David Kaminski on Healthcare SEO: Winning Google Maps, “Near Me” Searches, and Consistent Content

Welcome to another episode of the Underdog Physician Podcast. A podcast where we spotlight the 12 Blazers, the Grinders and the Physicians and other professionals who are rewriting the rule of healthcare entrepreneurship. Today's guest is in a physician, but he's a game changer for every provider looking to grow their practice. David Kaminsky. David is a healthcare SEO strategist and the founder of Collaborate Pros, a company that turns practice websites into patient generating engines. From humble beginnings as a window washer, he's grown to build a multi-million dollar enterprise helping dentists, podiatrist and physicians dominate Google Maps and online search. If you ever wondered why your online presence isn't converting or how top practices seem to win the digital game, David cracked that code and today he's here to share it. David, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited. So I heard something in there about digital presence and online. Most people hear those words and go running for the hills, cover their eyes and ears and just want to run. Just to give you a heads up, I'm going to explain it to you super simple and it's not difficult. It's really not difficult. So anyway, that's just a wrap. It sounds like, no, that's true. Thank you for clarifying. It sounds like rocket science to many of us. We're excited to have you. But to get started, tell us your origin story. How did you get into digital marketing? Yeah, so I started the window cleaning industry in Arizona. I owned the largest window cleaning company, X-Troorn, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. Multiple offices, multiple locations, multiple millions of dollars. But the beauty is I grew that business and I never paid any money on advertising. Like, I don't recommend that. It's probably a bad way. And I became so obsessed with obtaining free traffic from Google and Google Maps. I was like, I don't want to pay Google. I don't want to pay them my dollars because they don't care who clicks on my ad and they could care less if I waste my money. Google ads and paid ads has gotten harder and harder to crack. But if you can show up in the Google Maps and if you can get your website to show up for near me search terms, like tons of near me search and like Botox near me, right? That's a search term. Dentist near me. When you put the near me on the end of it, it's a transactional search term. So it's high in 10. Somebody's ready to spend money. So I focused on all that in my window cleaning business and I surrounded myself with a lot of entrepreneurs in the SEO, search engine optimization world. And they always taught to do it as an agency or a business. But I just took the information and applied it to my own business. If I put my head down and just worked hard and then 10 years later, I looked up and I have got the biggest company in the state. I've got tons of employees, great contracts, great people that run the business. I got out of the business. I still own them, but I don't run them. The knowledge I have, I don't want to share with other business owners because you can waste money so fast in marketing. If you market on Facebook, Facebook doesn't care who clicks on your ad. Same with Google. You put an ad out there. Google could care less if somebody clicked on it. They charged you and they didn't convert. If you get them in the Google Maps or in the organic section, then it's free. If somebody shows up your website and doesn't convert, you didn't pay for it, right? Right. So tell me about the window cleaning, window washing was your first startup, right? Then you blew successfully. What was your prior experience? What kind of specialty you gained and undergrad? And what made you want to pursue entrepreneurship? Oh, yeah. So when I went to college, I was studying computer information systems. I love computers. When I was a kid, I was always coding. And my brothers and sisters were playing games on the computer, but I always created a Photoshop before Photoshop. Everybody came out. I was like, 12. Yeah. I love computers. That's funny. It's a funny story. I don't tell a story too often, but I have a neighbor that I grew up with. He's the guy who started VMware and he sold it to Dell for $64 billion. I'm like, what? And I used a computer. He never used a computer until it came to my house. So anyway, I always love computers. So yeah, when I was in college, I studied business and computer information systems. And I got into the window cleaning industry and I always liked it. I like being physical. I like being outside, but I always was drawn to getting on the computer and doing some code. I just love computers. So you had that passion for computer technology. So what made you get into the window washing business? Was there something that you liked about the business aspect of it? Do you feel like it was more recession proof? If I were to do it all over again, I probably wouldn't start a window cleaning business. At the time, I thought, well, I would go out and generate $400, $500 a day at the time. And if I got 20 guys, 30 guys, 40 guys, 50 guys doing that, that'd be pretty cool, right? A recession proof business is like an HVAC company, right? Like if you're heatered and it's wintertime or an air conditioning network and it's summer time, you're like, I'll try to kid. I'll sell an arm, like whatever I need to do. I need my air conditioning