🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: YouTube
This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Isaac Justesen, founder and CEO of PatientPartners, an agency that works only with healthcare practices. Physical therapy, chiropractic, massage, counseling.
You would expect a specialist to tell you his niche is special. He said the opposite, and it is good news for every small business owner reading this.
“The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor.”
Translation: what works for a clinic works for your shop. So here is what a specialist does first.
Fix one: your Google Business Profile is not finished
You set it up when you opened. You have not opened it since. Isaac finds the same thing over and over.
“They haven’t set up their categories correctly, they don’t have services listed in their business profile. Really, really simple things.”
Categories and services are two fields. They are free. They are the difference between showing up in the map pack and not. Go open your profile this week and actually fill them in.
Fix two: you cannot tell what is working
Conversion tracking does not bring you a single new customer, and Isaac still puts it in his first two moves.
“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.”
Without it, every budget conversation you have for the next five years is a guess.
Stop putting real money into boosted posts
This is the one he wants small business owners to quit.
“You’ve got a thousand bucks a month to spend on marketing and a good chunk of it is going to just boosting posts. That’s always one of the first things where I tell them, hey, we’ve got to change this up.”
And a smaller one, which got the biggest laugh of the episode:
“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.”
Isaac’s most underrated channel for a local business is not a channel most marketers would name: showing up in person. Sponsor the youth sports team. Set up a booth at the marathon and tape some ankles. Jeremy runs community cleanups on the same logic, and found that posting the event to a local subreddit WITH the sponsor’s brand name in the title got more upvotes than leaving it out.
The phone is the leak, not the contact form
Every business owner worries about their website form. Isaac pointed somewhere else.
“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.”
Speed matters more than most owners think. Research covered on this show found that out of roughly 1,800 businesses measured, 68 percent never replied to an inquiry inside 24 hours. If someone is standing on your sidewalk with their phone out, a missed call is a lost sale.
Isaac will not hand the front desk to an AI yet. He was direct about that. But he is watching for the day it is good enough, because the gap is that big.
Where he does use AI
Review responses. The system reads what the customer actually wrote and who they named, drafts a reply, then layers on tone, friendly or professional or clinical depending on the business.
“I don’t ever really want to replace the patient interaction. But if we can find simple ways to save time, that’s usually where we can see some really good value with the AI.”
That is the whole philosophy in one line. Two hours of work becoming one hour means you do more of it, not that you cut staff.
“AI is not taking our jobs. But AI is taking tasks.”
What is coming for local search
The idea Isaac carried out of someone else’s podcast, and the one worth remembering:
“Rather than just curating ten options, it’s saying, hey, here’s the best option. Here’s the best clinic for you. It’s kind of moving from curation to selection.”
Ten blue links let the customer choose. AI answers choose for them. Which is why Isaac thinks your business profile is gaining importance while your website loses a little.
Connect with Isaac
- PatientPartners: patientpartners.co
- Free clinic marketing blueprint plus a website, SEO and AI visibility audit
- LinkedIn: Isaac Justesen
🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: YouTube
Keep going → Browse the interviews