Google Juice and Algorithms- How to Boost Your Rankings

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How to Boost your Rankings with Google Juice and Algorithms

In this episode, Barbara and Andy discuss:

• Search engines changing their algorithm
• Facebook algorithm
• Facebook ads
• Building Customer trust

Key Takeaways:

“If you actually want real results, get that expert who spent years working at it and is in the algorithm and understands what needs to happen to get you the results.” – Andy Seeley

Connect with Andy Seeley:
Website: https://creativelydisruptive.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyseeley
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creatively.disruptive/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/andydisruption?lang=bg
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/creativelydisruptive?_rdc=1&_rdr

Connect with Barbara Hales:
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Show website: www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
Email: Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com

YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales

Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist

TRANSCRIPTION (98)

Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales.

Today, we are fortunate to have with us, Andy Seeley.
Andy Seeley is the CEO and co-founder of Creatively Disruptive- a digital marketing agency built by a team of professional nerds that work together as Small Business champions and is a small business marketing expert. He is committed to helping businesses keep up with all the latest algorithms to make sure that they are getting their money’s worth for their online advertising, especially during the current economic environment. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Seeley: Thank you, Barbara. Love being here.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Andy, you mentioned that you keep up with all the latest algorithms. I’m always hearing that when Google and various other search engines change their algorithms, and they have names attached to each one that nobody quite knows what it is that they are measuring, how is it that you get in on the real thing?

Andy Seeley: It’s probably the number of how often we’re in it. It’s really a discovery-type system. We’re alerted to a change that’s made. It’s like looking at the numbers and figuring out what that change has been affecting the numbers of the clients and the data. Then you can backward and engineer kind of what they’ve tried to do.

It’s a weird kind of thing with Google and Facebook. There’s no customer service, there’s no one for you to call, there’s no one to talk to. They built these immensely powerful organizations that can basically do whatever they wish to do. They won’t tell you what they’re trying to do. They kind of like just, hey, we’re making a change, because we want this to happen. They will say, we want better-optimized results for our clients.

We have to start digging through what happened back in the day. There was the other algorithmic update for Google that really pushed them away from being link-building to being very content-focused. We all kind of understood that that’s what they wanted to do because Google as an entity said that they wanted to do that. Google had made these changes to make sure that when someone searched instead of getting somebody that had lots of links attached to a site that used to be called Google juice back in the day. You’d get a lot of Google juice from having lots of links on other websites coming back to your website, and people would pay thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars. They have teams of people in India and all over the world, just adding links every single day.

Google, quite rightly, looked at that and said, okay, the fiber is searching for some help. Is the best result really the guy that spent the most money on people building links? On irrelevant websites? Is that really the best result for her? Or should the best result actually be a website that has really good content and good information so they can help her.

Google basically took away that as the main factors and made it much more about how your website’s built, how good your experiences when it’s there, and the quality of the content, what’s on it, and I think it was a very positive change. We were able to work through that based on what they said, and what they’ve done. Now Facebook, on another hand is another kettle of fish altogether because oftentimes they make changes and no one knows what’s going on. Most times that causes campaigns to fall apart at the seams and you have to rebuild them. That’s why many times you’ll hear a small business owner say “Man, I was doing so well for the last three months, and then suddenly it stopped.”

Facebook’s changed  mathematics is going on in the system, and it’s now not aligning with what you’re doing so your results are getting poor. And we just test and see what’s going on and we’re able to figure it out. Facebook, unlike Google, Google makes a big change, oftentimes, it’s in relation to a lot of stuff that they’re talking about doing. Strategically, Facebook oftentimes makes major changes, with very little warning and very little explanation. I would say, however, that ultimately, every change, at least from a marketing standpoint, maybe not from a person, a civilian citizen might not be good. But from a marketing standpoint, almost all changes that Facebook has ever made have ultimately resulted in much better results.