working. I do it all over again. I probably would choose a different industry. It taught me a lot. Like how to run a business. I went to college for business, but had a truly run a business, check KPIs, manage people, had a set management in place, the organization of the company. Man, I learned so much in business over the last 30 years. It's also a little bit more about the team building aspect and share some of the lessons that you learned. Yeah, the lesson I learned is you can't really trust people. I always call it flipping the dumb switch. You'll be around people and be like, hey, I need you to do this. And then when you do that, I'm like, you got it? You're like, yeah, then you walk away. And then do anything you've got to do. That's business 101. Man, so you get to a certain point where you're trying to manage and see everything. And when I realized that if I found one person who shared the same vision, if I have a vision and other people aren't jumping out of the same vision, first of all, they're not a good fit. But you have to keep speaking your vision. I didn't learn this till maybe 10 years ago. But when I keep speaking the vision to everybody around me, we all know where we're going, right? So then I would find somebody within my company who seemed to get the vision and jump on board. And bring them aside and say, like Mitch, for example, is one of my supervisors. I was like, Mitch, I need you to handle this entire division. Everything that's these type of jobs, this city and this location. If you handle all of this and it's hands off for me, I'm going to give you a 2% bonus every month on all the work you did. If I have to help you, that 2%'s mine. He's like, sign me up. So now I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Mitch has it covered. He's still got to coach him along the way. But it'd be funny. Hey, Mitch, no, no, no, no, no, no, I got this right? 2% let's dig. And so then I got different managers managing different areas. And then I hired a general manager over all those guys. If the cogs that cost a good sold are 45% or less, he gets a 2% on the entire company's gross sales. He gets a massive bonus every quarter. I don't have to watch it because he's watching it. Because if he misses a bonus, it's a lot of money he misses out on. He's not a happy guy. So then I guess finding the right people to delegate to seems like one of the key lessons. When you overpay, I always say you overpay your best people. Number wise, sometimes it doesn't make sense. I remember when I hired a general manager, I brought them in from Los Angeles here to Phoenix. And when I hired him, it was like 110% of my salary. Like the numbers did not make sense at all. Oh wow. But when he came in, we started attracting better jobs, more jobs. We started raising prices. We were more organized. We were working more efficiently. And literally within three months, he picked up a couple jobs that covered his entire salary. And I was like, wow, actually, I'm this a long time ago. Wow. Yeah. And I like that. I think for talent, retaining talent through incentives, finding the bonus-based incentive, right? So they have skin in the game. So that's fantastic. And then so that was your, that was the business. What made you, I guess, was collaborate pros your next venture? So when COVID came, they gave us the option to homeschool our kids. Yeah. And we're like, sweet. So my wife and I have a summer cabin up in the mountains and we're like, yeah, pull the kids out of school. Let's go live in the cabin for like a year, a year and a half. Oh, it was beautiful. I was totally worked out of the window, but it's now a couple things I do once or twice a week. But I could work for Moe. I didn't have to be in the office. And I've always wanted to help other business owners. I'm always like, if I could share this knowledge with other business owners so they don't waste a ton of money, marketing, it kind of had a formula per se. I can share some of the formulas with you if you want. But if you want a laser target of search term, like Botox near me and you want to show up for that or like MedSpot near me, let's say you're a MedSpot owner and you want to show up for that search term on your website, I developed some ingredients and a way to do it. And it just started working like crazy. And I had an idea and I thought it would work, but then I reached out to a couple of business owners who are friends of mine. Hey, you want to give me a free trial? I'll try this out. We'll measure it in every single one. You just started jumping to page one. And I'm like, this is cool. I want to share this to everybody. Yeah. Awesome. That's when I started to collaborate. Collaborate and working together with other people, right? The more we collaborate, the more information we share, the more blessed everybody's going to be. So that's kind of my philosophy. Yeah. No, and that's fantastic. So you figured out the strategy. Now you're on a mission to help others. In the beginning, you would say we used the word SEO. It's starting to the basics. Tell the audience what SEO is, what it means, and why it's important if you are a business owner. - Yeah, SEO is not as difficult as Google and wants you to think it is. Google wants you to think you have to pay for ads to get customers, but it's not. If you want to show it for the search term, let's pick Med Spa or Med Spa near me. If you want to show it for Med Spa near me, that's an exact search phrase. But if no content