AI Is Rewriting Addiction Treatment Marketing. Donald Prince Explains What’s Changing

Speaker A: I. We've worn a number of hats in the behavioral healthcare space, but my transition into more of the administrative marketing side kind of was by way of the admissions department. So I was in the admissions department, and I really got to learn firsthand what it was like to talk to someone who needed help. The transition from there was. I've always been a techie guy. This was like a little startup treatment center. And I was like, oh, you're really good with technology. Can you help us with it? Cause we don't really have an IT budget. And through that first organization, that's where my role ultimately ended up as Director of marketing. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Speaker B: Want to attract and convert more leads? Want to learn how digital pr, branding and SEO can establish and build your brand identity? Welcome to the Market Movers Building brands and links with Linkify Podcast. We answer these questions and help you ramp up your brand visibility and credibility. Let's cut through the noise and make your business the talk of the town. We're your hosts, Nick and Chris. Let's get this show on the road.

Speaker C: Welcome to the Market Movers Podcast. Today, I am delighted to say, we are joined by Donald DJ Prince, uh, chief strategy officer at Guardian Recovery, where he leads marketing strategy across location expansion, digital growth, and regional demand generation. Really excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Speaker A: My pleasure to be here. I'm excited to talk marketing and SEO and all the fun stuff that, uh, we get to do every day.

Speaker B: All right. And it was a good intro, Chris. That was like the. How they introduced the fighters. Dj. Like the. You should have done the quotes. Dj, thanks for coming on. To kick things off, give, uh, us a bit more background on how, uh, you got started in the space.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I. We've worn another number of hats in the behavioral healthcare space, but my transition into more of the administrative marketing side kind of was by way of the admissions department. So way, way, way back when, More than a decade, we'll say. So just to date myself a bit, I was in the admissions department, and I really got to learn firsthand what it was like to talk to someone who needed help to understand what their needs were and how they found us. Right. So the transition from there was. I've always been a techie guy. Um, so this was like a little startup treatment center. And I was like, oh, you're really good with technology. Can you help us with it? Because we don't really have an IT budget. And then it was, hey, the website's kind of not working. Can you help us fix the website? Because the vendor we picked doesn't really seem to know what they're doing. And through that first organization, that's where my role ultimately ended up as director of marketing. And um, it was kind of like thrown into the fire because, uh, anybody who knows substance use disorder treatment and this facility was based in Florida, probably one of the most competitive digital marketing, marketing spaces that exist. So, you know, I didn't start off advertising like, you know, John's Pizza. It was like right away, how do I get, you know, this very, very difficult, uh, brand to show up in the market and to get the phone to ring and to connect with our audience. So yeah, that organization was a great learning pad from there, um, just then fell in love with, with digital. You know, I've always been a problem solver. I like puzzles. I really like puzzles. And marketing is like one puzzle after another. And that's just where my transition, you know, kind of went to everything marketing you could think of. Um, you know, touched some other industries outside of behavioral health, but always kind of found my way back to the behavioral healthcare space. Um, I joined the Guardian team about eight years ago. So I've been here quite a while. Uh, and, and yeah, you know, took Guardian from when I started. Then we had two. Just opening our third location, um, to now we're 21 locations. Uh, we're in six, soon to be seven states, about 1200 employees. We do about a thousand plus admissions a month. So it's really been a huge growth and a year seems like a long time. But in most companies, uh, timelines that's just a small little blip. So we've done a lot in a short period of time and hopefully what we can talk about some today is how digital fit into that, that picture and kind of how that's transformed from what we did eight years ago to what we do now.

Speaker C: Yeah, that sounds exactly what we want to talk about. Uh, and you must have done something right because you've got, you went from VP of Marketing to Chief Strategy Officer. So yeah, talk to us about what the strategy looked like in those early days. I say early days like eight years ago and when you first started to how it's changed and what it looks like now.

Speaker A: Yeah, so yeah, and actually my original title was even VP was. I think it was Marketing Director. A marketing director, which really what that meant was just digital. Right. Like when I got hired and found the organization went from vendor to vendor, agency to agency, and kind of had the traditional like burn experience, like promise the world underdeliver. Um, and they kind of actually just wrote off digital. They were like, you know what? We're good with B2B. We're really good at building referral relationships and professional relationships. We're just not going to do it. But the organization had an appetite for growth and it was like, you know, well, we can't do the growth we want without really capitalizing on this, this digital channel. Right. It has to be an equal blend to our marketing channel mix if we want to get to where we want to get to. So, yeah, when they brought me on, it was me and only me in the marketing department. So I was, you know, the PPC paid M Media manager was the web developer, I was the social media manager, I was the graphic designer. I was fixing computers. I was a little bit of the IT department too.

