Building a Trusted Healthcare Brand in the Age of AI Search

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Alex Membrillo: We’re going to have fun today, guys, because we’ve got Mr. Dane Titsworth with us. The talk of the town, all these conferences we’ve been to lately, I’ve been asking prospects, leads, and friends at these conferences, what’s top of mind going into next year. In years past, it’s been measuring attribution, it’s been setting up the right media mix, it’s been HIPAA compliance. This year is all about AIO, GEO, ASM, AEO, GEO, SEO, WTF. It’s all about the LLMs and getting the recommendations. We’ve got Mr. Dane here. Dane, what’s up?

Dane Titsworth: What’s going on, man? Good to talk to you, brother.

Alex: Dane, tell them where you live. Where do you work? What do you do there?

Dane: Yes, man. I reside in Nashville, Tennessee, if you can’t tell from the accent, born and raised here. I work for Ardent Health. We work with about six states that have hospitals in them of ours, hospitals, clinics, urgent cares, you name it, health system that touches all different points. Been here for a little over three years now. It’s been fun so far. They’ve given me the freedom and opportunity to expand my SEO knowledge and bring what I’ve already learned onto the team, and then just run with all the future stuff that’s going on.

Alex: Yes, and it’s fun. SEO’s back, baby. We’re important again. I love it. We’ve been telling everybody for 16 years we’re important. Now they’re finally realizing, oh, media’s not as cool as it– Okay, cool.

Dane: People are still out there saying the SEO is dead. They’re just like, let’s get some buzz topics out there so we can try to sell you something that’s a little bit easier.

Alex: Yes, dude. That’s exactly right. Media’s more confiable, always has been, but all of us in SEO, we love it because it’s an enigma. We never know if what we do today will do anything in six months. That’s why I think we love it. It’s also why I garden, because you never know if the strawberry little thing seed is going to make strawberry. I just planted strawberries, blackberries, and a kiwi yesterday. Just like SEO, we’ll see if it worked and if I got the recommendation in six months.

Dane, before you fully hopped on and we started this thing, we talked about what we’d call it. I said, “Dane, what do you call this new– Is it AIO, AEO?” Dane said, “I call it SEO.” I love it. That’s just what it is, guys. We’re just trying to rank and get a recommendation on something different now. What’s going on? We’ve heard from studies, patients don’t want marketing. How does that make you feel in this whole new world?

Dane: Health care decisions are important. They’re personable. Don’t push something in front of me that you think I should see this doctor for. They want to make their own informed decisions. That’s very true in a psychological factor of the searcher, but they don’t know what to look for. They’re not sure exactly what the accuracy is, what they’re finding.

Our goal is to really try to make sure that healthcare marketing is something that’s easy to understand, easily accessible. How to get that authoritative, that trustworthiness to somebody in front of it digitally, instead of just somebody talking to somebody. It’s really important to debunk that myth of patients don’t want marketing.

Truthfully, they need to know something that they don’t understand because health care is crazy. Somebody may think they get on WebMD, get on Google, or something, type something in. They’re like, “Oh, yes, I got this. That’s what I got. I need to go see this doctor.” Maybe you’re right. Marketing to them is very important because it’s like we are trying to make sure that the people get the right care that they need, educate them the right way.

Alex: What you’re telling me is marketing, when done right, is education. It’s getting through the latest trend. I actually really resonate with what you just said because I took my kiddo to the emergency room a few weeks ago; broke his finger off-roading, racing side by side. He’s sick. That’s a story for another day. He runs a fever that night when we’re in bed. I’m like, “This means it’s infected.” Then Google and LLMs all said, “Yes, it’s infected. He’s going to die.”

We go to the emergency room, and the doctor’s like, “No, dude, it’s not infected. Kids, this happens all the time. It’s just a response to inflammation.” I’m like, “Yes, Google. ChatGPT.” Dane, how do you approach getting the right content out there? You’re ranking the LLMs, but the UX is good and educational on the website. Do you even care about the upper funnel traffic anymore? Give us the whole how you’re thinking about AI for Ardent scenario.

Dane: It all stems down to what your content has on your website. I like to tell people now is that you think of code as the backend for a website. Before long, AI overviews are going to be the zero-click search. Our websites will be the backend to AI overviews. It’s not as much as human-readable needs to be as important on websites. Still is, but not as much as, hey, what does AI and Google need to see as they read?

