Episode   |  145

Mastering Healthcare Reputation Management with rater8 and OrthoArizona

In this must-listen episode of Ignite, Evan Steele, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of rater8 and Torin Dinh, Growth & Strategy Manager of OrthoArizona, join Cardinal’s CEO, Alex Membrillo to dive into the power of review management and online reputation in shaping patient acquisition and provider recruitment. Learn how evolving consumer expectations, local search trends, and digital-first experiences are redefining healthcare marketing in 2025. Discover key pitfalls to avoid, strategies for balancing digital and traditional marketing, and why a strong reputation is your ultimate competitive advantage.

Episode Highlights:

Torin Dinh: We’ve all seen the landscape of medicine and healthcare change drastically over the last decade. Growing up, you’d ask a friend, family, coworker what doctor they would see, or you ask your primary care doctor who you should see. Then that was it. Nowadays the internet is at our fingertips. Anyone can go on Google and try to find a doctor near them.

Not only that, but people can see the reviews that providers are getting or not getting… A lot of it is just about transparency, digital convenience, personalized care. You can learn so much about a practice and physician before even stepping through their door.”

Episode Overview

On this episode of Ignite,  Alex Membrillo is joined by Evan Steele, CEO of rater8, and Torin Dinh, Growth & Strategy Manager of OrthoArizona, to break down the new era of patient decision-making.

Gone are the days when a simple referral from a friend or PCP was enough—today’s patients are researching providers online before ever stepping foot in an office. With Google, Healthgrades, and AI-driven search results influencing choices, a strong online reputation is no longer optional—it’s mission-critical for healthcare practices.

Torin shares how OrthoArizona made review management a core focus, ensuring their providers and locations stand out in local searches. Evan dives into the psychology of patient trust, revealing why a 3.8-star rating with 15 reviews won’t cut it—but a 4.9 with 100+ reviews can drive real patient volume.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Why bad reviews often stem from front-office issues, not clinical care
  • How rater8 helps practices proactively build a stellar online presence
  • Insider tips for navigating Google verification and avoiding reputation traps

From winning the Google 3-Pack to avoiding reputation nightmares, this episode is packed with game-changing insights for healthcare marketers, practice managers, and providers.

Tune in now and take control of your digital reputation! 

Related Resources

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: What’s up Ignite listeners. It’s 2025. This is awesome. We often talk about the fanciest of things out there, Meta’s advertising restrictions, Google losing market share, the patient journey changing. That’s great. At the end of the day, whenever those ads are working or your emails to patients or you’re trying to show up on Google, what is the thing they end up doing? They go in, they research the practice and the providers. Unless that looks great, reputation reviews, referrals look phenomenal, you’re going to get nowhere fast.

Today I’m joined by the CEO of rater8, Evan Steele and Torin Dinh of OrthoArizona. What’s up guys? Torin, give them a little primer on you.

Torin Dinh: I’m the growth and strategy manager with OrthoArizona. We celebrated our 30th year as a company in 2024. Been with the group for 11 years and have led our digital marketing for the last 6 years. We’re a physician-owned orthopedic group with nearly 300 healthcare providers in over 2 dozen locations in Arizona.

Alex: What is under your purview? Is it all growth? Is it marketing? Got the B2B side? Is it mostly all the B2C direct acquisition?

Torin: Yes. A lot of it is digital marketing and we mainly market to the patients.

Alex: I love it. What a new world we live in where orthopedic groups can go direct to patients. I love it. That was not a foregone conclusion seven years ago. Everybody came by referral and every orthopedic group I met with thought this was a crazy idea to get patients directly. Very cool. Thank you for joining us on Ignite, my friend. Evan, what’s going on? Where do you hail from? What do you do?

Evan Steele: I hail from the New York metro area. I’m in Florida right now. You can see the ocean right there behind me. I’m CEO and founder of rater8. I started it January 2015. We have our 10th anniversary this month. We started out as a patient satisfaction survey company, specifically focusing on rating people, check-in staff, check-out staff.