anywhere within your website or your Google business listing doesn't have the words Med Spa near me, you're not gonna show up for that. Now, that's simply a search term. It's not like some Google voodoo magic. You need to have that content on your website to show up for that search term. I show up for near me searches in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Orlando, all over the country and I'm located in Arizona. It's how you code your website and it's how you do the content. - Gotcha. - Yeah. - Okay. What are some of the common mistakes you see? I know you mentioned one is you have to pay to get your websites search optimized. What's the other mistakes that you see? - So mistakes a lot of people make is your Google business listing. You have to think about it like your wife. I'm married and if I said to my wife 50 times today, I love you. She's like, okay, that's cool. For the next 30 days, I don't say anything to her. To be like, I thought you loved me. I mean, yeah, I told you. You know, 30 days ago, like 50 times. So Google, like Google your business is the same way. It's evolved and it measures how much interaction you have going within your Google business profile. So if you upload images to your Google business profile, this is what a lot of people and I did this too. Years ago, years ago it worked, but now it's evolved and it doesn't work. Like if I put 200 photos into my Google business profile, I think I'm done. I put 200 images in there. I'm good to go. You put questions and answers in there. You can do blog posts in there. And if I did it all today, I think I'm good and I'm done. However, if you don't keep up with that and keep activity going in there, Google drops you in the map listings. So the biggest mistake business owners do is not be consistent with it. Same with blog posting. Like if you're gonna do a blog post on your website, blogs are breaking news. You wanna show up for a MedSpot near me. You do a blog post and you title it MedSpot near me. That's the title of the blog post. Nobody searches that. So you wanna title it MedSpot near me. Pretty simple, right? So now you have the content on your website and also if you're putting blogs on your website regularly, like they just jumped up to like 10,000 visitors a month in traffic over the last like three months. All we've been doing is putting blog posts up there. Blog posts is like breaking news. When Google comes back to your website, Google's like, "Ooh, there's something new here." The biggest mistake is doing nothing. Consistency is the other thing, right? It's not like you do it once and then you think it's good. Lot of other competitors might be updating on a daily or regular basis. David, tell me a little bit more about the blog post, Ashley. Because with the rise in AI, there's, it's very easy to have a blog post that's AI generated, right? Here in Algorithm for SEO optimization where they can screen and see what's written by a human and what's written by AI. And is there like a prioritization based on that? - Yeah, I love that question because AI is fantastic. We actually have been using AI to write blog posts before Chat. We were using a program called Jasper. Have you heard of it? - I used to be called Jarvis, but Disney is at its Jasper. We used Jasper for, you know, one or two years before ChatGPT came out. And the way we do it in house is we'll have the article written and then we have a human go through it and move some paragraphs around, change some of the words. But it's not really so much about the content when you're doing a blog post. You want to insert images that break up the content. You want to bold some headlines, put links in there, go into different parts of the websites. You want to break it up, make it easy to read. You want to make it engaging. If it's just words and it looks like AI wrote it and you just slap it on your website, Google's like, come on, man. Like, you know, let her job. (laughs) - Yeah, no, that's true. So you said highlighting, posting links. Well, what about the tonality? There's kind of distinguished based on the tonality if it's written by human. - We've been doing it with AI for seven years, seven, almost seven years now. And the only thing I've seen is sometimes Google will rank a blog post really high and then it'll fall off. Or vice versa, it won't show up and then it ranks really high. So if it ranks really high and then it falls off, it tells you that Google doesn't like the way it was written. So you just rewrite it. And we had a customer in the roofing industry. And he was showing up for roof or near me really quick within maybe a month. We started working with him. Roofing near me or roofing contractor near me. Man, just first page, he was actually number one right under the maps and we're like sweet. And then like a week later it was gone. We're like, where'd he go? (laughs) So you just got to keep an eye on it. If Google makes it not shown up, it means Google either doesn't like the way the AI was written, just rewrite it. Put more pictures in there. Google loves YouTube. So put YouTube videos in there. We're doing a blog post on a roofing company. We should put a YouTube video in there that's talking about roofing materials. Something to educate the customer, right? - Bye. Now that makes sense. And thank you for sharing those. Definitely think those are very unique insights. Definitely will help the listeners out. David, the next question I have is more about we have clients who