There was a big change two years ago when Facebook was getting spanked a little bit by everybody about data and stuff. They don’t sell our data, they use our data. If you’re looking for a doctor, and you started getting some ads about a clinic or whatever, I didn’t get Barbara Hales information and put that out there, it gets put into a poll. And we say I want to reach people that are interested in this clinic, and most likely to purchase. Facebook puts it in front of you. So there’s a disconnect between us and you.
Your information, at least to the majority of the users is not being used. Sometimes Facebook does share data with some of the apps and that’s really got in trouble is like there was some sharing of data. But that’s not their core business. Their core business is not sharing data, it’s actually helping connect like-minded businesses, with people most likely to purchase. That was a big shift. We were very concerned about that because that changed the way they targeted. One of the great things about Facebook is its targeting system, but they’ve basically turned the AI around on that. That has caused there to have some more opportunities.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you find that Facebook algorithms and what they’re looking for now has changed drastically since they bought Instagram?

Facebook Algorithm

Andy Seeley: Yes. It’s changed since last year. It’s changed dramatically since four years ago. It’s constantly changing. Everything’s changed on Facebook. Probably everything’s changed from two years ago. It’s a constantly changing thing. When Instagram came on board, I wouldn’t say Instagram initiated change on Facebook. I think Facebook just changes. Facebook is a very different place than when it was first launched in colleges back in 2005, or whatever, it’s very different from 10 years ago. It’s basically light years different from there to the point that now it’s a very different platform. If you were using Facebook 10 years ago, it’s a very different platform from today.

I think what Instagram did was it brought in a different crowd, a younger crowd, who was a lot more interested in it. It probably single-handedly ended or put pressure on because that’s still operating, but kind of ended the growth of Snapchat, the younger, younger crowd. You could argue that Instagram has caused issues in society. But from a business standpoint, I wouldn’t say that Instagram is affected. My opinion is that it hasn’t affected Facebook directly. But it’s just part of that. It’s part of that big tick thing that whatever it is today won’t be what it is into a year. The strategies that we use six months ago don’t work today.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Now some people say that Facebook ads are not as worthwhile as they used to be. It doesn’t really pay to have Facebook ads. What would you say about that?
Facebook ads

Andy Seeley: I would say that probably the people that say that don’t understand the targeting and don’t understand targeting changes. They don’t understand how they may have siloed their marketing so they might have the Google over here unconnected to anything. Facebook here, unconnected to anything, email marketing here unconnected to anything. They might look at Facebook and Instagram as two separate identities when they are really just one. Just reaching different people in different ways.

We have seen what Facebook truly is. When you’re thinking about how you’re building out your marketing plan, you need to understand this because there’s only one platform that does this in the way that it does. Back in the day, if you wanted to build your clinic, you’d have to put a newspaper ad out, or maybe a radio ad or TV ad. It would be about introducing new people to your business, branding, and education. . Facebook’s really the only platform that does a really great job.

Google is a reactive medium which means I type in something and I find it. Facebook, you could have a new technique that no one’s ever heard of. No one’s gonna search it on Facebook because it’s brand new. You just come up with it. You’ve invented this new technique, whatever it is. Facebook introduced it to people. What’s wonderful about Facebook, for example, let’s say it’s a chiropractic doctor. He’s got a new technique that seems to be very, very good. And he’s getting lots of plaudits in the chiropractic world. I’m not a chiropractor. I’m not in the chiropractic world. But maybe I’ve got this problem and maybe this technique will help me. I’m not going to search for it. I’m not going to look for it. However, Facebook, because of all the platforms that know more about us than anybody, and it’s scary level stuff. Like if we went marketers, we should be concerned with the amount of knowledge that it has about our activities.

Literally, the other day, I was talking to a group of marketers, and this is gonna sound a bit crass. But literally, Facebook could probably predict when you go to the bathroom. It’s that kind of stuff that goes there. We have GPS on here, it can measure us to about a meter, it can figure out where in the house we are. And it goes, Okay, Andy goes to the bathroom probably are between one and two. Isn’t that part of the house that seems like a constant thing that he does every other day, we have a feeling that’s a bathroom, we know he’s gonna go there. So hey, we’re gonna start producing some ads that might be relevant to him when he’s in the bathroom. Facebook knows that amount of information about us, which is kind of scary.

