Beyond Clicks: Merging SEO and GEO to Dominate Recovery Searches

Relying on a single marketing channel leaves your treatment facility incredibly vulnerable. Zach Blackburn explains how the nation's premier recovery networks monopolize page one of Google by capturing four distinct layers of digital real estate.

Zach is the Director of SEO at Lever Eleven, bringing 15 years of deep expertise managing search strategy from local operations up to massive enterprise-level brands. He specializes in auditing healthcare platforms and stripping away operational tech debt to build lean, hyper-authoritative organic funnels.

* The 4x search landscape: How to occupy page one simultaneously via Sponsored PPC, Google Business Maps, Organic Results, and AI Overviews
* The trust amalgamation factor: Utilizing verified public peer reviews to erase consumer hesitation during high-stakes family medical choices
* Cross-channel digital attribution: Tracking phone inquiries and digital intakes cleanly across nested funnels while preserving absolute HIPAA compliance
* Niche targeting blueprints: How to build localized content frameworks tailored directly to your facility's hyper-specific specialized modalities
* The generalist agency trap: Why broad-market digital agencies consistently fail to convert admissions due to lack of behavioral health experience
* The compound ROI curve: Why organic indexing consistently undercuts paid cost-per-acquisition benchmarks over multi-year operational runs

The centers scaling fastest aren't arguing about which individual digital channel is best. They are running omni-channel campaigns that establish omnipresence, eliminate consumer doubt, and capture intent wherever families seek guidance.

Weekly episodes on what’s working right now in addiction recovery marketing, admissions, and center operations.

00:50 Meet Zach SEO Lead
02:18 SEO Evolution Not Dead
04:22 Why SEO Matters Now
08:01 Common SEO Audit Fails
11:25 Fixing Bloated Websites
12:57 Three Pillars Explained
14:32 Roadmap For New Sites
17:25 Agency Transparency Reporting
21:11 ROI Timelines Expectations
24:08 Avoid SEO Shortcuts
25:37 SEO Plus Paid Ads
28:10 AI GEO And Visibility
32:26 Staying Current Final Advice
33:59 Wrap Up Free Audit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm your host, Tommy Anderson. And if you're running a treatment center, leading admissions, or responsible for filling beds with the right clients, not just more leads, you're in the right place. Because here's the reality: clicks are really easy to buy, but quality patients, that's a different game entirely. On this show, we're diving into what's working right now with Google and meta-ads, how to attract high-intent prospects, and how to avoid the costly mistakes that flood your pipeline with the wrong people. We'll be talking strategy, sharing real data, and bringing in people from the front lines who are doing this every single day. So whether you're looking to scale, stabilize, or just stop wasting money on bad leads, this podcast is built for you. Let's get into it. All right, welcome back to Clicks to Recovery. I am joined today by Zach Blackburn, our director of SEO. I'm gonna make a cheesy joke here. I always say, like, this guy's so passionate about SEO. If you saw him on the beach, you'd probably see like an old English lettered tattoo like of the acronym SEO. The guy lives, sleeps, eats, breathes, SEO, and you're a busy guy. Thanks for joining us today, Zach.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yeah, thank you very much. I'm super excited about this. We're gonna get into some good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Always appreciate you taking time away from your day. I know that you're always answering. I love watching you around the office because everyone's always at your desk asking you a bunch of questions. And SEO is a huge product that we deliver on uh here at 1111. So let's just jump into it, Zach. How did you get started in SEO? How long have you been in? What sort of industries have you served? Leave nothing out.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah. So I've been in the industry for about 15 years. I've specialized uh in the very beginning with smaller businesses, and then I grew into uh enterprise level clients uh that focused on a wide variety of verticals. Throughout the years, though, I've kind of tailored my strategy towards uh realistically real rehabilitation and uh detox centers. I I think that that's really been a fantastic opportunity for me. Um, and it is something that's a really big passion for me. So the yeah, I would say those are top-level view, that's where it's.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

So you have, I mean, a lot has changed in this game. I mean, we can start from just the traction that Google's got the different platforms, and now into AI, right? Which is something that we will certainly cover. And so you've had to stay on top of all of these updates and these algorithmic changes and just the way that these platforms work. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

The Google has changed, uh, I would probably say a 900-degree turn from when I first started to where we are today, and especially with the advent of AI, AI has played a massive factor in the evolution of where SEO is going, GEO, AIO, whatever acronym you like to use.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

