we have to have that trigger moment, then we can go and make sure our content appeals to those trigger moments that align with what you have here, which is, hey, here is our case study of women you, with your condition, and our success rate aligned to that.

But we find that understanding that consumer buying kind of trigger, that consumer buying part, what kicks off the journey.

Guide you on fantastic content that will serve the rest of your downstream content, well.

Seth Turnoff — Well, I think that consumer trigger is just gonna be, the door that slams open, and as long as…

Jessica Walker — to answer it.

Seth Turnoff — You're there to answer the door, and have a whole slew of meaningful content, that

can answer this consumer, this future patient's questions. Sure, there's a frequency play here that trigger moment is probably not going to be the, I'm picking up a phone and I'm booking a consult. That trigger moment is going to start the research phase, and the anxiety phase, and the wait phase, and the frustration phase of, that, that consumers go through before

Or they even have a target of who they're gonna pick up the phone and call, and they know why, right? And I think a lot of it has to do with the information and the content they were able to find.

Nick Fraunfelder — Okay, at this point, you're , the title of this was 5 Things You Can Do. Where are my 5 Things? Right? So I'm gonna land the plane, right? So I'm gonna give you the 5 things.

Here are the 5 tips for ranking for AI, and I'm not just say AI, I would say for SEO as well, or SERPs. But the first is authoritative content. If you're an expert in your field, if who you are, how to communicate it well. So focus on case studies, look at your references, reviews, how-tos. Blogging is not optional, it's mandatory.

And if you want to blog videos, that is even better, right? Again, that just… when we put those in the middle, I wouldn't put them on the top of the page, because it kind of slows down the traction, but if we put them in the middle of the page, people will stop, and they'll engage with your page.

If you get consumers to stay on a page longer, just through video alone, not only are you training the AI models with your video, but you're actually getting them to stay on pages longer, and that's just highly engaging, so that's really good.

The second one, right for NLP intent, natural language processing, right? So, what does that mean? Well, these models, these LLMs, they're being trained to read like we do.

So when I come onto a web page, I skim it, and I'm looking for sections and blocks. Each block should be self-explanatory. Why is that important? Well, like we talked before, those snippets. I shouldn't be referring to other parts of the page, it's not a whole story. I want to read it. This block talks about this service, and it does this, and has this outcome, and does this, it is all self-contained.

AI loves that. It's skimming. It's skimming just we skim. So make sure that your webpages are, built for that. So FAQs are absolutely mandatory on all of our webpages. Third, off-page mentions. So this is your earned backlinks.

But this is a first principle of search. Larry Page, when he started Google.

He came up with this concept that he noticed in research papers, that all these research papers were referring to a foundational research paper. And that was the seminal research paper that everyone was referring to. You want to be that seminal research paper. You want other people coming to your content as a source. When Google sees this web of you being cited on other websites, either through PR, or earned backlinks, guest post bloggings, or inserts of your website within a pertinent blog, that is major importance, for SEO and for AI SEO, I guess we want to call it.

Third, okay, develop author influence. You want internal influencers. We have doctors that can be celebrities online if we wanted them to.

The idea is that you should have author pages for them. If you want to ghostwrite for them, fine. But what are they good at, and what kind of authorship should they have? Should they have their own blog? They should have their own author page with their… so, you do that anyway. This is about Dr. So-and-so. Here's the articles and blogs that this person has written about. That is hugely important. So, on all our blogs, all of our content, there should be a date, and there should be an author. And the author should have credibility, right? So we're looking at the authority.

The last one, everyone's gonna go to sleep on, but tactical. Your website, no one visits me on mobile? Yeah, they do. And, even if they don't, Google thinks it's highly important. It needs to be organized, have architecture, it needs metadata, schema markup, blah blah blah, robot text, all of that stuff.

Affirm can do that for you. It's worth the money, just to do a one-time audit and just fix those things if you don't have a webmaster that you feel confident in. But, we could tell you really quickly if your website's healthy or not. So, those are the five things I would say that immediately, if you could just fix and focus on these at a high level, those are the five things that I would love to leave with everybody. That's it all. Any other comments on this?

Jessica Walker — I was gonna say, everything you highlight here, Nick, every… all of our friends falling along at home, you said, outside of maybe some of the technical, more advanced, geeky, nerdy things, right? But the beautiful thing, by the way, GPT can also help you learn some of those.

Nick Fraunfelder — There we go.

Jessica Walker — Right? But that aside, every part of this is something that we're almost doing naturally, but now we're doing it with intent, right? So, I'll give you a quick example. For natural language processing, we brought up FAQs, right? Your FAQs should not be price, and then a drop-down menu that then gives you price details, right? But literally, the language is, how much does XY procedure cost, right? Then, here's your answer, all together. That's how the GPTs are going to be looking for that, and then again, your authority, you've demonstrated that, you've answered it. So, it's just slight things that you probably already have a lot of this in the work that you're doing today, but now with Nick's guide here, and the things we've been talking about, just tweak it in a way that allows you to become more visible, more trustworthy.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you could try to figure out technical on your own, but, I could look at YouTube and try and fix my car. I still bring it to a mechanic, right? So you need a good technical person.

