How AI is Rewriting the Hospital Marketing Playbook

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: Oh, boy, near and dear to my heart. Many of y’all don’t know. Cardinal is largely a healthcare performance media agency. It’s about 65% of the business that we do. I started this as an SEO company, and we get to talk all about SEO as it applies to healthcare and health systems today, so I am pumped. Glenn, welcome to Ignite.

Glenn Elliott: Thanks, Alex. I’m just as pumped as you are to be here, I’ll tell you that.

Alex: Glenn, where do you work?

Glenn: I work at Hackensack Meridian Health. I’m the manager of digital applications. I’ve been with HMH for about four years, but I’ve been in the digital marketing space, I don’t know, for probably two decades, too long.

Alex: Yes, I feel that way, too. That’s why I’m aging so fast right now. You had your own agency, too. You’ve done [unintelligible 00:01:01].

Glenn: The last startup I was with, they had a buyout. As part of that buyout, I was not included in that buyout. It was like, “Okay, what am I going to do now?” I’m like, “Let me try this out.” I tried that out [unintelligible 00:01:10]. You may have heard of the global pandemic that hit Iraq in 2020.

Alex: Yes.

Glenn: That wasn’t great on a lot of consulting practices like myself. The first thing that tends to get cut in those instances are marketing budgets. Started looking for another path forward, and this turned out to be a really great opportunity. Hackensack’s been a great place to be.

Alex: Hackensack is what, for those that aren’t as familiar, how big, where is it?

Glenn: Hackensack Meridian Health is located in New Jersey. We’re the largest healthcare network in New Jersey. 18 hospitals, over 500 patient care facilities, 7,000 physicians. On top of that, about five, six years ago, we brought into creation the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, the first medical school in New Jersey in 50 years. We also run an extensive research facility called the Center for Discovery and Innovation, the CDI, that’s really focused on cancer research, infectious diseases, and regenerative medicine.

Alex: That’s awesome. Noble work. 18 hospitals is huge. You’ve got a big thing going. HMH, I’ve never heard the abbreviation, but that makes sense. By the way, you skipped over on your title. You are the manager of digital applications, SEO, and AI inclusion optimization.

Glenn: AIIO.

Alex: AIIO. All right. Dude, how long until we don’t even call ourselves SEOs anymore, we’re AIIOs?

Glenn: I think we’re getting there more rapidly than we ever could have imagined previously.

Alex: The robots have got to be laughing and like, “You Know you won’t matter soon.”

Glenn: People say that, but the process still needs to be managed. That’s the key. We’re going to have the classes of employees that utilize AI and understand it and really optimize their work processes and workflows and those that don’t. Those that do, I don’t know. What’s foreseeable these days? For the foreseeable future, there’s still a role for us.

Alex: Yes, there is. Humans are good at safeguarding our future. We will hold the robots back if necessary. Let’s talk more about it. AI is the trend and you have it in your title, which is very smart. I can tell by putting it so prominently in your title, you’re basically saying, “Let’s not hide from this.” Yes, it might be affecting SEO, but not in a bad– Tell us about that whole trend in your mind and how you’re looking at AI and search overviews. Are you scared? Are you happy? What are you thinking?

Glenn: I’m not scared. I’m actually happy and cautiously optimistic. Let’s back up a little bit and talk about the foundation, the basics. Technical SEO is still critical. Your site needs to be fast. It needs to be crawlable. It needs to be mobile-friendly, full stop. Without that, even the most brilliant content won’t get seen. I included that in things like title tags, meta description, image alt text, still things that get overlooked far too often.

Next is high-quality content is still king. We’ve been saying that forever, and I think we will be saying it forever. Search engines are increasingly prioritizing content that’s helpful, trustworthy, and aligned with user intent. It’s just not about the keywords anymore. We’ve done away with keyword stuffing a decade ago. We’ve already gone past that, but it’s about answering real questions and demonstrating real expertise. Those are the things that get you noticed.