In in I've just being in the digital marketing space, we always hear that like, you know, search is search is dying. And and what would you say to that?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Um, a little bit of a hot take regarding that. It is not jumping right into it. Yeah, let's get the hot takes going. Yeah. It's evolved so dramatically to where if you were to compare it to where it was 10 years ago, yes, you would say that it's not the same uh process, strategy, definitions, execution. But realistically, it's just the evolution of marketing. People are getting smarter at their searches, people are understanding how algorithms and search engines are actually working. So it's just working within that framework. The way that I kind of equate it is that the bubble for SEO is just getting bigger, not that SEO is dying, because people still look for authoritative websites on the internet that Google displays, because Google is the dominant dog. So we have to make sure we're looking at where people are going. Google gets anywhere between 13 and 17 billion searches a day in their platform.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

I still say this all the time is that for big life decisions, whether it's real estate, insurance, childcare, automobile, addiction recovery, anything to do with your family's well-being, people still trust the results that Google's gonna put in front of you. You agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Absolutely. And it's even better with the advent of Google Business Profile was previously Google My Business. Um, but with that avenue, it's not just that they trust it, is that they see other people that distrusted it as well, which is that's the perfect amalgamation. I don't know about you, but every product I ever buy, I'm looking online for reviews, every service I'm ever looking for, I'm looking for reviews from actual clients. And that has played a bigger factor than it has ever done in 2026.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Before we jump in, you see people, especially marketers, they jump from industry to industry or tool to tool or product to product. What makes you still so passionate about SEO 15 years in?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Uh I I think realistically is the end goal where someone is getting help, someone is getting that level of support that they need, that product that they need. I mean, especially with rehabilitation, I it it is being a little vulnerable here, but I have personal relations that have dealt with that in the past. So it is very important to me, not only from a personal level, but from a business level, seeing people get help.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

You've been in-house, you've been freelance, you've been agency side, you've worked with small addiction recovery centers to huge ones, right? What what do you see works the best?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Uh what works best is a cohesive strategy that encompasses all of your marketing channels playing nice with each other. Good attribution, good strategy, good uh follow-through. Because every single one of your clients, no matter what channel they're gonna come through, they are going to look at your reviews, they're gonna look at your business, and all of that has to be ready and apparent right on page one of Google. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

So the most common marketing channels that are always talked about is paid ads. And I always say this, this is like it's hunting and farming, right? It's it's you can use paid ads, it's like a gun, you can go out, kill a deer, and you can eat that night, right? Whereas if you're gonna do SEO, it's not necessarily the case. It takes time for you to get traction and get an organic presence and authority on Google. Are you seeing that there's a lot of people on the sidelines still in addiction recovery center or in the addiction treatment center or in the addiction recovery space that are still on the sidelines with SEO?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Absolutely. The value of SEO is it's truly organic. So even if they may not have a cohesive strategy, just by the evolution of them being on the internet, they will inevitably be found. But are they putting money and resources and a strategy behind it? There are tons of rehab centers, recovery centers that are not actually jumping into one of the biggest channels. Uh, there was a stat that was just pulled not too long ago that 53% of users go to organic results in search engines.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

That means they they're skipping past the sponsored.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

They're skipping past it, they're skipping past AI overviews as well. Wow. So they are absolutely coming to what they know and Google has trained them for the last two decades. Trust Google Search Results Organic because we've vet them. And if you're not doing it right, you are being left behind.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Incredible. So not doing it, right? Let's let's talk about that. We've, I mean, Zach, what are you what would you say? Hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO audits that you've done, specifically in in the center space, a boatload. Right. What are you seeing as far as a downfall or what's missing in their strategies to truly rank with Google?

