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

Key takeaways

• The mechanics travel, the language does not. Map pack, profile, reviews, pages. What changes is what you are legally allowed to claim.
• Two opening plays, every time. A profile audit, because categories and services are almost never set correctly, and conversion tracking, because it is almost never set up at all.
• The typical clinic budget is around a thousand a month. Much of it currently goes on boosting social posts, which is the pitfall he names.
• Nobody answers the phone. The single biggest leak he finds sits behind the marketing, not in it.
• Community building is the underrated channel. Slower than ads and the only thing that compounds.
• Curation to selection. Search is moving from ten options to one recommendation, which changes what a location page has to do.

On this page

• Why a clinic ranks like a plumber
• What you are allowed to say
• The first two things he fixes
• The leak behind the marketing
• From curation to selection
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Why a clinic ranks like a plumber

The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor.

— Isaac Justesen

It is a deliberately deflating opening. Healthcare marketing is sold as a specialism, and the technical work underneath it mostly is not. It is still the profile, still the map pack, still proximity and relevance and prominence.

But for local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options.

— Isaac Justesen

Which is a useful thing for a clinic owner to hear before paying a premium for healthcare expertise that turns out to be the same checklist with a stethoscope on the invoice.

What you are allowed to say

The genuine specialism sits in the copy. Advertising rules for clinical services vary more between states and provinces than most marketers expect, and the platforms enforce their own layer on top. Some treatments are a flat refusal in ads regardless of what your local regulator permits.

So the skill is writing something persuasive inside a box that changes shape depending on where the clinic is. Physiotherapy and counselling are comparatively safe ground. Anything speculative is not.

The first two things he fixes

1. A Google Business Profile audit. Primary category, secondary categories and the services list are wrong on nearly every clinic he sees, and they are free to fix.
2. Conversion tracking. Not analytics for its own sake. Knowing which enquiries came from where, so the next thousand pounds goes somewhere defensible.

The pitfall he names is the opposite habit: taking a modest budget and pouring it into boosting social posts, which produces engagement metrics and very few patients.

On the website side, the pages that matter most are the ones tied to place, and most location pages are bad in exactly the same ways.

But I like to see AI as sort of additive. I don’t want to replace or automate all of our client work.

— Isaac Justesen

The leak behind the marketing

You would be blown away at how few phone calls get answered.

— Isaac Justesen

This is the part that makes the rest of the budget conversation slightly absurd. A clinic can rank, can advertise, can fill the calendar with enquiries, and then lose most of them to a phone nobody picks up between appointments.

He is interested in AI answering as a fix precisely because the problem is capacity rather than intent. The receptionist is not ignoring the phone. They are with a patient.

His one piece of advice on what to stop doing is more direct.

stop using generic Canva templates on your Instagram. Nobody likes them.

— Isaac Justesen

From curation to selection

So it’s kind of moving from curation to selection, which I thought was a really interesting framework.

— Isaac Justesen

Curation gave you ten options and left the choosing to the searcher. Selection hands back one recommendation. For a clinic that is an enormous difference, because being the fourth good option in town stops being a position that earns anything.

The practical consequence is that the profile carries more weight than the website for discovery, while the website has to do the work of justifying the pick once it has been made.

Community building is his answer to how a single clinic wins that. Slow, unmeasurable in the first quarter, and the only thing a competitor cannot buy.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
PatientPartners	Isaac’s agency, coming up on five years, working only with clinics
Curation to selection	The framing he credits to another podcast: search moving from options to a recommendation
Google Business Profile	Where his audits start, because categories and services are almost never right
Conversion tracking	The second opening play, and the thing almost no clinic has
Boosted social posts	The most common way a clinic wastes its monthly budget

Questions this episode answers

• Is local SEO for a healthcare clinic different from any other local business?
• What can a clinic legally advertise?
• What should a clinic fix first in its marketing?
• How much should a clinic spend on marketing each month?
• Are boosted Instagram posts worth it for a clinic?
• How many enquiry calls do clinics actually miss?
• What does curation to selection mean for local search?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• His write-up on local SEO for physiotherapy clinics.
• Alex Zweydoff on niching an agency to one industry, which is the same bet placed on property management.
• Unscripted SEO, where the rest of the practitioner interviews live.

Find Isaac Justesen

PatientPartners offers a free clinic marketing blueprint and a website, SEO and AI-visibility audit.

Cite this episode

Justesen, Isaac. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/isaac-justesen-on-local-seo-for-healthcare-clinics