You can check me on this because I’m not sure. I think I came up with this with this acronym, and you know, as marketers, we love a good acronym. We get to come up with something clever, creative juices flow, but I’m calling it the ready framework. Ready for it? Okay, READY. Relevance. You’ve got to focus on what users are really asking for, not what you want to tell them. E, engagement. Craft content that keeps them moving forward in the funnel to that conversion that you’re looking for.

A, accessibility. You’ve got to make sure everyone can use and understand your content. D, discoverability. Use SEO best practices that get found in traditional and non-traditional channels. Why? This is the weakest one, but I had to make it work somehow. You’re going to have to bear with me a little bit. It’s specific to healthcare. It’s Y, your, Y, patient’s next step. You’re always guiding the user towards a meaningful action, submitting that form or making that appointment.

Alex: I love it. It couldn’t be read. It had to be READY, right?

Glenn: Thank you. Yes.

Alex: I think it’s perfectly tailored to healthcare. I like it because that’s how SEO is changing. It’s about getting the patient to commit and take an action. SEOs need to be marketers, not keyword stuffers and just technical people anymore. That’s what you’re saying with READY, right?

Glenn: That’s what I’m saying, yes. That’s the foundations. You’ve got to be there to really then start taking advantage of AI. Using that foundation, that’s more important than ever. That’s for traditional SEO or for AIIO. You got to start there. Tools like Google Search Generative Experience, Zero-Click Environments, they’re changing the game. People are getting the results on the search engine result page without even clicking through your site. If you don’t adapt, if we don’t adapt as marketers, you’re going to miss out on visibility.

The good news is that there’s also real opportunity. AI is rewarding clear, authoritative, well-structured content, and it’s pushing us all to be better marketers. If we refine how we present our services, our providers, our locations, we’re going to win. We’re already seeing this in results. This is not something we just started this year. We’ve been tracking this for a while.

AI traffic and specifically LLMs I’m going to talk about right now, ChatGPT, Perplexity, what have you, Gemini, we can see this as a source in GA. You all can. You can all see this as a source in GA. It’s our smallest channel, for sure. There’s no doubt about it, compared to organic, direct, referral paid, what have you. It grew eight times in 2024 and we’re seeing even greater results in 2024.

Alex: All GA is tracking is clicks through. It doesn’t mean that they’re not seeing the content and getting an answer and getting an HMH.

Glenn: You’re right. You’re right. Because that’s what I’m seeing in GA. That’s what I’m seeing in GA. Great potential as LLMs become more mainstream. What I can also track, and I’m going to give a shoutout to Semrush. Semrush is now allowing me to see feature snippets. Our content is being featured in feature snippets, knowledge panels, AI overviews, local packs. I just enabled their toolkit. More to come on that. I don’t know what that offers yet. I haven’t scratched the surface yet, but that should be pretty cool as well. GA, we can see our LLM traffic. Now in Semrush, we can see the other types of results that we’re getting across the AI landscape.

Alex: Glenn, you got me thinking. Can I ask you a question?

Glenn: Yes.

Alex: Teach me something. What is the number one KPI when you’re looking at organic results these days? It used to be organic leads, right? You couldn’t see non-brand versus brand. Google got rid of, obviously, keywords 10, 12 years ago. It used to be organic leads, but now should it also include direct and referral? Because anybody that’s just seeing the HMH brand and an LLM that goes and types in Hackensack’s cardio group and goes to that service line and commits a lead, and that is direct or referral. Should we be looking at the number one KPI differently? It’s not just Google organic leads anymore?

Glenn: Leads is a tough one for us, too, as a healthcare organization. I’m going to be honest with you. That’s more of our paid search side. They’re looking more on things like that.

Alex: What are you looking at?

Glenn: I’m still looking at impressions. That still matters. I know people are saying across the board, impressions are down. We’re not seeing that, which is interesting. We’ve also been really focused on enhancing our content for AI, like I said, for almost a year now. Impressions are still important. I’m tracking the other AI results featured in AI overviews, teaching and knowledge panels. Our ultimate KPI truly is appointments booked, how we got there. You’re right. We need to be looking at all the different sources, but ultimately where it’s coming down on the funnel to appointments.