There are like 272 points of interest that it knows about us. Your mum might know 90. So it knows you better than your mother. Give you another example, I was talking to a Facebook executive about targeting and how good the targeting is. And he actually brought up a surfing analogy. He said we know who’s a surfer. And I’m like, really? Is it because you see them going and purchasing stuff or looking at surfing stuff on Facebook? He said, no, about 20 to 40% of surfers take their phones out with them. They take photos and stuff especially now that a lot of phones are waterproof, water-resistant, and so forth. They strap on and whatever. They’re taking photos of each other. We can tell when they’re floating. We are 50 feet off the coast. If they’re constantly floating 50 feet off the coast, it’ll probably be a surfer.

All the different angles and all the different data points that they get. They go okay, so he floats off. This is like again, it’s like a detective thing. He’s floating off the coast by 50 feet every other day for hours. He does go to some surf shops. He’s recently purchased this, he’s interacting his surf photos. He’s a surfer. So if we’re a chiropractic clinic, and we’ve got a new technique to help a surfer, maybe there’s a common thing that surfers have, we can actually target surfers. And even though surfers don’t know anything about this, we could target surfers with Facebook and introduce them to something brand new that they’ve never thought of.

Facebook is proactive where it can go “hey Barbara, look at this really cool thing that you didn’t know exists.” and you go well that’s kind of cool. I didn’t even know that and then it brings you on a longer process than Google like Google Search Find by Facebook. Hey Barbara, look at this really cool thing. What do you think of it and you go Oh, I like that and  you interact with it and then then the algorithm goes, she interacted with it she’s interested we’re gonna do a different thing to it.

And for us, we call it the funnel. Many of your people might have heard of a sales funnel. So the way the sales funnel works is you have a large group that you’re trying to reach, which is all the surfers, not all the surfers might have this back problem that has a chiropractor can fix. But it is surfers, right? All the surfers have this problem. It’s people have, it’s a surfer problem, but only some of those surfers have it. So we market surfers, not everybody. We don’t want to waste our money on people that are not likely to buy. We just want to focus on those surfers.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Not only your back is broken, but every part of you.

Andy Seeley: We focus on the surfers. Then some of those surfers interact. They dropped down to level two, which we basically use as an education kind of level. It’s like, okay, we know that you’re interested now it’s about explaining why it’s interesting. Then you start getting at some ads, which is usually a little bit more exploratory, a little bit more detail into why this is a really cool thing. Anybody that interacts with that drops down to another level, which is like purchase, action, do something.

You feel like you’re being bombarded, but you’re being taken through a process. A lot of it is based on how long you look at an ad. How long do you go? Do you click on the ad, comment on the ad, do whatever and it brings you through the process. And Facebook, there is no platform that introduces new things and new opportunities. There’s no other platform that does that. Think of a TV ad where if you were an ice cream manufacturer, that you could decide to go off to only people that like ice cream, how much more effective that would be?

Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, it’d be very effective unless I wanted, of course, to introduce new people to it.

Andy Seeley: The other part of it is Facebook and Google work amazingly together. They work well with email. It’s a system that works together. It will work as it magnifies it tenfold. To give you an example, someone does a search on Google to find it, they don’t quite decide to buy. They go to the website and check it out. Facebook sees Oh, I see that they went there next time they go on Facebook or Instagram, the ads coming up to follow them. The process isn’t they searched, they went to the website and they disappeared. Never hear from them again, you got to wait for them to search again. We grab them, we’ve got them and we can start having a discussion and try to reel them in. They give us some data, they give us their email address because they are interested in it, go into the email process, and they are getting followed and built. That’s when you build it all together. It’s the closest thing to magic right now. If you do it right, I’ve seen businesses go from half a million dollars of revenue to 2 million in a year.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Wow, that’s very impressive. Is that what you mean when you say that you can make your website a conversion machine?