Jessica Walker — That's a good point, right? Because there's also, if you try to self-teach yourself, right, you're going to be losing a lot of daylight. And I think why CareSherpa, why we wanted to host this series, and why I'm bringing wonderful experts Nick and Seth to the table, is that there are things that you can do now to get ahead of your competition. And if you are on this webinar, you are already one step ahead of your competition by thinking about this. So now, make that foundational investment, and then you can iterate on it.

But, if you don't, your credibility, your authority, your timeline, all that, you're losing daylight that's gonna get you lost in the shuffle.

Nick Fraunfelder — Just a quick pitch for a service that Seth and I are partnering on. We are doing these game plans. We had an old game plan for SEO, but now we're doing it for AI plus SEO. At the end of the day, it's a full audit of your website, how you're presenting, how your content is being viewed by the internet and by the search engines and the LLMs.

so at the end of the day, we got these four buckets that we look at, but what I would point you to is what are your competitors doing? It's a zero-sum game. Either you get the mention, or they do. Either you get the number one spot on the SERP, or they do, and there's no in-between. It's completely binary. So the idea is, what are they doing? How are they getting there? What are they spending? What channels are they marketing on? We can give you that type of insight. And then, at the end of the day, is strategic guidance. You'll have a playbook. If you want to use a firm, great. If you want to implement those on a monthly basis, or if you just want to do it yourself, we can give that for you. So, happy to talk to anybody who wants to do that. You can talk to myself or to Seth about that.

And then if you want to find me and Seth, we did a podcast together. We were killing it. Jessica's gonna do one, hopefully. Now I put her on the spot publicly, that she needs to do.

Seth Turnoff — She has to. She has to, you can't say…

Nick Fraunfelder — It has to now, right? Pretty committed. Yeah, do you promise to do a podcast with me, Jessica? Of course. Okay, cool, yeah, so it's locked in, folks, so be looking for that, but…We talked about searchless marketing with Seth, but that was really fun, so the things that he's doing are very unique, and another take on what we're doing here. But if you want to check him out, or me out, we are available. But at the end of the day, we to say at Sherok, let's grow together. This is not something that we do, We have this saying here at SureOak, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We have a very long-term outlook, and we just want to add value to the community. So, if we can help in any way, we would love to do that.

Jessica Walker — Yeah, right on time. Yeah, and I'll kind of echo that, too. I mean, why I asked Nick and Seth to come to the table, we have shared a kind of thought leadership, and also when it comes to these opportunities, bringing that full circle, right? If you, just start, right? Have some kind of assessment, whether it be with Nick and friends, or, just start somewhere and give you a baseline of where you are, and then we are happy to also help you with that, consumer outlook, right? So now you understand, are you ranking, how are your competitors ranking, and then who's answering the phone and who's helping you along. But while we've been chatting, Nick and Seth, we had a couple of questions, and so we'll jump into those now. So just a reminder for all of our friends still following along at home, please submit any questions you have. We'd love to jump in and double-click on things.

The question you mentioned about the localization, and so… I just wrote it down, because I want to make sure I didn't miss it. So, local is important, and then what are the ways that a practice should be thinking about local to future conditions in case SEO, or in case GPTs start to pick up on local.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So, we don't know,

Google has tried putting local into Gemini a number of times, so we know it will happen, and we know that the UI will change. The user interface is going to change. So we haven't seen that yet. We've seen Perplexity come out with their own browser. We're expecting a new Chrome browser, we're expecting a ChatGPT browser, so, we don't know. As it is right now, the 4 box, is what we to call it, those first four results on that map, on something near me, those are super important. And you can pay to be in those, but also it's driven by your reviews.

Jessica Walker — So, your Google My Business. There are 10 citations, there are 10 directories that you have to be on in local, you can look them up, but they are things like Yelp.

Nick Fraunfelder — The most important thing I could tell anybody for local right now is to make sure all of those directories are filled out accurately and cleanly.

If the phone number's different? if the website's different? if it's directions? That is easy, low-hanging fruit that you can make sure that you catch. So, I would focus first there on those. What chat does for local, it's in their sites, it's gonna change, but the idea is it's still gonna come back to first principles.

What are your reviews, where are you located? So, a lot of what we're doing now, in terms of SEO for local, is still gonna apply, I think, for, you're gonna be in a safe, safe bet. What we find, people are getting damaged now in this new world are the ones that weren't doing SEO before, who weren't doing consistent content. So when the AI came around, they got punished. So people that were doing SEO well for the last 5-10 years, are the ones that are able to make the adjustment much easier.