Alex: All right, that helps. Not just from Google organic anymore. That just got me thinking, clients can’t look at that anymore because people are finding the information in different ways and then going and typing in brand and finding them direct, and it’ll go into direct. Anyways, question. When you say you’re optimizing your content for overviews and all that, tell us what you’re doing. What did you prioritize? Location? Is it service line page, provider pages? What are you tactically doing to optimize for this new world?

Glenn: My two top priorities for 2025 were two things. Optimizing for local search. That’s also improving our position profiles, not only in our own listings but in Google business profiles, specifically for AI search. What does that mean? We’re enhancing with AI in mind. AI pulls from multiple sources, Google business profiles, third-party listings, and all other structure content. We need to make sure that our content is structured in a way that the bots can best crawl them. That means breaking down complex information.

When you’re working with the positions, when you’re working with the content team, sometimes they really get down to the weeds in their specific specialties and really get focused. Not in the way users are searching for information, but the way they would search for information, which is totally opposed to the way normal human beings do this. We need to break it down to clear, scantle content using schema markup.

Really important, what I’m really starting to pilot is incorporating FAQs into not only position profiles, but into location pages, and also into service pages, because AI seems to be prioritizing FAQs as a content source, because it breaks it down. It can easily use your FAQ to answer a user’s query, question.

Alex: I’ve seen them on service pages all the time. We advise for that, like, do you provide this? I hadn’t thought of it for location pages and provider, and you’re making it specific to the provider, like, does Dr. Smith actually provide ablations in the cardiology service?

Glenn: Exactly.

Alex: That kind of stuff. Smart.

Glenn: That’s what we’re doing.

Alex: Yes, Glenn. Good. Technical advice.

Glenn: We’re piloting it. When I say piloting, I started this about a month ago. I’ve started meeting with physicians. Frankly, I’m taking their current physician profile. I’m running it through AI. I’m like, “Optimize this for AI search, generate a user-friendly intro, and not only for your profile but for a Google business profile, long listing, short-listing, and generate FAQs for their profile,” which we manage their profile. Currently, we use the high-risk for find a doc. We can put a section right in there for FAQs.

Now, it’s a little trickier in their Google business profile, but I’m doing that in two ways. You can seed the Q&A section that that’s all available, or you can do a featured post and create a little short form that’s going to be really prominent for about seven days, but really be up there for another six months. You’ve got to be a little more judicious about doing that because you can’t overwhelm users and also the algorithms with that information. I don’t have the results yet. We just started meeting with a select group of physicians that we know will be engaged and want to actively work on their profiles to do this.

Alex: I love it. Guys, listeners, AI inclusion optimization. This is what it’s all about. He’s going to AI and saying, “Optimize for yourself, Robot.” [laughs]

Alex: No, we’re truly doing that. Then I’ve got a good prompt library, and it keeps getting better with every iteration because I think of this, because then I meet with a physician and say, “Okay, here’s what I came up with. What do you think of this?” Put it in a Google Doc so they can edit it and then they give it back to me and then I’ll feed it back into my LLM and say, “Okay, this is this is the information I asked for. Use this.” Essentially, through the prompt, but, “Use this for the next one I’m asking for.”

Alex: I love it. Brilliant. Guys, Glenn is, I’m not going to use a buzzword, leaning in. Glenn is leaning into the chain.

Glenn: I’m leaning in, man.

Alex: There’s no going back, guys. We can hide from and try to protect our jobs or we can be the humans that use the robots and keep our jobs, at least for the next couple of years. Because the ones that don’t, that’s the first to go. You said Google business profile. That’s one of your top two priorities. What are we doing differently, new? What are we doing on the GBP listings?

Glenn: It’s funny because we have different qualities of profiles out there. You’ve got your descriptions and you want to optimize those. I’m tackling these many times for the first time since– Okay, back up a little bit further than that. We’re using Reputation.com to help us manage our profile. We’re not doing all this stuff. We could provide them. We give them a CSV file. They upload any of the bulk changes we make.