Speaker C: How many arms did you have?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was like, you know, anything that's kind of complicated and techy, like, just DJ can do it. No, but so, you know, when I started, um, you know, something happened in the behavioral healthcare space right around that time, which was the entrance of this entity called LegitScript. So those in the space know around. I think it was around 2017, Google shut down addiction, ah, treatment advertising. So no more ppc. Google Ads said, we're putting a ban on the entire industry until we can figure out how to better manage the advertisers and vet them a little bit. They Google out a lot of blowback from just letting some unscrupulous actors advertise on Google Ads. And there was a whole lot of issues there. So fast forward a little bit. When I started at Guardian, we were one of the first organizations to get that legit script certification. So we, we had this like, you know, card that allowed us to go to Google Ads and start running ads when a lot of the rest of our competition and industry was still working through that process. So I walked in the door and the rest of our leadership, excited as they should have been, was like, let's do this, let's run. You know, we have the Google Ads legit script certification. Let's get this going. And I said, great. So like, what CRM are we on? What are we doing for call tracking? What's the admissions customer journey process? Like, do we have conversion tracking for each of those? And it was just like, well, no, we have, uh, we have two guys with cell phones, um, and they kind of log it on a Google spreadsheet if they remember. And I was like, well, guys, this is not going to work. Right?

Speaker B: Figure it out. Yeah, you don't have any of that. Just go figure it out.

Speaker A: You know, if we, if we want to give Google a ton of money and burn through it without a lot of return, we can do this. But let's just take a minute. You know, give me, give me two months or at least two months and let me just stand up a couple of foundational, you know, things so we can, we can get something running that's capable of performing what we need it to be. So to their credit, even with the looming opportunity costs of not running immediately, you know, I was able to set up at that, at that time it was like Unbounce, which I don't know if anybody still uses Unbounce, but it was like the Unbounce page builder, just basic call tracking systems and everything feeding into a very, very bare bones Salesforce instance, like the out of the box Salesforce instance. So not purpose built for us, but at least now we had a way to track everything that journey. And on the marketing side, you know what it looked like at that time was PPC search. So really the PMAX stuff and a lot of the AI stuff wasn't there. So it was just traditional search on Google Ads. And then on the SEO side it was, which really was a strategy up until recently. You know, everything you do for local, right? So just local, local, local. Especially us, uh, we oper the hub and spoke model. We have these like inception points across the country that are higher levels of care. So like detox, it's kind of like a hospital stay, like you're living there. It's very high medical acuity. Once you go through that program, that's when we'll say hey man, like you know, you're using heroin for five years, a week in detox is probably not going to get you to a place you want to be. Let's do a longer term care in Florida or Portland, Maine or New Hampshire or something like that. So local has always been a big part of our strategy because we really try and dominate where we have those brick and mortar inception points across the country. So the strategy was heavy local plus the traditional SEO playbook, which I'm sure we'll get into why that doesn't really work anymore. Of volume through very niche long tail articles, blogs, pages. So the example I use is like, um, can you mix Nyquil and cocaine? Right. Very fringe query, probably very low volume. But the intent of someone who's looking that is like if someone's thinking if they need to mix Nyquil and cocaine, if it's Safe, like they may have an issue with cocaine. Right. So let's answer that question from them. But also like that's our opportunity while they're on our page to give them a quiz about addiction, to put a call to action in front of them to talk about addiction and help them make that transition from like this really niche long tail search to maybe this person needs treatment. So it really was a volume game, you know, hundreds of thousands of pages really targeted on those kind of search queries, getting that individual onto our site and some very, very small portion of those people realizing they need help, moving them through to the admissions process. So yeah, that, that was the traditional playbook. And then you know, those pages that were high value, that we were seeing a lot of traction from doing backlink building, doing press around PR releases around those pages, doing everything we could to keep and maintain the rank we've gotten for those pages that really, really performed. That was the old way.