We added questions, benchmarks, and later on we went with– Started building reputation management, which is an amazing product. It’s consumed our company because it’s a very important and very hot product these days in healthcare. We build ourselves, even though we have that DNA of having surveys and patient feedback, we lead with reputation management, focusing just on healthcare.

Alex: I love it. I noticed in going to your website that a lot of our clients have overlap. You got a lot of great logos on there, or I think they’re great because a lot of them are our clients. Kudos to that. Something must be working very well. Kudos to you for pivoting. You start with employee surveys and you say, “Hey, listen, healthcare market really needs this and we’re going to pivot, pivot, pivot until we get to product fit.” All great founders. I’m going to ask you the number one question everybody’s wondering, where in Florida are you?

Evan: We’re in the Southeast coast, East side.

Alex: Is that East Coast?

Evan: Highland beach, which is just next to Boca Raton.

Alex: All right. Rats mouth. Crazy name they came up with. Rats mouth, who came up with that as a good idea. Off the street from here, that’s called Vista View. That’s view view in Spanish. Anyways. All right, guys, back to healthcare markings. Absolutely ridiculous. I’m sure Arizona has none of that nonsense going on.

Torin: For sure.

Alex: The patient journey has changed and now mama is getting exposed to all kinds of different information all of the time. How have you seen patients be more discerning, Torin? How have you seen that change over the last few years? Why have you decided to focus on your provider reputations as a core competency there, OrthoArizona?

Torin: Obviously, we’ve all seen the landscape of medicine and healthcare change drastically over the last decade. Growing up, you’d ask a friend, family, coworker who they would see, or you ask your primary care doctor who you should see. Then that was it. Nowadays, the mom or whoever’s looking, they have the internet at their fingertips. They can go on Google and try to find a doctor near them.

Not only that, they can see the reviews that they’re getting or not getting, and they can go onto the website. They can look at what kind of resources are available to them as a patient if they were to become a patient. A lot of it is just about transparency, digital convenience, personalized care. You can learn so much about a practice and physician before even stepping through their door. Then there’s a growing demographic of younger, more tech savvy people who maybe travel a lot for work or they just moved to a new city and they don’t know who to see, they don’t have a primary care doctor and they may rely on Google to help them find a doctor.

Actually myself, I’ll use my insurance portal to make sure that they’re contract with my insurance. Then I will go onto Google and verify that that’s the doctor that I should be seeing. It’s good that they’re contracted, but I will go the extra mile to see what kind of reviews that they have. What does their website look like? What resources are they putting into patient care before I even see them?

Alex: Getting your ACL repaired is a big surgery. You’re going to go do your research. I know I did. I found my orthopedic surgeon on Google and then did tons of research. I run a Google marketing agency, so maybe that was just me. Anybody that’s going to go get put under anesthesia, they’re going to look for reviews. If they’re new to town, they’re not going to be in a Facebook group necessarily where they can ask the other moms, “Hey, who did you use? My son tore his thing or whatever.” It’s absolutely paramount to look great there and everywhere that somebody might not be coming for a referral. Yes, Evan.

Evan: Even if I have a PCP, I’m going to get a few names and say, “See this, this or this doctor.” I might look at like Torin does in my insurance guide. I have three, four doctors. The way I work, first doctor I look up on the list, I’ll Google the doctor. If I see 3.8 stars and 15 reviews, I’m like, “Eh.” If I see my second doctor has 4.9 stars and 100 reviews, I’m like, “This is the doctor I want to see.”

20 years ago, you call a bunch of doctors, whoever had the most convenient appointment time and who was ever closest to my home or office, that’s where I’m booking the appointment. Now, I don’t care how inconvenient it is. I don’t care how long of a drive it is. If one doctor has a lot of reviews and a high star rating, I’m going to make appointment with that doctor. That’s who I’m going to trust with my life, my health, my care.