For this pilot, I’m really doing a lot of hand-holding. Me and my team, we’re doing these updates ourselves because we can access those as well. What we’re doing is we’re updating their long description, their short description, and we’re making it user-friendly. Just like we’re structuring their profile on our website, we’re structuring it in a way that’s easy for the bots to crawl, to understand, and to deliver responses to questions and short little sentences or a couple of things.

We’re updating that. We’re seeding FAQs into the profiles as well. We’re creating the Google post that I talked about also. This seems really basic, but we’re making sure their hours are accurate, their name, their address.

Alex: Locations they work at.

Glenn: Yes. We’re trying to get images because Google rewards images, again, because searchers like to know, “Where am I going? Where can I see that?” If it’s a position, I didn’t urge it, but let’s say, make sure that, again, those hours are available so people know, if they’re searching at eight o’clock at night, “I can get care now, not in the morning when someone shows up.” Those are the key things we’re focused on.

Again, no one’s touched these profiles in this way ever, so it’s going to make a big change. Oh, and the one other thing, the one other obvious thing, and this is a challenge on several levels is reviews. Google really does reward reviews and positive reviews.

Alex: I think so.

Glenn: The problem is, first off, physicians are really reticent to a patient for review for obvious reasons, and we are not doing it as an organization. We have not been, as an organization, doing a great job of asking them to leave the Google review. Now, we asked them to leave other reviews that show up on their profiles. We have physicians with one, two reviews, and that can be okay if it’s a five-star review, but it takes one-star review to really throw off your entire rating if someone’s unhappy with the billing process, so to speak.

We need to really account for that and we need to develop ways. We’re working on some things internally where we’re working with a reputation management or partner reputation, as I said, to really try to enhance that ecosystem, the Google review ecosystem so they’re not just getting reviews in other places, but also in Google as well.

Alex: I love it. I love it. I love it. The reviews matter. I think Google does– they said they’re looking at social media now, including review sites, and they want to see fresh content. I have always thought that they’ve never claimed it, but I know they were– I couldn’t tell, like we get more visibility for clients or reviews, like their rankings go up. Reputation does listings, I guess. Same as the Yext. [crosstalk]

Glenn: Exactly. There’s several players in the marketplace.

Alex: Got it. Got it. Got it. You do listings, not just for locations. You do also for the providers and all that. You’re getting all the providers. You’re doing a bulk upload. You said they haven’t been touched before because no one claimed the provider listings wherever they came from or–

Glenn: People had claimed provider listings more so than location listings, but they’re claimed and no one’s touching them. It’s getting uploaded. Dr. Jones is a cardiologist. That’s it sometimes. There’s not more than that. When I decided looking forward around July of last year, I really need to focus more on location, a local search, and critical to that is claiming our Google profiles for locations. We hadn’t done that. We had claimed maybe about 100.

Like I said, in the intro, we have over 500 locations. A priority of mine was, well, first off, getting the budget. We were lucky to have a leadership culture here that really support new initiatives, new ideas, and like, “Yes, we get it, Glenn. Go ahead. Spend the career, claim the new listings,” because every listing has an expense associated with it. I claimed them all. We did a mass upload with basic information, pull from our CRM, pulled it to a spreadsheet, and we uploaded it all just to create it.

Now it’s going through and trying to optimize all this, optimize the locations. The aha moment was– we’re around the first of the year when I’m thinking again, “What am I going to do this year?” Really focused on thriving AIIO, and we really got to work on these decision profiles. Another team member really manages the position listings. I partnered with her and said, “Listen, I really want to experiment with this.” She’s like, “Yes, go for it, go have at it.”

Alex: Awesome.

Glenn: Really became focused on how do we improve their position listings as well in conjunction with the location listings. Again, it all works together, it really does that, to drive relevance and drive expertise and drive trustworthiness to the network.