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Yeah, so and this one's incredibly funny. I was just doing an audit yesterday of a really big uh rehab center. And one of the biggest things that you end up finding is that they have a multitude of pages, hundreds upon hundreds, maybe even thousands, because that is what they were told 10 years ago. Pump out content, pump out content. And that's not actually true. If you follow Google's algorithm, which they've been saying this for over 15 years, before I even started in the industry, that good quality, relevant content is valuable. And what we end up seeing is that they have a bunch of content that is still on the website that is at least a decade old, that they do nothing with, but it's wasting Google's crawl budget and value. And then the reason why they call it the World Wide Web is everything's supposed to be interconnected, and there are pages that are not being interconnected. So they're just trying to like overpower it.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Just as much information, just hopefully that there's a couple pages on there that Google really likes, and the website gets. But Google's smart, right? I mean, it understands how to read it and what organization looks like and what a good authority uh you know looks like for a website. You can't just throw a bunch of information on there and hope that it sticks. So that's what, like, with that audit in particular, what's the first thing that comes to your mind when you look at it? Like, whoa, too much, like like what's the first thing that comes to your mind?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Uh, that they've had a multitude of agencies, generalist agencies, coming to them and saying, this is your fix when it's not. You should actually be curating your pages. Uh, there's a term in the industry called keyword cannibalization, where you have a multitude of pages that are targeting the same primary uh keyword. So let's use an example, let's say um uh fentanyl addiction. That's a really big one right now. So fentanyl um addiction, but you have 500 pages, I'm exaggerating there, but let's say you have 10 or 15 pages that are all directed towards the fentanyl addiction. If they are all trying to target the same concept, you're hurting yourself because Google doesn't know which one to actually rank because they're all trying to say the same thing. If you were to condense those into one page, make it a little longer, because there would probably be the little nuggets from each piece that's valuable, but you end up um saving your page count, making it easier for Google to crawl, and giving Google the best option, the best answer from your website instead of Google guessing. When you give Google the tool to guess, you are failing at marketing. You are not doing it the right way, you are not hitting it the way that you should be. And that's a targeted direct message directly to your user. And by happenstance, Google follows what the users like.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

So we'll just use this as a case study. What are you gonna do for that client? Like, what is what is the first thing that you do with a client like that? Because I have to imagine somebody out there is listening saying that's our website. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Yeah. So one of the biggest things is that we would do a full analysis of every single page, and there's a couple tools that I utilize to determine the value of your pages. So we would map all those together, determine how many pages are getting value, getting traffic, getting results. And then we would probably see, in my general experience, let's use the thousand-page website as an example, about 80% of their website is pages that Google isn't even indexing anymore. It's not in Google's index, therefore, it is not a result possibility for any particular user. Someone could naturally find it on your website, but at that point, it's it's probably really deep. So, what we would do is do the analysis, come up with a plan of curation to make sure that we can condense those content pieces. And then we would deploy that, which would take a little bit of time, especially a length of a website of a thousand pages, hypothetically. Um, you would end up curating that, bringing it down to more of your industry standards, which most rehab centers range between about 150 pages on the website to about 250 that are on page one that are ranking. That is generally the average, is around 150, 200 pages.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Okay. You you talk often about website, off-site, on-site, right? Those are the three pillars of SEO. Yeah. So break it down for this particular client, how all three of those things come into play. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

So uh the just to clarify, there are three pillars of SEO on-site, off-site, website. On-site is the things that are visible to your users, your clients, your info, your videos, your copy, the whole shebang, everything that's visual to your clients. Off-site is your backlink authority, that is your backlinks, your domain authority, kind of building out that avenue. And then the very last piece is your website, the technical side of it. So, where this would actually help is that we would curate the on-site, making it easier for users to read and Google to read. The off-site, you would be able to condense all of those links and create a 301 redirect map, which would say, hey, we're removing these five pages, and they're gonna all go to this one page that is hyper-relevant. So you're you're bringing a roadmap and kind of funneling everything into their unique pages, uh, which will make it to where your website does not have 404 pages. Those are dead pages, those are the worst kind of pages on the internet, okay? Um, and then the technical side of it, it makes your website easier to crawl and it creates a better, more cohesive experience for the user base. So that strategy, just that individual strategy, affects all three major pillars of SEO.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

So we kind of covered like those big centers, right? Maybe they've lost a little bit of control. They hired in-house, they tried SEO themselves, they hired agencies, and like everybody has a different strategy. Like, build a bunch of pages, do a bunch of blogs, give me a bunch of content, and now they're at that spot, and like that's there's one situation, but also on the other side, like we've definitely talked to a lot of centers of new websites. Maybe it's just about us, who we are, where we're located, a contact page. Like, maybe only a few pages. Are those people like, and I know they sit on the sidelines and be like, well, you know, X Recovery has, they're here, they've been around forever, I can't compete with them. Is there a roadmap for people just starting out, Zach?