Speaker B: That's interesting. Kind of a roundabout way to get to people on a. First of all, I assume the answer to all of those pages. Can you mix this with this? Was no?

Speaker A: Yeah, don't.

Speaker B: Yeah, don't do it.

Speaker C: Oh yeah, you could. That's a great combination.

Speaker B: But so I think that's interesting when you started out, uh, you're a team of one. I kind of wanted to just touch on that real quick. That's uh, you know, a lot of people, Anyone who's worked on a big team thinks like. Today's episode is brought to you by Linkify, the digital PR agency that gets brands featured in top publications worldwide. If you're looking to build authority and boost your search rankings with powerful, high quality links, Linkify has you covered, ready to take your brand to the next level. Visit Linkify IO and let's get you in the headlines. And they've just, they're always hearing, no, we can't do that. No, we're not doing that. I'm sure that sounds amazing. But on the flip side, like it's all on your shoulders. It's like every success is it comes down to you. And this is before ChatGPT, this is before Claude code. So it's not like, like now I think you could probably, you could be a one man marketer and handle a lot of that, but with, with AI help. But back then that was like you had to get down and like really get in the dirt and figure it out. So that's very cool. Okay, so the local strategy, you mentioned this, you've got the individual locations. How did that work on a domain level. Was this a website for each location or did you have one main website? How did that work?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a um, that's a great question. So goes a lot to the, to the point you just brought up of what AI has done in the calculation of resources versus reward. Right. Which, which was a much more difficult question and balanced to strike Pre AI and what I mean by that is going into a rebrand. So when we started we had um, uh, we were a house of brands, different uh, names, logos, domains in every market we operated. Um, there was a theory, uh, we don't get too much in the weeds that like you know, customers really wanted a local niche brand, they didn't want a national organization that it may affect some of our business development relationships. We went through a whole brand exercise. On the other end of that we found that you know, some of that is true, but not to the extent we thought. And ultimately we decided become a branded house. But with the uh, domain strategy, you know, it was pre AI the question of do we build a parent domain guardianrecovery.com right? This is after rebrand. So everything is Guardian. Whether it's Guardian plus like Plymouth House and it's kind of a co brand or Guardian, just Dallas Addiction Center. Everything was going to be Guardian. So we could do it on one domain, same logo, same color palette, same brand guide. Like it would work. So the question was do we do that and put this emphasis on building a really strong parent domain. Individual location silos underneath, sub directories for each location and like do build outs under this parent or do we do individual domains for each location. And in the beginning pre AI, what we decided was the parent route was better that you know this, this concept that Google ranks pages, not uh, domains. Like if we just focus on building out these subdirectories and making them hyperlocal, focus on that location that we will get the lift that we want from a local SEO perspective doing it the subdirectory route. And we get the ancillary benefit of then still growing a lot of just synergy, which cheesy word but like really towards that parent domain. Right? Like driving everything to the site. More traffic, more engagement, more links just to the parent. So pre AI, that was the question we had to answer because we didn't have resources for both. We didn't have enough content writers and developers and designers to build out this parent and build out hyper local silos in there and do a uh, complete separate domain and do a site build there that's not the case anymore. Right. So the case is now you don't need a team of 50 writers for a website. Like that's, that's the reality where an AI, I think that's probably one of the first jobs that really went AI was content staff. That's been my experience. You know we can do a template from our, you know, creative and brand team of Figma and AI can spin that up into a Ah, WordPress elementor page with a plugin like that. Like that used to be weeks and weeks of work. So with the you know, explosion of artificial intelligence in the last couple years, we basically said to ourselves, well guess what, we don't have to pick either or you can do both. Right. So we can still build this super strong parent domain, do hyperlocal, you know, silos in that parent, you know, have that be our national kind of hub of just resource and content and build out these hyper local facility domains that are just focused and really a 45 minute, you know, drive radius around that location and really have it show up and look like a local business like it is. Um, on the local search sides. That's kind of been the, the evolution of our strategy on, on the search side and it's, it's kind of good that we went that route because that niche long tail, you know, resource based query strategy that I mentioned at the beginning, it's kind of gone. Uh, AI overviews have really killed the click through rate for those kind of searches. That's if someone's going to Google at all. Right, right. Maybe they're going to Claude, maybe they're going to chat GBT and like the click through rates on there aren't great. Like I know they're just starting to roll out ads but it's still a huge unknown what that's going to look our industry. Um, so yeah, that's kind of, you know where we're at today is a ton of domains for every single location we have and those domains are super hyperlocal focused. GMBs are tied to those locations to really build the ultra like local relevance, full SEO local push on each of those domains and locations. And then anything that's like more national resource based, like just brand authority building if you will is going on on the parent domain.