Alex: It’s interesting because it doesn’t mean they’re the best provider. It could just mean they’re really savvy at online marketing. What we found like Torin, correct me if I’m crazy, but it’s oftentimes when I see negative reviews, it’s not the provider’s fault. It’s not bedside manners, not outcome. It’s the front office. They didn’t know what they were doing. They double-billed me. Insurance sucks. Whatever. I sat there for 35 minutes before–

It’s just that these provider groups are not actively soliciting is why they’re not getting great reviews. The lack of a rater8 where you’re actively soliciting can actually cure a lot of bills. Just waiting for reviews to come in means you’re going to get mostly the negative Nancy’s. Have you seen that? Is that why you decided to onboard rater8 and be more serious with review solicitation?

Torin: Yes, exactly. It’s funny. I was just talking to a friend who’s looking to find a place to rent and they looked up reviews on the landlord company, and it’s terrible. All 11 reviews, they only have 11 reviews, but all 11 are 1 star reviews. It’s very obvious that they don’t go out and try to solicit for positive reviews. You see that also with a lot of these Google listings for these physicians where they’ll have 2.5 stars, three stars, and they’ll have maybe like a dozen reviews.

When you aren’t proactive and you’re not going out there asking your patients for a review, you’re going to see a lot of negative reviews because the upset patients is going to make sure that they are heard. Whereas the happy patient, they’re happy, but they’re not going to go out of the way and say this was awesome. We get those from time to time, but the unhappy ones are much more motivated to leave a review.

Evan: Just to add. I remember going to a restaurant. This was in Utah, traveling, and I was so upset with them. They treated me so poorly. As soon as I left, I had my phone, I went to the Yelp, I trashed them online. Totally motivated. That same restaurant, if I went there, “Oh, great restaurant, great food, good service,” I walk out, last thing in my mind is to post a review. If I get a text from them with one little link, one tap, and then I’m right on the Google site, logged in, ready to type a review, I do it. It’s just make it easy for the five-star happy patients to post a review and they do it. That makes all difference in the world.

Alex: It’s so true. Landlords beware. Go get positive reviews. Evan, you’re absolutely right. I’ve tried to be more proactive lately when we have a great experience as a family to leave a nice review because it makes that business’s day and no one else is doing it unprompted. Guys, we are the rarity. You have to go and ask for it if you want it. Evan, other sites that are important? Google to me is losing slight market share every year and people are going in different places. Where else is it important to have really great reviews?

Evan: Definitely Google, right? It’s the online billboard. You type in a doctor, a brand, OrthoArizona, you do a local search, Google promotes listings. Interestingly, Healthgrades has taken on more importance recently than the Vitals, WebMDs, Yelp. That’s because– I don’t know the exact percent. I’d say 15%, 20% of all searches when you search for best ophthalmologist or best eye doctor near me, best orthopedist near me, Healthgrades is the first result at the very top of the screen.

Healthgrades lists six or seven doctors and the first one will show reviews and ratings, star rating. That’s right at the top. That’s above Google’s 3-Pack, Google’s local search recommendations. That prominence makes Healthgrades more important. We advise our clients to do Google first, then Healthgrades, and it’s always good to round out the lot and build some Vitals and WebMD. We’re finding the AI searches, when you do a Gemini, they have their experimental AI search.

They’re using reviews and ratings to inform the AI generated responses as well. Especially Google, the same review sites are filtering through to those AI results.

Alex: Healthgrades is all their acquisitions. I think the domain authorities just– Torrent, they don’t let agencies in there, right? It’s like you have to be internal. I remember having to get an email from the internal person to mess with it. They wanted to kick rater8. What if that is true or what are they doing now?

Torin: They definitely put a lot of hurdles in place to get in there. I fortunately found a way to get in there. They want the physician themselves to be the ones that own the listing. After just pestering them, we were able to gain ownership of our Healthgrades listings and have a centralized account, but it’s still not great. A lot of these reputation sites have a pay-to-play model like Yelp, like, “If you pay us, we’ll make it so easy for you to do whatever you want, but if you don’t pay us, you’re going to rip your hair out just trying to make one single edit to the page or do something, let alone reply to reviews or try to monitor the reviews.”