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Absolutely. So the avenue of SEO is not directly related to uh a one size fits all, meaning the the top dog is always the top dog in organic because there's a multitude of terms that people use. The same way that you say addiction recovery will be vastly different than the way that I do this. So we will still be able to get in front of people that need help. So when you're dealing with a smaller market or a pardon me, a smaller website, a few of the things that we would build out is who is your target audience? Who are you trying to get into these bands? And then we would build content related to them directly that answers their direct needs. So if you're dealing with uh though there's a few rehab centers that specifically only deal with direct rehabilitation. So we would focus on the dominant um ones that are in the news and kind of in your town and your city, and we'd be building towards those avenues. So let's say that you're a brand new website, you're less than a year old, and you have 20 pages on your website. We're not looking to build 900. We do not want to be at that 900 mark. We don't want to be at that 200 mark right away. What we want to do is build that there is Google's algorithm. It's eat, it's expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So we are trying to build authority, not only within the center, but within the people that work in that center. Google wants to see authoritative users. So one of the ways in which we would do that is that we would get quotes and uh studies and maybe papers and research and whatever it is that your doctors or your uh staff is able to provide to build that authority within Google. And through that avenue, we're not yet again, we're not trying to build a lot of pages, we're trying to show Google the signal that we're the option. Okay, that we can actually resolve someone's uh crisis.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Yeah, exactly. I'm SEO. Here's what I've learned about SEO is that I I it feels like there's a sentiment in many different spaces that it can be a racket because it takes a long time to work. Trust us, stay with us for six months, a year, two years, and you guys will ring. But it's a slow moving process, right? And I always know that clients are like, what are they doing? What are they doing? So I want you to tell the audience what not necessarily you, what what should your SEO agency be doing on a day-to-day basis? How should they be reporting? I want you to draw a picture of the the life of an SEO uh agency that is what you're doing on a daily basis and how you're communicating and reporting to the client.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest uh core tenets of me is because SEO sometimes does have that stigma, is because some SEOs treat it as though it is magic. It's this mysticism behind here, and you can never see behind the curtain. Um, that is so wrong. That is so false. SEO is very programmatic, it is a very big strategy. So the things that I would always encourage anybody in any industry, especially in rehab, uh to be looking for is a cohesive strategy, looking over the next three months, six months, whatever the timeline actually is, with a monthly report that is reviewing uh what we do here is we answer four things. Uh, what we did last month, what we saw from it that was good, what we saw from it that was bad or not ideal, and then how are we adjusting our strategy? Because the way in which a good marketing strategy is done, it's not a package, meaning a one size fits all bracket. Just because you are at your end phase and someone at their beginning, you will get different tasks because of that end phase. So always look for that level of transparency and accountability. The bigger thing, staying within HIPAA, because we know HIPAA likes to be a little mysticism there, but always staying within uh HIPAA guidelines, but making sure that you're tracking true conversions and true leads through the organic channel.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

So you're talking about attribution. Is that something that's important? Is because somebody could have med ads going, YouTube ads, Google search, bing ads, maybe they're running radio, TV, uh, and then also SEO. Can you really see where, like, you know, if it's an organic lead that comes through? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

It's it not only is uh a lot of the reporting tools very good at doing this, there is some HIPAA requirements in this as well. As long as we're not transferring um uh personal information, as long as we see this is a true conversion or a true lead, that's all that matters on our end. But generally speaking, you're able to distinguish between those individual leads using a good contact form, using a good contact number that is dedicated to this vertical or pardon me, to this marketing channel, and then this one. And you're able to break it out in a way that if you know as a company where the lead is coming from, and that is absolutely what you should be doing because you should be checking every marketing channel to verify is the dollars giving me the ROI I need.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

This is still a business, right? Addiction recovery, there has to be a profit that comes from it, right? If you're not profitable, you can't keep your doors open and help people. Does SEO still present the biggest return on ad spend? Absolutely. It is still seeing that too. I mean, we have we we we we have enough data to be able to analyze it now. Are you still seeing that SEO, if you put in the time and your patience really allow your website to get traffic, that it has the biggest return on ad spend?

SPEAKER_01 21:28

Absolutely, and it's only gonna get better with the advent of AI because SEO is the big bucket, like I said. AI fits in that actual bucket, so it is still part of the mechanic channel.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

We're gonna transition to that for sure. But it takes a long time to get to that return on ads fund. So that leads me to my question. And I know I wouldn't ask you this question, right? Because I get asked this question all the time. Yeah. But I know somebody's out there saying this exact thing, and that's hard. How long is it gonna take for it to work? How are you how would you answer that? For that person out there listening right now, if you connect with them, Zach, how long is it gonna take for this to work?