Andy Seeley: Yes. Your website should not be your business card. Your website should be about capturing data, should be about capturing emails, should be about getting them to reach out to you. Conversion per se, for a clinic or a doctor, would be an inquiry would be an I’ve got a problem or a scheduling an appointment, giving information so the staff can call back. Mid Staff can type, things would be along those lines as well where we’re at a lead comes through and then they can start communicating. But then there are automated systems that continue working them until they actually purchase from me.

We’re busy people getting distracted all the time. We’ve learned that if I just call you and leave a message hey Barbara, would you like to do business with me? I hang up on that said there’s a good likelihood that you might not check the phone might not never respond to me because you’re busy. You might really intend to do business with me, but you got distracted. Life’s busy, especially with the distractions that we have. We’ve got to be smart. We’ve got to be thoughtful about how to keep people engaged, and you do that and results happen.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Another interesting thing that you mentioned, which I’d like to touch upon at the moment is how to get online reviews and build customer trust. Obviously, if you have a patient that is a raving fan it’s easy to say could you please rate me and review me when you see me. But in general, what would you suggest?

Building Customer Trust

Andy Seeley: I think every business regardless of whether it’s a local GP, or if it’s a plastic surgeon, whatever the modality is, or whatever the product is that you’re offering or service that you’re offering, you’re having a front desk of customer service people, even yourself as a doctor to ask for feedback from the client. Most of our clients are going to not give us any rating even if they’re happy.

Reviews are almost always a little worse than what the reality is because the loudest people are usually the ones that are a little bit peed off. What I always suggest all about and this is like auto mechanics. Every service-based business that you’re in touch in, you’re in contact with the client, is to make it part of your business to be Hey, how did you feel about the treatment? How did you feel about working with us? Is there any reason why you can’t give us a five-star rating? If you were going to give us a five-star rating, is there any reason if they say, Oh no, Barbara, this is wonderful, you did a great job. I really love coming to you. I’m very happy, then you just say hey, it really is helpful to us if you could go to Google if you go could go to Facebook and give us a quick review or recommendation. I’d really appreciate it.

Now not all of them are at a go. Many people won’t do it. But you’ll get a good number that you’ve pretty much got to ask for it. would suggest that you just put it as part of the way you operate. If you’ve got a customer service team or a Front Desk team to say Hey, how was your experience, and if somebody says my experience was really bad, it’s probably a good thing for you to know about it so you can do something about rectifying it right and rectifying it with the client and rectifying it within the process of your organization?

But you’ll get a lot more positive results, positive reviews. And it does two things. There are algorithmic benefits, where the algorithm will just go look at you and go, well, you must be a decent organization. So we’re going to give you more organic reach, we’re going to give you cheaper costs and paid to advertise all those things benefits as you get more and more good ratings, because Facebook and Google really just want to highlight the best businesses not eating crappy ones. Then the other part of it is the human part whereas if I and you were looking to go to a clinic, and there are three clinics, and one has 10 reviews, and are all five stars. One has 100 reviews, and it’s like 3.8 stars, and then another one has 100 reviews in that spot, and it’s five stars, we’re going to look at that. As humans, we’re going to go well, this one doesn’t have many reviews, but it’s highly rated. This one has a lot of reviews, and it’s average. This one has a lot of reviews, and it’s really highly rated. I’m going to go to the one with a lot of reviews and highly rated so and that’s just a normal human way of going about it. All the search engines show them as well.

Yelp has a situation where they are connected with Apple. When you’re trying to find a clinic to go to, you’re going to get that Yelp review. Personally, I would discount any Yelp review. I would go okay, on Yelp. It’s a 2.5. Let’s have a look on Google and see what the rating is. Google is usually a little bit clearer understanding of how good a company is. Facebook is actually becoming quite good too.

Dr. Barbara Hales: I do have another question about that, though. There are many services that we use in the course of a day like a manicure salon or a car dealer that has a subscription to a service that automatically as soon as you left there, you get a text message on your phone to say in just a click, and it’s a little bit more efficient because then patient doesn’t have to think about going someplace to rate you, they could just click on the phone. Do you feel that is a good way to go?