Alex: Yes. You heard what Glenn said, guys. You have to have leadership buy-in that believes in marketing experimentation. That marketing can drive more patients to care, that it’s not just an afterthought. Please, guys, when you’re interviewing for jobs, please make sure your leadership cares about marketing. You’re going to get nowhere fast. You’re not going to get buy-in to test. You’re going to be frustrated and complain about it for the next two years. Hackensack believes in marketing and that’s cool.

We’ve talked a lot about SEO and AI inclusion optimization and focusing on the right things and local search and GBP and all that fun stuff. You also are a believer that team structure matters. Why?

Glenn: The best digital work I’ve seen in healthcare comes from cross-functional teams. They respect each other’s expertise. We’re a large network. My tower is the digital engagement team. I’m in digital engagement under Pam Landis, great leader, Adrienne Woods, great leader, but our purview is really focused on web and web properties. I’ve never touched the web. We have a marketing team. We have marketers. We have clinical, obviously the physicians. We have content team.

When we’re all aligned around the patient needs, you get better content, you get better performance, and ultimately, there’s better access to care, which is ultimately what we’re doing here. That’s critical. It’s really having your teams aligned. If they’re not aligned, especially in an organization as large as ours, it really becomes problematic. You just get pages that are updated in a timely manner, location information that’s wrong. It’s just critical to get everyone rolling in the same direction.

Alex: What are you saying, that we can’t do our jobs as SEOs if the actual business operations doesn’t tell us what’s going on?

Glenn: Yes. It’s obvious, but we know how it goes. We’re not perfect. We are not perfect. I’ll say it again. We have a culture that really understands that we need to all get on the same page.

Alex: I love it. Glenn, this has been awesome. I imagine you are going to have a lot of people reaching out to you specifically.

Glenn: I hope so.

Alex: You are ahead of the curve on all things AI with SEO. You taught me a few things with FAQs, on doing them on providers and location pages. I had not thought of that. I’m going to pass that along to the team. They may be doing it, but I hadn’t thought of that. That’s very cool, focusing on GBP provider listings. We have a lot of low-acuity clients. I can see for the high-acuity clients, high-acuity providers, it makes a lot of sense to be optimizing the heck out of those. Guys, it’s not rocket science. It’s robot science. You heard, you got to stay ready. Glenn, thank you for joining us on Ignite.

Glenn: Let me leave you with one thing. Let me leave the audience with one thing. Don’t wait till you have it all figured out because you’re never going to have it all figured out.

Alex: No.

Glenn: Start small. Start with one position, one location, one service line. Start optimizing for where search is headed, not where you’re at. One other thing, AI search is in the future. It’s already here. The organization that, I’m going to use that buzzword again, that lean into it, stay flexible, and experiment, they’re going to lead and they’re going to win.

Alex: Guys, you heard it from Glenn. You don’t need fancy tools and fancy structure and all that stuff. Just optimize one location, one provider. Try some little things here and there, go into a GPP, make some optimization., make some FAQ changes, put some schema. You heard it from Glenn. Thank you so much.

Glenn: You’re welcome.

Alex: Little by little, it’s already here, get moving, don’t be scared. We all don’t know what we are doing, so you can’t be worse than us. “Don’t let the secret out, Alex.” We never have known what we are doing. That’s the beauty of SEO. It’s also why I like gardening because I plant all these flowers and then some of it– See, SEO is like gardening because you plant and then you have to wait and see if the Google gods like it, if the gardening gods end up liking, the sun and the water ratios, and you wait a few months, and then you find out if what you did–

It’s so rewarding to watch it happen, but guys, it takes time and lots of iteration. 90% of the time we get something wrong in something that we are doing, so don’t be scared. Go optimize, go iterate, go learn this stuff. It is a whole new world. I am with Glenn. The humans are still going to be very much necessary, at least for a couple of years, the ones that know how to use the robots. Then after that, who knows? Universal income’s coming for us. Glenn, thank you for joining us, buddy.

Glenn: Thanks, Alex.

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