Speaker C: So I love that and I was excited by that when we, when we talked pre podcast. So I'm really glad you gave such an awesome explanation to that. Uh, one thing that I was intrigued about was because it makes complete sense as well for the industry and for the growth trajectory that you've taken maybe with one or two locations doesn't make sense but like 20 plus locations GMBs for each individual location and then like a parent domain and I've been on the, obviously the main website you do have location specific content for each location. So do you get any cannibalization of content? Like do you ever notice that the parent domain is ranking for like local searches that you'd want them? Uh, and how do you handle that?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we do. Which I will say this for a branded search it's a little funky. Like we ideally want them to go to the local page because it'll be really more relevant to that facility. Conversions will be better for like city plus service line based searches like drug rehab in New Brunswick New Jersey. Let's just say ideally I'd like the, the world like the child site or the individual domain site to rank better but it's almost like if you, if the parent does rank better for that search doesn't really matter because they're going to get to the same place. Like as soon as they get on that page we're going to route them to like a facility finder and move them up to that individual location anyway. So like uh, we're competing with ourselves. Yes. But if we have multiple results, like if we're owning multiple results in that page and we get them to the same place anyway, it's a win.

Speaker B: So yeah, definitely. I do imagine that was quite a uh, quite a few like on page changes, the on site changes. Like you had all that content for each location, you had those backlinks. Was that just a case of moving it all to the new domain? Go on redirects. Uh, what all did you have to do to change the strategy?

Speaker A: Well so we, because we started off as that house of brands, we did have all these legacy domains that did have existence. So when we started down the path the goal was we weren't going to shut those down. Like we were just going to leave those up but really just not invest too much more in the build and invest more in the parent. So when that strategy shifted those domains were still there. So we basically just, we've been updating those sites, giving them a new look and feel to match with a parent. And then what we've done is with locations that didn't have their individual domains like I'm just trying to think of one. Saddlebrook. We have an outpatient program in Saddlebrook, New Jersey. Saddlebrook Counseling Center. It only had an interior build out on the guardian Recovery parent domain didn't have its own site. So. Yeah. Then when we did build the uh, saddlebrookcounseling.com website, we did do a redirect from that individual location like main landing page to the individual site page. And then it was just a huge citation cleanup. You know the, that's, that's the, the biggest part is just you know we've had everything then pointing to these interior pages and then getting those redirected to the parent. That was a little bit of a lift. Uh, so yeah, that's, that's, that's a little bit of the, the challenge but manageable. I mean there's plenty of citation management tools that as long as you have the money to pay, pay for em like. Yeah, yeah, it's not challenging.

Speaker B: It's just a pain in the ass.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Have you, so what has been the, the impact then? Has it, have you seen like impact in each spot? Have there been some challenges?