Andy Seeley: I would do it with both. If I interacted with you and went away and suddenly got a text, there’s a good chance that I might just ignore it. But if you said to me, Hey, Andy, is there any reason why you wouldn’t give me five stars? Have you enjoyed the experience with us? And I said, Yes. Then I walked away, and I got this text, and it made it really easy for me to do, it’s gonna make it way more likely that I’ll interact with it. I think those services are really good.

I know there’s one. It’s not a medical thing that you could use the same process. We have one client that says, your auto repair shop, and actually have on the business cards on the back that says if you want to give us a good review, please scan this and it’s like a QR code and you scan it and it actually takes you straight to the place to actually put the code in. They verbally say do this, and then they get the card. These automated systems, these automated text messaging, emails, do the whole nine yards, I would suggest taking it seriously to develop endorsement of your business. Your campaign reputation management is critical, especially in the medical field.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Very critical. Could you give us a few marketing tips on how we could use Facebook successfully?

Facebook Marketing tips

Andy Seeley: Specifically, from a clinical, medical doctor standpoint, I think doctors are typically very focused on their service and on the outcomes of the patients and working the work that they do. But like any business, these two parts store business. There are sales and marketing, and there’s product and service. Before you are a product and service, you’re going to struggle. If all you are a sales and marketing, you can get away with it, but you’re constantly trying to find new customers.

If your product is crap, I guess you could be McDonald’s and get away with it. Because the marketing and sales are amazing. They’ve got a very average product. Some might say it’s great. I say it’s average, even though but the sales and marketing is so good that I will buy from McDonald’s once a month. And I know when I buy it, I’m going to have a bit of a stomachache. But ultimately, if you’ve got both together, what ends up happening is you end up having power. You have a never-ending convey about a business that’s coming to you. It’s like having a spigot that you can turn on, I need more business, I’ve got the business. I turned it off when I don’t need any more business and you have control instead of just waiting for the world to kind of blow your business randomly.

Facebook especially is going to introduce people to you. It’s much more personal. When I say Facebook, I’m talking Facebook and Instagram. Paid advertising, I highly recommend most small businesses to have a paid advertising budget. Most people like I want it to be organic. Well everyone wants it to be organic. If there are 10 clinics in your local area, they’re all wanting it to be organic. With paid I can make sure I get in front of Barbara. It probably needs my product, which if I’ve done my marketing correctly, she’s at least most likely to purchase of everybody else on Facebook. I can be in front of her, I can become top of mind, I can become the only one on her mind instead of it being okay, I need to get a chiropractor.

I can actually get to the point where I’m like Barbara Hales Chiropractic Clinic is the only one that I’m thinking of when I need to do it. Facebook has the power to do it. It basically puts the power in your hands rather than being blown around by the winds of change and what was going on. We both know that hospitals go out of business. Doctors go out of business, doctors oftentimes have to end up working in hospitals and working hard shifts, and it’s not always easy. If you’re a doctor that has goals of having your own busy clientele and clinic and you want to, there’s an entrepreneurial feel that you must look at both parts of the puzzle, your sales and marketing, and your product and service and balance that well.

Google, Facebook, email as the three things that we always like the magic trinity, so to speak, you’ll do extremely well, if it’s well thought out. I highly recommend that you get an expert to do it. If I’ve got a back problem, I’m not going to go to my neighbor who’s an electrician, say I’ve done a back problem. Can you fix it for me? I’ve seen you reading stuff about backs. Why don’t you do it, I saw you like stretching your son out once because the news feels good dad, maybe you can do it for me. Online marketing, online marketing is full of people like that, hey, I’m going to get my daughter next year. My neighbor’s daughter next door is a high school kid. She’s on Instagram all the time. She can do my social media management. No, it’s as complicated and ever-changing as the world of medicine is. There are always new things coming out of medicine. There’s a constant juggling around of things happening. There’s lots of movement with online marketing, it’s constantly changing, we spend probably 5% of our total income, just on knowing stuff.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Which we depend on you to do. To recap, marketing is absolutely crucial for the success of your business. It’s also crucial that you outsource it and have it done by a pro who knows what they’re doing.