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Yeah, so generally speaking, I'm gonna answer this in two parts. One of it is a brand new facility just opened up within six months. Uh, you're looking at at least 12 months, at least to start seeing the value and the results.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

And what does that mean for it to work? Like I want to make sure that's clearly defined. Sure. What does that mean? 12 months to get to what? I start getting lead flow.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Okay. Start getting people that are contacting you to fulfill the rehabilitation that they need. Does that mean no leads in the first 12 months? Uh, generally speaking, it depends on where you're at, but the first six months guaranteed, I would not anticipate. Don't expect it. Don't expect it. The reason why is because there's a lot of foundational work that is built within that time and that work compounds. So it's not turning from zero to traffic and leads at 12 months. It's a it's a curve. It builds into itself. Now, if you're already an established business that have been around one to 10 years, you're already getting good lead flow. What we would look at is your benchmark and determine where we can actually pull you up and build on that. So if you have any value at all, you're already getting leads. We just need to make sure that they're the right leads, that they're qualifying accurately, and that they're growing over time. And we know our industry has a huge seasonality up and down. Um, so we would compare it against your baseline averages. Generally speaking, though, SEO has the biggest ROI out of all marketing channels because it could go above where paid can. Paid is one of the better channels because it's immediate, it's generally fairly quick. But there's always a cap. There's always that limit, no matter how much more money you put in, unless you break into a new market, you're at that.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

And that's pretty much where you're gonna live. Okay, okay. On this topic of time, you know, we talk, hey, give it a year, give it two years to really fully get that return, like get traction with Google. But you also hear your agency say, like, hey, three, four, five, six months, and they got these secret techniques to get you to rank. What would you say to that?

SPEAKER_01 24:22

I would say that generally speaking, when you're dealing with someone promising something that is absolutely outside of their control, they're blowing smoke. And what I mean by this is that they may be able to give you a small uptick, but Google's smart enough. Google understands when you're cheating the system. And not only do they penalize your website, uh, they actually hit it really hard. Um, and it can go, I've seen study after study where a website goes up, Google notices, and it is a direct cliff dive to the I've seen it.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

I've seen it. You could see the keywords gone. Yeah, that's like one step forward, four steps back. Absolutely, because you are fighting against a penalization. And that one step forward didn't even really get you anything, right? You're looking for the nine, 10, 15 steps forward a year, two years down the road.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

And uh generally speaking, regardless of the time as an organization, you will invest in these processes, regardless if you have an agency or not helping you in-house, whatever the case is, you're gonna be building this stuff. Why not build it right?

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Moving on, multiple channels. Let's talk multiple channels. Paid ads is a is a huge channel that that centers use and and to to be able to get the clicks, get the phone calls, get the form fills. How does SEO and these paid ads channels work together?

SPEAKER_01 25:58

The way I've always explained it is that it's two siblings that play really nice with each other. Because if you are on page one, there are four potential options of you being on the search results, which there's paid ads, there's your organic listing, there's the Google uh business profile, and then AI overviews of some capacity depending on your search query. Okay, so there's four potential search results. So if you're only doing ads, that's one channel. If you're only doing SEO, that's up to three, up to, and that isn't even guaranteeing to all three. But if you have all of your marketing channels working together, you are actually building up the most real estate that you possibly could be shown, which is, and we do not need to express this: the more options, the better opportunity for you to get clicked. That is absolutely how they work.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

I mean, look, you could show up essentially four times, right? A sponsored ad under Google Business Profile, the Map Pack, and then on the organic blue listing. That's four times. You want to talk about authority? I get this question all the time. You know, and this will be a paid ad, sort of sort of like talking Google PPC, and they'll say, Well, what are your best clients doing? And I know the conversation is centered around PPC, so the answer needs to be around PPC. Well, they're really good with acquisition, or you know, like their admissions are really good at talking, and their speed delete is great. But I always say, like, look, I'll tell you exactly what their best clients are doing is they're everywhere. They have this holistic view online. They are running sponsored ads, they're running meta ads, they're on YouTube, they're they have a great SEO um uh strategy where they're showing up organically, they're showing up everywhere, right? That is what the best client is doing. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Well, without a shadow of a doubt, I'm deal with SEO specifically, but the value that each one of these services actually provide is it compounds so dramatically. And realistically, when you're dealing with people that are in immediate need situations, I don't want to make them guess what one's the best. I want them to know which ones are the best. And that is where all of those channels work together.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Cool. Let's transition into AI. And in further more episodes, we're gonna talk more about this, but I just want to kind of get the feeler out there. Here's what's interesting about some of these AI engines, right? Like Claw and Chat GPT, Copilot, is we're actually starting to see people, you know, people in addiction that are using these forums or these these engines for as a therapist, right? Yeah, okay. I feel like they're drinking too much. Yeah, how do I stop drinking every day or drinking in the morning? And and they're they're using AI as a therapist, right? And eventually that can turn into a recommendation for a center. Yeah, right. I think we're gonna see more and more traction with that. How you know, and I get in these conversations, like, yeah, but like I'm gonna show up on AI, yeah, right? And I say, like, hey, well, SEO is is is where you need to start. Talk to me about the relationship between SEO and AI, because I know so many people want to understand how can I show up when somebody says, who can help me with my addiction?