Speaker A: So I mean two things are happening as one at once. One thing is happening is we're having these great hyperlocal sites. They're doing better on local search. That's one thing. We did a B test. So we took two net new locations didn't exist before we did one just an interior page on the parent site sent all of the, you know, GMB links, all the local links to that didn't do an individual domain build. We took another location that was net new and we did an individual domain build. And then we weren't really looking to see which site performed better because we actually believed that the parent site strategy would work better because it already had like some existing authority. It was more of what influence did it have on GMB rank? Did having a site with like totally the entire site dialed into hyperlocal content that's around the location where that GMB was. Did it help the GMB perform better? And we saw it did slightly. So that, that's um, one thing that's happened is all these individual domains, like I said, they're hyperlocal. It's more of I think what Google wants to see on local search which is like hey, local, local content, you know, domain in the area. Not to say that like you know, McDonald's doesn't rank well and they don't have a location for every site. Like the subdirectory thing can work but I think it's a little easier with just how you have to do content planning and structure when you can just dedicate a domain to hyperlocal, uh, content strategy. So that's working like we're getting a good lift from local. But what also happened at the same time is like I mentioned all of those super long tail niche searches that we were getting a lot of traffic from. Historically I pretty much got in the way. So we saw a big dip. And I think around like October was like when it really like hit us hard, um, roughly like 20% of admissions that we were getting from those like Long Tail organic or sorry, 20% of total digital admissions. So which is roughly about 250 admissions a month. 20% of those were really coming from like that Long Tail Organic strategy through the parent that was just kind of like, like disappeared overnight. Like as soon as, um. What's the name of the. The name's escaping me right now where I would quote like the article directly before they were AI overviews. Oh my God, I can't believe the featured snippet. Yeah, featured snippet, right. So all those feature snippets that we were doing pretty well with just disappeared for the most part. And now our AI overviews and then people are using AI search. So we are seeing better local, but a drop off in people coming to us from like out of state through those national, you know, kind of more resource like information built. So I don't think, and I don't think it's coming back right. Like no one's gonna say, oh, uh, you know what, I don't like arviews or I don't like ChatGPT. I want to go back to like, you know, weeding through 10 pages of results on Google to find what I want. Like that that's not the way the search is going to work anymore. I don't believe that. Uh, so what we've kind of been doing now is like, hey, we know local. What we've seen is that the, the tenants of local search that have worked for GMB Rank and Alt local search in the past seem to be the same tenants that are working in AI local search. Which makes sense, right? Like the signals that you would want for local search would be the same almost everywhere. So we've doubled down on that, you know, making sure we have a solid review strategy that we're doing. You know, local backlink building, local content builds, like the same stuff we always done for local search. But just knowing that that's going to be more and more important in how we show up in the LLMs. And then I uh, think the jury is still out on just general LLM rank for like non local search. I mean if we listen to like every LinkedIn post about what you should do to rank an LLC, it's like we'd have a different strategy every day. Like you know our, our focus has really just been like focus on what we know is working now and then let the dust settle so to speak until there's like really some solid consensus and a time has gone on where we understand what the strategy needs to be for general LLM stuff. Does that make sense?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's really interesting that um, this whole long tail, like this loss of being able to capture people in that sort of consideration journey because it makes sense now that you're like ranking for local and for that those bottom of the funnel like you know, and rehab facilitation facility. Rehab facility in xc. Yeah that makes sense. But it's also there's a two sided like positive element of the strategy of that long tail. Can you mix X with Y? First of all it's great for you guys because you're getting people into your service and also it's great for them because they possibly didn't even know that they needed a service and that seems to have, I mean maybe that's just gone to the LLMs now through conversation and it will lead them to recommending them. I don't know, I've Never, I know LLMs sort of like won't get too risky with what they're talking about. So maybe they wouldn't. But is that like they'll probably be

Speaker B: likely to recommend help.

Speaker C: Actually recommend help?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But yeah, yeah. And where, where is that help?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And that's the question we don't know is.

Speaker C: Yeah. So like is there a way to capture that loss? Is there any strategies where you can get people at that point where they, they're sort of, they're ripe for the, for the service but they don't even know they need it. But like a nudge could put them into getting it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Again LLM side, I don't know, I don't know yet again to your point, like they, they're very risk averse. Obviously this is a super sensitive area. Like forget about healthcare at large. Like this in particular, um, is super, super, you know, risky with giving recommendations anything mental health or behavioral health related. Um, you know, I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are like jumping at the, you know, thought of how they're going to do paid, you know, endorsements of health services. Right. That's. Yeah, that's risky. Right. Google can take a step back and Say, well we're just, you know, we're, we're having place and people are bidding against each other, you know, and like they can kind of claim hands off a little bit. But when you have an AI bot that says oh no, you should go to, you know, wherever. Guardian Recovery, right. Like it's a liability there. Right. So how they're going to manage that. Unclear. Um, and I think the same stands for recommendations, even non paid. Right. Like if someone does say, can you make some K? And it says no, you should get help. Like there's a lot of liability where they say you should get. And I don't really know if they know how to manage that just yet. So, so what we've done, just in an absence of having like real knowledge of what that's going to look like or how it's going to develop, we've had to ask ourselves, where are people spending their time? Other places online. Right. That we maybe had ignored in the past. A, ah, lot more social content, a lot more video content. Um, looking at some of the, more like uh, uncommon display network things, you know, we've really invested more in social this year than we ever have. Uh, social search is something that we never really thought much about, thinking a lot about. Like, what does it take when someone types in, you know, drug rehab in Hoboken, New Jersey into TikTok, if they might. Right. What does it take to have a wall of results be Guardian Recovery? Uh, we never asked that question before, but now we have to figure out an answer because you know, that's where people are spending time and that's an opportunity for us to get in front of them. So it's just been um, you know, our bread and butter. You should be a bunch of articles, bunch of content. Google Search Organic is going to get us there. We supplement that with paid when we need. That was the playbook. It's not the playbook anymore. It's, it's like always, every day of where I used to like not be excited or entertain some of the fringe kind of ideas or strategies. Now it's like, yeah, we gotta try it like what you got and let's give it a, give it a roll, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I personally think healthcare space is like the perfect place for AI recommendations. Like there's definitely like the, it's gotta be careful. But also uh, I think if you're just asking for a recommendation, it's just making those recommendations based on reviews. Right. And reputation of the clinic. So I think there's still like a ton of opportunity there to get recommended. And I don't know like the landscape right now, if you guys are seeing a lot of that, but I think that's gonna grow a lot. It's AI is like very, or uh, ChatGPT specifically is very like cautious on this. Like I'll be asking like a health question, like a simple thing about like a muscle spasm and it's like get it checked out and like, you know, it should just say like hot pad. It does say that. But then you get down to like if any of this happens. So I think there's some interesting thoughts there. So LinkedIn influencers aside, what are you guys thinking about? Like how are you for maybe more visibility from AI?