Our goal is to make sure, one, we get with all of our markets, our hospitals and locations and say, “Hey, are these services pages accurate? Tell us all the information that the doctors there provide. What is everything there that we can make sure that if we put in front of a user and they click on this page or they see this in the AI overview results, is it going to be accurate and it’s going to get them to the right thing?”

Our goal is to make sure that, one, we get a basic SEO. That’s why I stay to SEO and don’t really go away to AIO, AEO. Yes, that’s going to be intertwined with what we’re going to do in the future, but SEO is still making sure you have solid, accurate content that is going to be needed for one, the user to see, but two, for the LLMs to start picking up and understand that yes, you do perform this procedure here or do that because as we know, AI is evolving and it’s smart. You can’t fool it.

That’s one thing I tell a lot of people in SEO. I like that AI is finally here because a lot of SEOers, they do one or two or three things right and it makes them look good, but they don’t do the whole package. They don’t do everything to connect. Now you can’t fool AI with that anymore. You need to have everything accurate, everything right because if it goes and finds two or three pieces of content, or something digitally that doesn’t match with what you’re trying to say on your websites or wherever you’re driving the patient, then AI is ultimately going to penalize you for it. Your competitors can get ahead of you, and it’s just not accurate.

Being accurate all across your service pages and wherever you’re feeding the LLMs needs to be the number one thing because, ultimately, the brand is going to take– It used to be domain authority, if you went to SEM, or I should say domain authority. Now, if anybody looks on there, it says AI visibility. Everything’s changing up big time to a point where it’s great to have authority and you can manipulate authority. Used to, back in the day with SEO and different ways of backlinks.

Now, it’s AI is not going to let that fly anymore. Manipulation is far out there. It’s not, can I do two or three things right and then show this to a client, show this to a patient, hope that they come to my link. It’s now, hey, I better make sure that everything is accurate in the world of AI and get that to where they want to trust it and show it to the LLMs and show it ultimately into that AI overview that a patient’s going to get to, or user, a unique patient, somebody new that’s trying to find services, we’re going to find. That’s what we’re trying to feed into our LLMs and AI overviews because they’re going to expand.

Saw a webinar not too long ago that said don’t even try to put healthcare ads in AI reviews. It’s going to be impossible. Healthcare finance and some other couple of things, don’t try to do that because we’re not going to let you manipulate or tell people that this is the best doctor, this is the best service in this area. We’re going to make sure that you have your SEO right, your content set up right, your doctor’s physician profiles, your location pages. Everything needs to match, your GMV pages, the reviews. All that’s coming together to where AI is going to understand all of this thing and can connect it a lot better than Google ever really just could by itself.

Being accurate and having all that stuff connect the right way is the way to go, in my opinion, right now. Of course, that could change next week because everything’s evolving crazy at a crazy rate with AI. That’s the best way for us to get the accuracy here at Ardent. What we’re trying to do is just make sure that we touch bases with all our markets, boots on the ground, people like, hey, what do you all see here? What’s going on here? Help us be accurate.

Then we go through QA everything, make sure our sites are up to par. Now, let’s start to expand. We have that great base built across all of our hospitals, all of our places. Let’s start to expand on that and just trying to get accuracy as far out as we can go.

Alex: You’re absolutely right. To recap a little bit, what I heard there was a few different things. One, I’m with you that the AIO stuff is good because you can’t game the system anymore through on-site content and spammy links. You actually have to be a good brand because it’s going to look for press mentions. It’s also going to look for reviews. It’s going to look to make sure it all can correlate. It’s GMB, the whole thing. Dane is right. The whole picture has to match.

Guys, they’re a big health system with one brand. It is a lot harder to change the perception of that brand and the LLMs. It has to be a good brand, and people have to say really nice things about Ardent for a long time. If you’re an MSO or a house of brands, MSO or DSO, you’re a local dentist, and whatever area, 1PR or high school mentioned, can be the difference in getting ranked in the LLM in your local area. If not, it is possible if you’re more multi, but Ardent has one brand.

Dane, going to something you said, I think, which is the most important part, you’re going boots on the ground to get the content that makes sense from the providers themselves. How often are you doing that? Are you doing it across all service lines? Just priority? Is it you doing it? Is it a liaison? Tell them actually how to go do this because I think that is the best way to get the most relevant content. It tells you what Ardent is best at and your take on it, because not everyone treats ablations the same way or cardiology patients. Tell them how you do it.

Dane: How would it sound if I just said, “Oh, yes, you have a cardiology over here. Let me just build your page out,” without actually knowing? Really, communication across the markets. They know what’s going on. I’ve never been to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and seen their stuff. I’ve never been to Texas and seen their stuff. Never got close to Idaho and seen anything out there. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t even know what localization they use.