may be interested in working with you for growing their physician practice or their aesthetic practice. Tell them a little bit more about what it's like working with you, what your team composition is like, what your pricing structure is like as well. So if you can just share that with me. - Yeah, so over the years, actually in the last year and a half, we've worked really hard on developing some tools that help with automations. So we've pretty much automated the entire Google business process, which means you can run your business. How we say who, not how? Find the who, who knows how to do it? Have you ever read the book? - See, I've had the book after the year. - Yep, great book, right? Who know how? Find the people who know how. So we have an automation process in the Google Maps and it literally does the content, like almost on a daily basis. It automatically replies to reviews. It even posts stuff to YouTube automatically, Facebook, Instagram. So when you get tools that automate all that stuff, it's a game changer. 'Cause then we can offer it at a lower price and get like five to 10 times better results. That's part of what we do for automations. What we also do on the website is we interlink pages a lot. If you were to go to Google and you were to search, like what is Botox or how much does Botox cost? There's gonna be a people answer, people, questions on the Google homepage. And you click on it and you click on all these questions. Well, that's just information to educate the consumer. So we like to take those questions and slap them right on the homepage of the website. And the reason we do the homepage of the homepage has the most power of the website. So we'll put for that guy who is a roofer, a roofing contractor near me. On the homepage of the website, we'd say, how do I find the qualified roofer in my area? Questions related to roofing or how much should a new roof cost for a 4,000 square foot home? I put content on the homepage and then link that content to the blog post. So now we got a link from the homepage, go into the blog post and given that blog post, the bigger push and it jumps higher on page one. And then the collaboration part of it, we have a lot of customers in the medical industries, dentists, meds, spots, tons and tons. What's beautiful is when you connect yourself to somebody in your industry, like a roofer, buddy. I think he's up in Portland, Oregon. If I put a link on my website, I did a blog post on my window cleaning website and I talked about how awesome as roofing company was, Google's like, you're an idiot. You guys aren't even related. However, if I was a roofer and I talked about what an amazing roofer that guy is, Google's like, oh really, tell me more. So that's what stirs up the authority and helps your website go up. So yeah, working with us and collaborate pros, you can go to collaborateprose.com and we have a little button on the top that says, podcast resources and you can watch some videos and you can see some pretty cool testimonials. As far as pricing goes, I feel like we're very reasonable. We tried to charge, like if you were to get one customer, it's gonna pay for our services. I just sent a report to a customer earlier today. From the last 30 days, compared to the previous 30 days, they got 119 more phone calls off their Google business listing. - Wow. - That was just phone calls. That wasn't even website clicks. Their website clicks also went up about 80% month over month. So when you have that much free traffic come into your website and your phone's ringing all the time. - Yeah, it's worth the investment for sure. But what if you're like a number two, number two way? - Yeah, so like, or Google Maps, usually, I think it's like $1,000 a month or SEO is also 1,000 a month. But if you bundle it together, I think it's 1750. And there might be podcast discounts. So if you click on there, and if you mention a podcast where you might have a-- - Yeah, so 1750 per month. And it sounds like a lot of your clients have experienced great ROI on that. - Yeah. - So that's who the program is for or who you typically work for. Just for transparency, tell us who you don't work with. - If you want to be cheap on your way to success, we don't have a good fit. Being cheap on your way to success means you want to pay me a hundred bucks. It's just not worth it. But people who want to grow their business, people who are excited, any small business owner, we don't typically like to work with insurance brokers. Those guys are no fun to work with. And it's a super competitive market. Like you got to work six to nine months so you see results there. Most business owners don't have patience for that. But all good things come to those who wait. (laughs) - Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I'm sure it takes a couple of months for a lot of the clients to see any return. So that covers how long do your clients work with you, typically for? - Well, that's a good question. I always say, if you work with us, it depends on where you're at in business. Some people have pretty strong business profiles and we get results really fast. Some people are just starting out, but there was a dentist in Omaha, Nebraska. Like, we built their website and then started marketing for them. About a year and a half later, I told them, don't pay us anymore. You're getting all the free traffic you can possibly get. They were number one of the maps for all their search terms. They were number one and two for