Speaker A: Yeah. So uh, you know, the thing that we've seen consistent to your point is for the local side reviews for that recommendation engine. So we've always, I mean since inception I've been beating the review drum to some people who probably hate to hear it over and over again. But like how critical it is for everything we do online. Um, I mean even, even uh, this crazy industry aside, my neighborhood, a great guy, it's a little pest control company. His website was from like the early 90s, you know, and I was like, hey listen, I'll do an AI experiment. I'm going to completely build the site with AI, like get it up for you. The only thing you owe me is you need to get 200 reviews in the next three months. Um, and if you do that like it'd be a great case study. So like the reviews are it, I think for uh, to your point of like the AI is probably not going to, to ever give you the click through rate just from like being the source of information for the content. I don't think that's ever going to be the case. Like especially as it becomes more conversational. No one's going to like, you know, can you make Snyclone cocaine? Oh, and it was cited by Garden Recovery. Oh, let me get out of this conversation and go click to. I don't think it's going to happen. I think it's going to be like, okay, well where can I get help? And to your point, like here's some local recommendations. You know this has this many reviews, this is the main reviews, whatever. So I think structuring your feature set, your amenities, your differentiators and getting your reviews helps will help the LLM like match the query better. Like I want somewhere that allows you to smoke cigarettes. I want someplace that you know, does EMDR therapy right so making sure all that is presented clearly for the LLMs to understand, like your offering set I think is going to help. And then the other piece that we've seen consistently is just brand building, so more PR stuff. You know, if we can get into local news, like again some area that we were like, nice, but like whatever. Now we're like, we're pitching like every time we were doing a grand opening or we had a program like really trying to get picked up by local news or a nice, you know, local citation from, from a local authority. Um, so that's, that's it. I don't know what the strategy is.