Andy Seeley: As much as it’s important for me to go to an orthopedic surgeon if I break my arm, is that right? There’s knowledge and if you’re serious about the results, if you just want to save money, do all the other stuff. Like if I want to save money, and I don’t really want my back fixed, I’m going to go to my electrician friend next door, who seems to be able to stretch out his son well. If I want to save money, I’ll do that. If I’m serious about results, if I want my back fixed, I’m going to somebody who’s an expert on it, and I’m going to have them do it for me.
Same thing with your marketing, if you want to get real results. If the reason why you think Facebook doesn’t work, it’s probably because your next-door neighbor’s daughter is doing your marketing for you. If you actually want real results, get that expert that spent years working at it and is in the algorithm and understands what needs to happen to get you the results. Most doctors that I’ve ever had any dealings with have been wonderful people. In our industry, there are lots of people that know nothing and say a lot, There’s a lot of people that talk a really good game or put themselves out there as experts in certain fields, and they’re really just not that good at that. Do your due diligence.

Have a look at the Facebook reviews for marketing companies. Do they have them? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a marketing agency, and they’ve got no reviews. Why is that? I’ll tell you why. Most times, they turn them all off. Why do they turn the reviews off? Because they don’t have any good ones. These people built belly aching about them. I’m happy to say that we’ve got a lot of reviews, and we’ve got a five-star rating on Facebook. We keep those open because we know we’re doing a good job. People need to be able to do a little bit of due diligence. You want to make sure that you get the right guy and when you get the right team, you work with them, you make them part of your organization. Don’t take it as a separate kind of thing that we do. It’s got to be a part of your business and it’s got to be thoughtful.

Dr. Barbara Hales: So how can our listeners reach you?

Andy Seeley: There are two things that we’re doing and I’m going to give you a link. Go to Barbara’s website to get a link, go to creativitydisruptive.com, we’re actually doing a thing because we’re very committed to small businesses, whatever they are to survive the pandemic, and to do well, within or without the pandemic. We have a course, which basically teaches everything that we do. It actually was a course that we developed to actually teach our team. We actually turned that into a course for the public to use. We were selling it for $500, that you could buy the course. You could like learn how to do Facebook, and Google and all the stuff and build all these things that we’re talking about and understand it, we’ve actually changed that during the pandemic, to just pay what you can do, you could actually put zero in there and have access to the course for life.

We believe it’s the minimum we can do to really help small businesses. Obviously, the payback to us, as people know about will hear about us a little bit more. My estimation is that most doctors are going to be busy doctoring, and maybe not want to do it themselves. Maybe some of them might decide to have us help them with it. But if you want to understand it, if you want to try and do it yourself, everything is there for you to do it. So you go to creativitydisruptive.com and click on this on on the academy drop down, which is on the right at the top and just click on Small Business Academy. And you can actually sign up and you can if you don’t want to pay anything, don’t pay anything I’d rather you join up and not pay anything than not join up at all. Or if you want to pay something because you think you want to support us feel free to pay what you can is the whole point.

So do that and I’m going to give you a link for it. The other thing is you can go to Andy Distruption, which is on Twitter, you can search me on LinkedIn, Andy Seeley on LinkedIn. Again, there are lots of recommendations, lots of people talking about me on there if you want to do due diligence, and we’re obviously Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all the different things that if you wanted, check us out. But if you want to email us too, you can email us you can email me at Andy@creativelydisruptive giving my personal email, and hope we have people reaching out to me. We have a great team, they care about you guys. At a bare minimum, you’re serious about making a difference to yourselves, at least from a knowledge standpoint, sign up to the Small Business Academy it’s free to infinity if you want you can pay me a million dollars. I’m okay with that. You can pay $1 pay zero but do something.

Dr. Barbara Hales: I think it’s important even if you’re going to be outsourcing it to understand it and to know what other people are doing.

Well, that has been all for our episode today. It’s been extremely informative. Thank you so much. This has been another episode that you’ve been listening to Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host Dr. Barbara Hales and guest, Andy Seeley. Til next time.