all their search terms and organic. You don't need to pay us anymore. It depends on the industry too. Some industries have a lot of different search terms or services they provide. So it takes more time to get your website to show up for all those. If you have a smaller, easier niche, like say you're a snow removal company. Like, oh, you do a snow removal. It's pretty easy. It works for us, the removal company. For like two months and we're like, yep, you're good. You're number one for everything. (laughs) So yeah. - But switch things up a little bit. So it sounds like they need to have a physical location, right? Because some of the physicians have their own telemedicine practices. Completely and more completely virtual. They extend across different states, their cash based or accept insurance. So let's collaborate for all have a program that works for them as well. Or is this just pure people with a system? - And as long as for Google Business Listing, if you have a Google Business Listing and it doesn't have an exact address, that's okay. We can still get it to show up in the maps. It's better if you have a physical location. If not, it still works. It takes longer, it's more work. But then the flip side is, you do more work on their website 'cause their website's gonna start showing up in all the organic results. - Right, because the near-me feature might not apply to them if they're seeing patients virtually. - True. - Or somebody search in near-me and they don't realize they can do it virtually. So you probably still wanna show up if that search start, right? - That's a good point. Speaking of search terms, I think transactional search term was one of the words that I hear often, right, with SEO. Tell us a little bit more about what that means and why it's another important term. - I'm gonna give people another really good tip right here. On Google Business Listing, where you can list your hours, eight to five, Monday through Friday, right? So when your business is closed, your business does not show up on the maps anymore. If you close at five o'clock and I'm sitting at my house and I have cockroaches in my house, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I need a test removal right now. So I go on and search pest control company near-me and it's 5.30, but you're the nearest one near-me and your office just closed, you're not showing up. I'm, Google's gonna show me who's open. So I try to tell all of our customers, all of our clients, keep your businesses open 24/7. Now, I get it in the medical industry, but it may not be practical unless you have somebody answer the phone. - Right. - I have three map listings for three different of my companies and they're all three open 24 hours a day. It doesn't matter what search term you search, those three companies always come up and no other companies ever show up. There's a way to absolutely dominate it. The transactional search term was pest control near-me. When you add near-me to something, somebody's like, "I got a credit card in my hand. "I want to go spend some money. "I need to solve my problem. "Like if my tooth is killing me, I'm in dental pain. "Emergency dentist near-me or emergency dentist open now." That's a transactional search term. There is a definite intent to do a purchase behind it. Now, if you were searching how much does a roof cost or how much does a new air conditioning unit cost, now I'm getting informational. That's an informational search. So I'm not really looking to spend money. I'm doing some research. Speaking of these different companies that you worked with, I'm guessing a lot of your clientele are like independent practice owners, right? We want to show up on the set. But what are the advice that you give them when they're trying to compete against different or more integrated systems? Let's say if you have one dentist. - The advice that we give them is it's not that difficult. The little simple things that I said in here, if you do blog posts three, four times a week and you spread that out for an entire year, you're gonna have 150 to 200 blog posts on your website. You're going to get your phone ringing. You're gonna get people coming to your website. Same with your Google business listing. If you're consistent, Google business listing another thing to do is put offers up. So an offer is essentially a coupon, like free teeth whitening or free Botox injection. Google sees that you're engaging. The biggest thing that people do is they get confused and say, I don't know what to do. Or they'll pay a lot of money to a large marketing agency. And the majority of large marketing agencies waste your money. They have all sorts of layers of management and they really don't care about the business owner. It's really sad. It's not that difficult. That's the advice I would give. - I like that because I think we're led to believe that it is. I have to talk into the team that there's certain strategies that you need to be aware of to get a successful marketing campaign. But one of the other things I think I've seen is a lot of people would spend a lot of money on marketing. But personally, it would allocate the least amount of time from their schedule to seeing if it works, to seeing if the KPI are being met by the marketing company that they're paying a lot of money to. - Yeah. - What's your take on? Is that something that you've seen yourself as well? - Yeah, we'll get customers who've spent a lot of money and then want to talk to us every single