Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Isaac Justesen, founder and CEO of PatientPartners · Recorded August 13, 2026
Isaac Justesen runs an agency that only takes healthcare clients. Physical therapy, chiropractic, massage, counseling. Five years of it. So I went in expecting him to tell me that marketing a clinic is its own specialist discipline.
He told me close to the opposite.
“The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor. What’s really different is how we talk about the service.”
That is a more useful answer than the one I was fishing for, and the whole episode follows from it. If the mechanics are portable, then the money is in the two boring things nobody finishes, and in the copy and compliance layer on top. Hit play above and follow along.
The two things he audits first, every time
Ask most agencies for their onboarding checklist and you get a deck. Isaac gave me two items.
The first is the Google Business Profile. Not because it is exotic, but because it is the thing every clinic sets up once, in week one of opening, and then never opens again.
“They haven’t set up their categories correctly, they don’t have services listed in their business profile. Really, really simple things.”
The second is conversion tracking. He is upfront that it does not add a single visitor.
“It’s so important to be able to tell what part of your marketing is working and what’s actually driving results. And seldom is that set up correctly as well.”
Those two make his short list for the same reason: they are cheap, they are almost always broken, and one of them tells you whether anything else you do worked. I have said versions of this on the show for two years and it still surprises people that the answer is not a content strategy.
Where healthcare actually is different
The specialist knowledge is not in the ranking. It is in what you are allowed to say.
“Each province or each state will have their own sort of rules around different language that you are and are not allowed to use. You can’t make comparative statements. You have to be careful about using the word specialized or claiming you’re an expert in something. And there’s a surprising amount of variation across the country.”
Then there is the advertising floor. Google will not let a clinic run ads on the more speculative services at all, PRP among them, which pushes that revenue into organic and into channels that are not search.
I have run into the same shape from the other side. I did some B2B consulting for an oxygen monitor manufacturer, and a real slice of their marketing was just publishing the compliance requirements their customers had to meet. The regulations were the content. Isaac’s clinics have the same opening: the rules are complicated, patients and practice owners are searching for them, and almost nobody has written them down plainly.
The channel he thinks is most underrated
Not a channel I expected from an SEO.
“I think one of the more underrated marketing channels for clinics is community building. Go to a marathon and set up a booth, tape some ankles. Go sponsor a youth sports team in the area and get out there and get involved.”
This is the part where I got excited, because I run community cleanups as a service for exactly this reason. The event is real and the digital harvest is enormous. Eventbrite has an API into ChatGPT. Google has a dedicated SERP view for events. And your local subreddit, which normally eats brands alive, will let you post it.
I have tested that last part directly, running it with the sponsor’s brand name in the title and without. The version WITH the brand name got more upvotes. Isaac’s reaction was the correct one:
“Reddit is typically so sensitive to any sort of promotion. They can smell that from a mile away. So the fact that you were able to actually get positive engagement while still finding a way to get a brand mention. I love that idea.”
The other version of this play, if you do not want to organize anything: go pick up trash, pile it up, photograph the pile, post it. There are subreddits that exist for that.
The leak nobody is measuring
We got onto speed to lead, which is territory I covered with Jake Melendy of Ignitvio. His team measured roughly 1,800 businesses and found 68 percent never replied inside 24 hours. That is the whole market opportunity in one number, and it is why Ignitvio exists.
Isaac will not put an AI on a clinic’s front desk yet. He was clear about that. But he pointed at something bigger sitting right next to it.
“You would be blown away at how few phone calls get answered. People are calling these clinics and nobody’s picking up the phone, and the missed revenue opportunity there.”
Everyone audits the contact form. Almost nobody audits the phone. For a local business where the searcher is on a phone in a car, that gap is the entire funnel.
AI as additive, not as a replacement
Isaac’s framing here is the most sober I have heard from an agency owner this year.
“I like to see AI as sort of additive. I don’t want to replace, you know, automate all of our client work. I want to be able to deliver more value, because what previously took us two hours now takes us an hour. And so that means we can just do more of it.”
He had a client ask if they could just rebuild the entire site with Claude. He pushed back. Which lines up with what Brett Schklar told me a few episodes back: AI gives you a second brain, but a second brain is not experience.
Where he does use it: responding to reviews. The system reads the reviewer’s name and what they actually said, drafts a response, and then layers tone on top, friendly or clinical or casual depending on the practice. He is also watching AI charting notes get reformatted automatically into whatever shape each insurance provider demands. Not marketing, but the same principle. Take the friction out, keep the human in the room.
Stop doing this one thing
I asked him what he would get every small business owner to stop doing. He did not hesitate long.
“Stop using generic Canva templates on your Instagram. Nobody likes them. I would rather have you take a photo of your team, or the trash you’ve picked up, or whatever, and put that out there.”
Related, and more expensive: boosting posts. He sees clinics with a thousand dollars a month total put a real chunk of it into boosting Facebook and Instagram posts. It is usually the first thing he changes.
Curation to selection
The best idea in the episode is one Isaac picked up somewhere else and passed along, which is how the good ones travel. Google is moving away from curation and toward selection.
“Rather than just curating ten options, it’s saying, hey, here’s the best option. Here’s the best clinic for you.”
Ten blue links is curation. You get a list and you do the choosing. AI Mode is selection. It does the choosing and hands you one answer.
That reframes what a local business is even optimizing for, and it is why Isaac thinks the business profile keeps gaining weight while the website loses a little.
“For local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options. So I think the Google Business Profile is becoming even more important. More weight and more importance on the business profile, and perhaps a little bit less on the website.”
If you are being selected rather than listed, the structured record Google trusts about you matters more than the page you wrote about yourself. Worth reading alongside what most location pages get wrong, because most of them are still written for the curation era.
I work with a home construction company here in Cookeville and the same shift applies with no translation needed. Different trade, identical mechanics, which is exactly where Isaac started.
Connect with Isaac
- PatientPartners: patientpartners.co
- Local SEO for clinics: patientpartners.co/local-seo-physiotherapy
- Free clinic marketing blueprint plus a website, SEO and AI visibility audit
- LinkedIn: Isaac Justesen
- X: @IsaacJustesen
🎧 Listen: Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics | 📺 Watch: on YouTube
Isaac’s two-item onboarding pass is written up as the SEO SOP: Audit the Google Business Profile and Conversion Tracking First — plus a one-page PDF, free inside The Vault.