Jessica Walker — we've been spending some time with our partners, and I want to just also emphasize for everyone, and we're going to have a future guest talking about this further how do I start to measure, right, my performance over time? So if you haven't done it today, when you hang up off this webinar, do that first thing. Just say, who is the best XYZ provider in my city, whatever that is.

That will be the most telling for you. And again, the beautiful thing using GPT as an example, you hit the source button, and it'll tell you immediately, how is your competitor ranking above you? Well, I'll promise you, they probably… their WebMD listings, right? They probably claim your Google listings. They've, you said, they've caught their Yelp, they've had some positive comments. That'll give you the tell right away. Start there, measure, where do I rank? And then work on, as you said, Nick, none of this is predefined, none of this is absolutely certain, but you can start testing things, and we've seen this with subtle differences, driving reviews. We have client partners focus on getting more consistent reviews. It changes your score and your ranking.

Seth Turnoff — That's so good. Type in your practice, type in your name, what does ChatGPT know about you? And it gives you the roadmap.

Nick Fraunfelder — It's because you told it that. If you don't have certain information, you gotta figure out where that source data is and remove it. Or you have to educate it. Remember, it's pre-training and post-training, so you have to keep that in mind.

Jessica Walker — Kind of a little left-center, but it came in the chat, too. The question was, has anyone thought about how LLMs are relating to recruitment marketing? So, obviously, there's a tough labor market for healthcare, right? So, thinking about how candidates start their search in LLMs, within the healthcare market? Have you heard anything in that kind of category?

Nick Fraunfelder — I haven't. We work with, we work with a number of recruiters. They don't seem to have much trouble getting noticed by the internet, because they've been doing this type of SEO work forever. The [candidate] shortage is more physical than digital, right? So I don't know how much is gonna change on that. But we are seeing schools, recruiters getting a lot smarter and making it easier. Yeah, I haven't seen a big shift there, so… but yes, that's a great question.

Jessica Walker — Another question was, we talked about social media, and we talked about Reddit, but can you share a little bit more about YouTube, and what we need to be thinking about for YouTube optimization for GPTs?

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, so the second largest search engine in the world.

Jessica Walker — is YouTube.

Nick Fraunfelder — It's owned by the largest search engine in the world.

Seth Turnoff — Again, whose game is it we're playing? Yeah.

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, so, people are using YouTube as their new Google, right? So if they're looking for content, they're looking for specific questions, they'd rather watch a video or something engaging, and they're skimming videos, and the way the videos are now with tags, there is, there's a huge play in SEO, just the way that we describe the videos, and the headlines, and the things that we use. You should be thinking about that, well. It doesn't have to be that professional. I think people worry about how professional it needs to be. I mean, some of our best stuff... it's just me with my kids with my phone. I mean, that's the opposite.

Jessica Walker — authenticity, right? Think about what the consumers are drawn to. And we see that with provider videos. Seth mentioned that earlier, right? The video is talking about his barbecue. The patient consumers, they want to know that, again, take off the white coat, you're human, I can trust you, I have confidence in you, because you're someone that I can approach. And so you're spot on, Nick. We see the same thing with those are the ones that are the most performant for our client partners.

The interesting thing I've seen, and maybe you can add to it too, is that I've seen where they've done the big video session, and so that's out there when we talk about, here's the treatment we do for uterine fibroids, let's say, right? but then they’re taking those sub-segments and pulling out little 30-second snippets, tagging them appropriately, putting the right title to them and the description, that's where it seems to then jump further, right? So again, we talked about making it hyper-specific. So during the video, did they talk about African American women and uterine fibroids and within this condition? Boom! There's your 30-second snippet that then helps you present in the GPT.

Nick Fraunfelder — That's so good. That's so good. Yeah, I think people are afraid of video. It doesn't need to be overwhelming, it's something that you should be doing, it just helps.

Seth Turnoff — And not just for recognizing and categorizing, but as a trust trigger, right? I can read anything, and it's fine. But when I hear you telling me, and it feels you're speaking to me because you understand what I'm going through or dealing with from a pain perspective, and that you're telling me that you deal with this before? And you could possibly help me too? That's just a warm blanket, right?

Nick Fraunfelder — Yeah, there you go.

Seth Turnoff — The copy does not connect that.

Jessica Walker — No, 100%.

Well, friends, I hate to say it, but it looks we are at our time. I would love to just remind all of our partners that have followed along. Seth and I and Nick are active on LinkedIn. We'd love to connect with you there, and we're continuing to share as we geek out on this topic. So, and again, you gotta follow Seth's LinkedIn, because the mustache speaks for itself. But we appreciate you spending the time with us.

Next month, our topic, we're going to keep this train going with everything GPT optimization. We're going to dive deeper into hyper human-focused content. And so again, as you've gotten a sense of all these experts I brought to the room, just keep building on it. We want to provide you with tools and resources that you can truly use to help your practice grow.

So, thank you, everyone, for joining us. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.