Speaker B: I think that's it.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a great answer. We've been diving into the weeds a lot with this. A couple of things that we've noticed as well. Um, a consideration as to like how the, the LLMs are uh, uh, extracting the information from that potential endless myriad of potential customer search journey queries, you know, conversations they could be having like, like specific directories or um, pages you might not have considered. That is where they're going to look for um, like rehabilitation clinics in a particular state let's say. And that can vary state by state. And then one of the things that you mentioned, which is something I think is really important is like can you smoke at this particular clinic? Uh, does uh, I'm looking for a rehabilitation clinic that offers like an interest free loan or having an understanding of the sorts of uh, those sort of query fan out questions that people, your customers could be asking and having that information like, like demonstrably on your site so the LLMs can extract it. So are you having more conversations with your customers in order to understand that breadth and depth of those conversations?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, and you know, the conversations are actually more often than not with our admissions team because I mean they're picking up the phone and talking to people a few hundred times a day and they're getting asked these questions, right? So if someone can find it on the website, that's the first thing they're going to ask is you know, can I bring my cell phone? Uh, can my family visit me? Uh, can I bring my dog? Right. Like they're getting these questions all day. So we've been doing some pretty cool stuff with call, uh, transcription analysis, keyword spottings we can now take. We don't get too much in the weeds but like the data set that our admissions team is using in these conversations and really pick out. Okay, well what is important to our clients, our customers, what Questions are they asking? Because inevitably those are probably the same questions they're going to be asking the AI. Right. If they didn't call us. Um, and trying to tailor in the most like easy to crawl and structured way for the LLMs on our website, the answers to those questions. You know, an FAQ page page may have been like nice to have like just you know, great if someone reads it. Like now that FAQ page is critical because like we are going to one to one match what those common questions are that we think people are going to be asking those LLMs.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a uh, really great uh, strategy and that will evolve as well in through time. You need to stay on top of that I think. And uh, because customers, you know, new drugs will come out that they get addicted to. The new questions will be asked and new things that every time the LLMs, like retrain. If you can be the source of the truth for that, like, for that information. Another thing that m, uh, me and Nick noticed as well was like really good, really granular information on like the services that you're offering. And then also if you can have like personable brands associated with specific treatments. So like if you have like a rock star doctor that can do. What was the one you mentioned? EMD.

Speaker B: EMDr.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: Yeah, EMDr. Maybe you've got someone who is like renowned for being an EMDR specialist within, within the area, within the industry. Then having having that name associated with that, that service is often something the LLMs will, will pull. Not like exclusively, but they'll say if you're looking for this sort of treatment, then this is the best doctor and he works at this clinic. So I think that's another thing to consider.

Speaker A: Yeah. 100, uh, I'll speak to both of those. First, the, the, the kind of source of new information, like very, very relevant example. There's like seven oh Kratom, which is like a kind of quasi. It's not opiate, it acts like an opiate, but it's, it's legal in most areas of the United States and you can like buy it from a gas station and people are getting addicted to it and you know they're having a ton of issues. But the question is like it's a new drug, it's not really illegal, it's not a scheduled narcotic. People are asking is my insurance going to cover treatment for this? Right. Like when we go to get someone qualified for treatment through their insurance company, like there's very, very specific, you know, diagnosis. We have to Give like opiate use disorder, alcohol use disorder. Like this isn't really an opiate. Like is the insurance going to cover it? Are they going to authorize detox? Like, so we've been working with, this is one example with our billing company to say, okay, what are we seeing from the insurance industry on how they're dealing with this? Because this is like super relevant information not just for us and our patients, but for the entire industry on how to navigate this crisis. And we're going to publish an article about that and like hopefully be the source of truth of like how does insurance, health insurance work with 7 kratom addiction? The other point, you know, is this, like we've always in this space of like your money, your, your life. Like uh, the E, you know, component of what we do has always been there. So we, we've always had like pretty robust author attribution builds for most of our content. And we've done a lot of like off site even historically, like builds around that individual. So to make that less abstract, right. Is like we have an article, maybe it's about can you make some cool and cocaine? And maybe the author of that article is one of our licensed MDs or licensed clinicians who we can link to their actual state license, we can link to their WebMD profile, we can link to their psychology today and really build them as a digital authority on their own. Like, and these are like doctors who are treating patients. They don't have time to do that. So like it's our responsibility to build that, that authority for them. We've taken that like a step further in this new age and really try to. If we have like a new medical director or we have like a clinical director at a facility, starting to build a presence around that individual. Especially on the mental health side. We talk a lot about addiction, but like half of our business it's also mental health treatment. And, and what we found is people really look for people like I'm looking for a therapist or a psychiatrist, not a mental health clinic or a psychiatrist clinic. Like they want to see the person and know the person that's going to treat them. So what we've done to respond to that is rather than just doing like facility, uh, based local builds around a mental health clinic, you know, building an entire digital entity around that individual, giving them a complete like local site basically page inside of our, our facility, uh, sites that they work at, getting them their own gmb, building a citation profile for them online and then doing the content attribution. So you're really trying to let Google the LLMs everybody know that like you know Dr. John, you know he works at this program and he's you know, credible author of our content. He's also a provider there. And if someone's searching for psychiatrists who treats you know, uh, depression in Monmouth county county or Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, that's, that's a one to one match. Get Dr. John Ton of content about treating depression and he has a GMB in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey. So um, a lot of work like you can imagine. Like we have 1200 employees. Like not all of them are doctors, but like even you know, a hundred of those getting GMB set up, citation profiles built up, you know just building them as their own digital NC online is a lot of work but uh, we feel like that's another hedge against that. You know, big search loss that we've seen from that like long tail stuff is just building digital entities around our employees. Employees who treat patients.