I worked on a hospital a long time ago that was in Vegas. I was like, “Oh, we should just say cardiologists in Las Vegas.” They’re like, “No. They should be cardiologists on the strill.” I’m like, “Wow.” They’re like, that’s the localization. That’s the words that they talk about.

How do I know that stuff? I don’t. I only know Nashville. I know Nashville based. One of the biggest things is to really find out, okay, you are at the market. You run these services. You are a service line lead here. You talk to these doctors. You understand what’s happening. Why not for me to go get the best info possible for us to turn that content into? Because one, we get their accuracy that we need. Two, that doesn’t mean that we need to take their info, and that’s the content.

No. We have the info that makes the content that we can then create evergreen stuff if we need to, or we can spruce it up with a keyword. Everything that we need to do from an SEO side, we have more confidence in that. We have more confidence in saying, yes, this is how we’re going to build this page out. Yes, because they offer this. Yes, because they do treat heart ablation like this. They do have a tab or procedure. Oh, they are recognized as the top brand in this place.

It’s things that we don’t know, things that we could find out, but if we hear it from people here that every day are creating brochures, seeing things in newspapers that maybe one day we’ll have AI, be able to have an agent to keep up with all of that stuff, but for right now, it’s boots on the ground. The people in the markets really do help. It makes sense for any industry. Healthcare is one, but if you’re helping multiple sites around different parts of an area that you’re not familiar with, how are you going to be confident in what kind of content you’re creating?

Healthcare is like, we just went back to, the accuracy of the healthcare content is huge because the last thing we want is for somebody to start calling and say, “Hey, you do 3D mammography here?” “Oh, yes.” They start booking appointments and doing that, and they get there, and it’s like, “Oh, no, we don’t do that anymore. We only moved that location. We quit doing that.” If we don’t have that accuracy kept up from the markets that we reach out to and get, then it’s going to hurt our reputation.

Like you just said earlier, it’s great to have service pages rank and all that stuff, but now it’s the brand. AI is making it the brand. If your brand is not top tier or getting mentioned or really showing that, that trickle-down effect of your brand is going to touch everything that you do, and without that, you’re really now–

Alex: You mentioned SEM Rush. Is that where you’re looking to see if you’re getting the recommendation in the LMs? What tool are you using?

Dane: I’ve had SEM Rush for a long time since I’ve been here, just because that was my main bread and butter. They’ve done a great job of restructuring the way things look, but that’s still a goal of ours. It’s trying to figure out the best way to find it. I get hit up left and right every day of, hey, check out our tool. Check out this. We’re doing this, when in reality, it’s just people have gotten ahead and built an agent or a tool off a ChatGPT or a cloud or some type of AI platform that just nobody has gotten to yet.

Eventually, a big box company is going to come through, a Microsoft. Somebody big is going to come through and be like, “Hey, we’ve created this now. Everybody uses it.” That’s the fun part of it, because it’s evolving. If anybody says they have a clear path on anything in AI, it’s like, just quit trying to sell. SEO has always had the snake oil salesman thing to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. You can tell they use buzzwords. You can tell all this extra stuff. Don’t tell me you have a clear path on something in AI, because that’s a total lie, because tomorrow, an article could come out, and it could just debunk whatever you just said.

Alex: That was 16 years ago when I started this company. As an SEO company, I remember guaranteed rankings. It’s like the same, saying the same. Guaranteed rank.

Dane: Guaranteed number one page rank in this automatically, or your money pack. It’s like, no, you’re going to get somebody’s money, and then you might get it back if they do it. It’s probably going to get somebody a free sample or something, and you just hope. You say, returns are free. We’ll give your money back. People aren’t going to take time to return it. Same way if somebody tries a thing out, they’re not going to say, “Oh, give me my money back.” They’re just going, “Okay, that’s failed. Keep our money.”

Alex: Yes, that’s absolutely true. I know you’re a big believer in all future things AI, and we were talking earlier, you mentioned AI agents. I think it’s going to be an AI agent. We’ll each have one that goes and books an appointment for you. Our websites are nowhere near ready, but that’ll be interesting when mama just says my kid is sick, or he knows you might be sick from the watch or whatever, and then it’s like going and booking an appointment for you and recommending. It’s cool. Anyways, I know you’re into that kind of stuff.