day. Like, what'd you do today? What'd you do yesterday? - Okay. - What are you doing? - I got one of those emails today. And it's been a month, like, we're all my phone calls. I'm like, actually, you've gotten three phone calls in the last seven days. That's pretty cool. What's a patient's game? And if you find the right method, and if you have the right patients, the right marketing does a good job. I like KPIs. I like showing, we show traffic, we track all the Google search console. So most business owners is go back to Botox. Let's say Botox 101 is the name of the company. You search in their search console. The majority of the traffic coming to them is Botox 101. It's their brand name. That same with, like, if it was David's dentistry, was the name of my dentist office. The majority of most people's traffic is their brand name. So they get wrapped up in spending lots and lots and lots of money on their brand. Whether it be radio ads, print ads, mailers, Facebook Instagram, they think they need the brand brand brand. And branding's not bad. However, most people don't know your brand name. They're going to search Botox near me. Or they're going to search MedSpot near me. So I see a lot of business owners get wrapped up and spending too much marketing and effort towards a brand rather than towards transactional searches. I know you said you have family. What does a day in the life look like for you? And what are some of your productivity hacks? You de-stress yourself after a long time. Yeah, I actually just got a patent on a product about a month and a half ago. So I'm working on developing a prototype for that. So that's kind of my next new adventure. Oh wow. On a marketing company, just like my window cleaning company's pretty much runs without me. I only work two days a week in my marketing agency, two days in Wednesdays. And then I pretty much have Monday, Thursdays, and Fridays off. Spend time with the family. I got three kids, 10, 11, and 12. They were a lot of fun. I coached their basketballs. I coached track, just enjoying being around other people, family and friends. So it sounds like a great team you're working on the business as opposed to in the business. But like in terms of exercise, routine, meditation, or your morning person, night person, what are some of those? I am a morning and a night person. Oh wow. Sleep looks. I don't go to bed early, but I don't go to bed late. 10, 30, 11, I'll go to bed. I still wake up at like 4, 4, 30, on like, I am going to go do something today. I play pickleball a couple of times a week. I was good at going to the gym until I started coaching basketball on track. I've been running my kids track program after school. I call that exercise by osmosis. Yeah. I'm sure you know, in a lot of steps, right? You get your step. And we were at a track meet this weekend, and we were hosting it. And my watch is like, hey, man, you hit your 6,000 steps. Good job. Seven in the morning. Yeah. That's going to be a great day. That's awesome. So yeah, you're involved with coaching and being there for the family. And that's fantastic. So every week in all of my businesses, all the management gets together and measures KPIs. So our key performance indicators, they're different in each business. And my marketing business is different from my window cleaning businesses. Yeah. But ultimately, every week we want to measure that we're having positive cash flow. Our expenses aren't greater than our sales that we're going in the right direction. Because if you meet up once a month, you really only have 12 opportunities to get your business going in the direction you want to do the vision I talked about. But the traction book breaks down the point that if you meet 52 times a year now, I have 52 opportunities to make sure everybody's working in the same vision. So I would say traction is probably the biggest book that's changed my business life. Awesome. So wrapping up the interview, one final question I have, David, is what's the kind of impact or legacy you want to have? Yeah, I mean, really truly, I just want to help other business owners. Like, I had this guy in Ottawa, Canada a couple of years ago. I was speaking at a convention in Orlando. And he was like 22. He was sitting in the front row, taking notes. And I was sharing some of the stuff I'm sharing today. And he was asking questions. And he's like, afterwards, he came up to me. He's like, I can't afford to work with you. I'm like, man, just shoot me an email. I'll hop on his Zoom. I'll show you what to do. He's the only guy that I've ever seen. I saw, took action himself and did what I decided to do. I met up with him maybe once a month, maybe once every three months and he did what I told him, his business grew from 600,000. A year later it was 1.6 million. He grew a million dollars of sales in one year and I just told him, "Hey, do this and hey, do that and let's do this next and let's do that." I didn't charge him. I just thought he was a cool kid and I admired his willingness to go get the world. So my legacy would be simply just, probably to help as many business owners as I can. - Wow, that's a very fantastic mission. Way noteworthy. David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and breaking down the terms that we think are so challenging to grasp like SEO, a transactional search term. And it's been fantastic having you on the podcast. - Yes, thank you so much. It was a great time. - Thank you, David. All right, we'll see you.