SPEAKER_01 29:16

So the biggest relationship right now that we know of AI and SEO is that AI tools are pulling from Google directly. So if you are not in Google's index and you are not doing SEO, AI will almost never work for you because you're not on the internet. And that is the value of uh the relationship between them. There is around 70 to 90 percent of the tasks that are done for SEO that are a direct relationship to AI. And those values are exponential because people are searching in different areas now and they're searching for different things. I don't know about you, but I have the newest Galaxy, the Galaxy S26. It has Gemini in my texting app. So AI is getting pervasive. It is getting to a point where we are gonna start seeing it everywhere. It is not necessarily saying that um you want only AI or only SEO. Yet again, going back to the original point of you want to be everywhere. You want to show up for everything. You want to be in AI results, you want to be in AI overview, you want to be in Gemini, you want to be in Claud, you want to be in Copilot, you want to be in Google, you want to be on the internet. And realistically, wherever these people are gonna find you, that advent starts with SEO.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

Okay. If you want to do good work, that was my next question, Zach. I want to show up on AI when somebody's looking for help and wants to know who can help. How do I do it?

SPEAKER_01 30:57

It honestly, the biggest thing I would do is work with a team and a partnership to create a strategy to build a good cohesive website because at the end of the day, that's what Google wants. And if you want to show up in the search results, that's how you do it.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

Amazing. We talk SEO and GEO, right? Yeah, break that down for us.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

So uh SEO stands for search engine optimization, GEO stands for generative engine optimization. Yet again, that kind of pie, that bucket. What is generative engine? AI. AI. That is the AI results. That is the term that has been coined for it right now. They are one and the same. They are one and the same. There are a few uh differences within how you get results, but you start with SEO regardless of those differences.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Okay. So there's SEO that we've always talked about forever, and now GEO, and I'm sure a lot of people don't even know that that's a thing, right? They talk, I need SEO, I need SEO, but you also need GEO, and both those things are together. And it's safe to say that your team looks when you look at a strategy, you're looking at SEO and GEO, not one or the other.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Absolutely, and we report on both of them. So we actually show you where you're showing up in AI results and in SEO keyword results. So we are actually building the cohesive story within our reporting. So we we don't just limit it because we believe that it is all part of the same bucket. Zach, how are you staying up to date with all this stuff? Lots of reading and uh trial and experiments uh because the AI that we know today was not the same AI that we knew six months ago. And six months from now it's gonna be different.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

Gosh. So you you probably have some people in your department that are just dedicated to the GEO or the generative engine.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Absolutely. Not only am I part of that because we have to be evolving. But the department itself, uh, we meet weekly going over every single thing that's changing in AI.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

There's probably 800 more questions I could ask you, but we are running out of time. Sure. Anything for our viewers out there listening that are looking to get into SEO, maybe there are an SEO in a shrug in. Is there a final message you have for the group out there?

SPEAKER_01 33:16

I am a strong believer in auditing the work that's already been done on your website. So if you're ever needing an audit to determine where you're at, where your placement's at, always gut check yourself. So where are you at? I would strongly recommend getting in touch with us and we could provide a free audit for you to run through the cohesive strategy that has already happened on your website.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

Yeah, and not to get too salesy, and I've been on many of these audits and you're the least salesy person. You are just extremely objective.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Right. And you speak as if, hey, here's some ideas for you that you should be doing now. Like, don't be doing this and we'll do it way better. And it's refreshing. Zach, I can't thank you enough for your time and amen. Yeah, thank you so much. Been a pleasure. Thanks for watching the Clicks to Recovery podcast. If something you heard today makes you question your current marketing, don't ignore that. Click the link below and we'll run a full marketing audit free of cost. We'll show you exactly where your leads are breaking down, where you're wasting spend, and what to fix to start bringing in the right patients.