You also mentioned that you think that there’s going to be dedicated roles for HIPAA-level privacy and security with all of this kind of stuff. You see that happening. You see within Ardent in the future, you’re going to have someone dedicated or multiple people dedicated to, it’s just going to be AI marketing compliance, and then they’re better [crosstalk]–

Dane: Yes, that’s the toughest part. Anybody in healthcare has to take an extreme amount of time to really figure out how they want to let their data into the AI world. I’ve built a couple of agents myself, but I’m not a developer. I understand dev work and all that. I don’t want to be a developer. I don’t want to have to do all that. I like being an SEO marketer kind of guy.

I truly believe that the dev side of the things are tasked with the hardest part right now of figuring out what it looks like to truly take enterprise data and make it, like you said, HIPAA-compliant privacy. It’s not getting leaked out to places that you’re going to get $10 million for down the road, opposed to our side of things on marketing. I’m staying away from agents now because I spent so much time building some. I was like, this is cool, but, dude, it took me so long to do this, and I think it’s going to change so much.

I just need to become a prompt engineer master and expert because, in my vision, I think everybody eventually is going to have to be a prompt engineer or expert. You’re going to be an expert. You’re going to know what you do. You’re going to have your expertise, and then you’re going to train and teach the LLMs and the AIs what you want to do with your prompt engineering. You’re going to QA them, and then you’re going to refine them.

Alex: I agree. I agree. I have some of my best media and analytics people building agents for the last couple of months, and I’m like, “Is this a wise use of our time, or should we just wait for a development company to build these agents for agencies? What are we doing spending so much time?”

Dane: It’s going to be tough for somebody to trust in healthcare to trust that somebody to build it. I believe agents will be built internally. They’ll be their own sandbox that they’ll have, just like web dev was in the past with websites. It’s just going to be a different type of sandbox they’re playing in. I do not think that I wouldn’t, for any healthcare system, reach out to a third-party vendor to trust data with, besides maybe an Epic or somebody crazy big who has it. Somebody says, “Oh, yes, we know how to do your data now and get this to like–“

Alex: “No, just upload that little PII thing. Don’t worry about it. Just put a direct connection in here.”

Dane: That’s scary to think about.

Alex: I’ve only got Dane for a few minutes more. Dane, tell me something. This is a new question we’ve come up with. Tell us something you wish you knew earlier about the gig.

Dane: It’s really just how important it is to have everything connected. When I first started out, it was mainly- and this was 15 years ago, it was mainly page structure, URL structure, more on-page development stuff. A little bit technical at first, but then throughout these years, it’s like, no, dude, it’s going back to what I said earlier. You can’t just be good at one or two or three things in SEO and expect to have success all around.

You have to know that everything connects in different ways. Getting big into backlink, getting big into killer content structure, outreach on how you can get things better for people to get that authority into it. All this extra stuff that I wish I would have just focused on all of it because I was truly, when I very first started, I was like, “Oh, this is what we need because that’s how SEO was.”

In the first two or three years, I didn’t expand. Then when one of my first jobs that was a large healthcare company that I was able to get into, I was one of the first SEO people on their team, and it allowed me to learn like, “Oh, I need to create a 20-page taxonomy. I need to create this to connect to this. I need to start doing this, and this.” I found out like, whoa, this all connects in a totally different way.

No, it’s not like that for every industry. Healthcare, for sure, though. Healthcare, you have to have everything connecting because you have locations, you have doctors, you have services, you have urgent care, you got clinic. Everything has to connect in a way. I wish I thought about that earlier on. I’m not mad it only took me two or three years because I still know people today that still do the basics. See how far you get on that, especially like we talked about with AI coming out. It’s going to be tough for them to achieve that. Yes, I wish I had expanded a little bit quicker.

Alex: Well-rounded. Yes, it’s not just about driving the lead or doing the SEO thing. It’s about making sure there’s appointment availability, that the call center doesn’t suck, that the facility is nice, clean, and that we’re showcasing in the right way. The whole thing matters, even outside of marketing. Good luck to new marketers.

Dane in Smashville, thank you for joining us on Ignite. I love talking all things SEO AI, or whatever we’re calling it these days. It’s fun. When we talk to people that are smart like you, it’s a nice reminder to just get back to basics. Have the right content at the right time. Have a nice business with nice reviews and nice press mentions and all that stuff to make sure it’s all cohesive and saying the same stuff. You’ll not only get ranked in the Google, but you’ll also get the recommendations on the LLMs. Worry less about the technology you want to rank in. Worry more about running an educational foundational healthcare organization. Thank you, Mr. Dane.

Dane: Thank you, Alex, for having me on. It was great, man.

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