Alex: We all are in the wrong business, guys. We should have started one of those shyster businesses where you just trap your clients. That’s interesting that they want the provider to own it because they also know the providers are going to move around.

Torin: Providers are likely to pour more money into themselves. Right? “Hey, we’re going to pitch to you this premier package for your listing. It only costs $200 a month, but we’ll do this for you. We’ll track your calls.” All these different perks, but then if you don’t pay us, we’ll still create that listing for you and you’re at their mercy. It’s a intricate dance with these providers.

Alex: You were able to amalgamate all of the providers under OrthoArizona-

Torin: Yes.

Alex: -and modify as needed. Yes, Evan?

Evan: For better or for worse, Healthcare, Vitals, WebMD, they have much more authority on a healthcare search. Yelp has been relegated to the second page, below of search, so it’s just not as prominent, which is good because if it’s paid up, you don’t want to pay, other review sites are going to be more prominent in the organic results.

Alex: Let them speak with the restaurants, get out of Healthcare. You really don’t have to stay. Man, I can’t stand. We got one bad Yelp review 13 years ago. I was like, “It’s impossible to offset this. You need 50 because they don’t let it–” Oh my God. Oh, I hate Yelp. Zocdoc, how do they play in any of this?

Torin: The same thing. We don’t use Zocdoc. I’m familiar with them. As a patient before I was really privy to looking at Google listings and all that stuff, I would look at Zocdoc and it’s just the same thing where, as a medical practice, if you open up an account with Zocdoc, there’s so many different things they’ll do for you, but really they don’t hold the same weight as these other reputation sites that we’re talking about, like Google, WebMD. I think they’re okay. It’s a little bit dated.

Alex: I think patients understand it’s like a pay for appointment. I think they get that and it doesn’t present itself as a review platform as much as an appointment booking platform. It’s a good starter thing for a young provider. Evan, what are some of the horror stories you’ve seen of practices that have ignored running a review management program? What are some of the oopsies and things that happen because of that?

Evan: We would say, try it. Sit at your desk, just say, and these searches are all over, amazing and billions of them a year. Just type best whatever near me. If you’re an orthopedic surgeon, start doing the high volume, high value procedures. That’s knee replacement surgeon near me. See what comes up.

If your competitors are showing up there and you’re not– When you say best, Google’s going to show the highest rated brand, not the websites or the listings that are related to websites with higher authority, they’re going to just show the 4.8, 4.9 stars. If you’re not on that list, you’re losing patients. It’s as simple as that.

Alex: It really comes down to that. Does rater8 also help with the listings part or is it just sending reviews out?

Evan: Yes, we have a listings management service that we do. We help practices that create, perfect, maintain, and even respond to their Google reviews in a HIPAA compliant manner.

Alex: I love it. Will you sign BAAs? Do y’all need to sign BAAs?

Evan: We have BAAs with every single client.

Alex: It’s about to get more fun because the HAAs just made us report on eight million more things potentially coming down the pipe and my lawyers are very excited about it. I got it. Listings management, do you have a direct port into Google, et cetera? Is it going through a Yext and then sending out? Is it just making recommendations? What is the actual setting?

Evan: We do work with Yext. We have a partnership with them. That’s for the larger enterprises who want industrial strength listings management, but we manage that. They don’t have to log in and configure it. It’s a beast of a system. I say that in a good way. It’s a complex– It does an amazing job, but it’s something we find our clients would rather us just handle. As part of that managed service, we offer that or we just offer Google listing services where we’ll just manage and help claim and verify, which is now harder and harder because postcard mailing verification is no longer an option, but we help practices get their listings claimed and owned.

Alex: What do you guys recommend? I know what you’re going to say, Evan, so I’m going to ask Torin. What do you recommend? Should every location and provider have review management and listings management, or should it just be practice and the providers will come in and out, pitfalls of both? What’s your first take on that?