Speaker B: Wow. I gotta know, I know we've gone past our time a bit here, but how do you, how do you create a GMB for an individual practitioner? How does that work?

Speaker A: Uh, I mean they're, they're as a psychiatrist. So okay, you know there's a psychiatrist gmb, you know, category. So you know, so each one in

Speaker B: that specific business would have their own.

Speaker A: Correct. Which is not like psychiatry. Psychiatry practices have been doing this forever. Right. So like, or doctors groups. Right. If you look at most doctors offices they'll have, have a GMB for the practice but usually you'll see like individual GMBs for the doctors or for like the providers there. So it's the same. It's not like we've invented this, it's just something that we didn't really like feel the need to do before. But we're saying like okay, well like again we got to try something like let's see if this bears fruit.

Speaker C: And um, I think that's absolutely the thing to be doing. I genuinely. That's going to pay dividends for you

Speaker B: here for AM models as well.

Speaker A: I think that'll be big. Big. Yeah, yeah. And again that was really, I mean to be honest with you, that was born really more from. To go back to like thinking about what our clients and customers want is that we offer something called mental health iop. If you don't know what that is, you're in the majority. Right? No one really understands a mental health IOP is it's a very specific way to treat anxiety, depression, other mental health disorders. It's Like a group component plus therapy, plus psychiatry, and like this very intense model. Um, but people don't really know what that is. Right. So, like, the people we treat are people with anxiety, depression, bipolar, but they don't know that service exists. So, like, part of this was like, okay, well these people are looking for therapists, they're looking for psychiatrists. So we need to like, give them a therapist, give them a psychiatrist, and then we can educate them on, hey, have you been, you know, on antidepressants for the last decade and you haven't made progress? There's actually something different you can try as well and get them to the education point. So the benefit is, is that's also a great strategy for LLM. Um, but it was really trying to meet our customers where they give them what they, they're looking for.

Speaker C: And I think in an era where like, a lot of things are just one click, like, uh, AI exists. Let's just do more content. There is a moat to this because like you said, there is an element of effort to it. You know, you have got to coordinate. You know, these doctors, they don't want to do it themselves, but there needs to be an element of, So I think there is going to be a period of time where this in of itself is still like a strategy with some moat around it because there's, there is work involved.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, um, look, AI makes mistakes all the time. Like, it loses its place. Like, AI is a great enabler. I think it, it in today's state, it, it really does enhance me. Like, I feel like I'm on the limitless pill. Sometimes it's hard for me to like, pull my weight away from the computer, like of all the things I'm doing. Um, but I, I, I think it is still true that it's limited to, to what's already in existence. Right. So, like, I think it's more philosophical, but I think that that critical thinking, that problem solving, like if you can pair that with what AI can do to supplement that, that strategy, it's huge. I guess I'm a little worried about, you know, if we take away from the population, like the ability to critical think, like, and we just have AI doing all the work where that leaves us. But, um, it'll be in rehab when that happens. You find me in AI too, to your point of who can track out on a doctor who's super busy and get him to write his bio and give you his headshot M and that'll be my favorite AI but there's still a lot of work to a lot of this stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. DJ this has been amazing having you on. I feel like you laid out the entire playbook here. Usually when we do these episodes that are SEO focused, it's just not that interesting that, you know, there's a conversation around keyword strategy and local SEO. But this was, I think, probably the most interesting one we've had on SEO. So thank you so much for coming on. It's been awesome for people who want to hunt you down, maybe clinics who want to steal you away, hire you.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, um, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Donald Prince, and, uh, I think, yeah, I should have a website, actually. I should have AI rebuild that. So I think I have, like, donaldprint.com is a. Is another one. But, um, yeah, it was really. It was a pleasure. I mean, I love talking about this stuff. There's, like, this many people in my life who understand what. What I do on a deep level. So whenever I get to talk shop, it's. It's super fun for me. So I really appreciate the invite and had a great time.

Speaker C: It's been awesome. Thank you so much, dj. Thank you.

Speaker A: Great, guys. Take care.