Torin: I think it depends on the practice itself and how they want to brand themselves and market themselves. What we do is we have a listings for each of our providers and not only just one listing. If they go to two locations or three locations, then we have three Google listings for that provider. The reason being is that when a person is searching online for a provider near them, we don’t want them to not find that provider who happens to go to a location close by them.

We used to only do one listing per provider simply because we just didn’t have the resources to create all those listings, but now we actually have both verification. Evan was just talking about the nightmares of getting a listing verified. I cried a little bit when they took away the postcard because then we had to do video verification and you have to do it live on site and sometimes it doesn’t even get approved. Now we’re way past that. We get them automatically verified.

Now we have a listing for every single physician, all the locations that they go to, and we have a listing for each office location, which is what we prioritize. Because so many providers go in and out of the locations, we want to really boost the location itself to just attract patients and have them come to our doors because some of our locations have a walk-in clinic.

Alex: When you’re deciding like, “Hey, where should the reviews of that provider be going this month,” usually location until it’s far and above outpacing the competition, and then you might start splitting it out to the provider individual listings or never, they’re never getting review solicitation?

Torin: That’s the great thing with rater8 is that it’s all hands off, really. We can tell them, “Okay, send a percentage to the office location listing versus the physician listing,” but we prioritize the office location listing and then rater8’s algorithm and make sure that the patients are also sent to the provider’s listing. That way, everything is touched.

Alex: Evan, two questions. One, do you believe that it depends on the type of acuity or type of practice, whether the providers should have their own listings and two, how are you getting through the wall of the email blockers and all that fun stuff? Maybe it’s that special sauce, but one, is it because it’s orthopedic high acuity that matters for the providers? If it’s primary care, do you feel differently that the providers may not need listings?

Evan: You should always have listings in any specialty. I think one example, if you have a satellite office and a patient says best orthopedic surgeon near me, if you just have the location listing, that will likely, if you have a lot of reviews, will just take up one spot of the Google 3-Pack. If you have doctors, then those doctors are more likely to come to that 3-Pack. Sometimes we see what we call 3-Pack domination, where you get your practice listing and two of your doctors are in the 3-Pack, no other choices.

You have to click on more places to see the competition and that’s what you really want. 3-Pack domination. You can’t get that without the doctor listing. Also, if I’m a patient, remember we were talking about I look at my insurance guide, I see Dr. Jones sees patients or is in my plan. If I then Google Dr. Jones and I’m in Gilbert, Arizona, but I just see the Phoenix listing. I’m like, “Oh, this doctor’s not in Gilbert. I don’t want to go to Phoenix. Let me look at the next doctor on my list.”

If the doctor had the listing, I’m going to see right there, that doctor’s listing in Gilbert and say, “Oh, that’s nearby, I’m going to book an appointment.” There’s other reasons why you’d want to have those doctors provide listings.

Alex: Total domination. I get it. Now, how are you getting through to patients? Is it automated? Is it a step three days after care, immediate after care? Tell us whatever’s not secret sauce, how you’re getting through better than Podium, Birdeye, whatever the other ones are.

Evan: With OrthoArizona, we have real time interface. Literally the moment the patient checks out and then we get that message, we send a text or an email to the patient and that goes out real time. Patient is in the parking lot, they already have the review request on their cell phone.

Alex: You’re getting through. That’s awesome. Google made things a lot trickier and that’s funny. They’re groggy from their ACL surgery. I’m like, “How’d you enjoy your stay?” [laughter] “Five stars. I feel really good right now. Bam.” That’s really fun. Kudos to you guys. Hey Torin, real quick, back to how you get automatic verification. How is that happening now that you don’t have to do the video stuff? Is that rater8 magic?

Torin: No. What we had to do was essentially name all of our locations OrthoArizona because we had a tag after each listing that would say OrthoArizona, Arcadia, or OrthoArizona, North Gilbert. Google saw all of them as separate businesses. For us to get past that, we had to just name them all the same. Then they also had to match the number of locations we had listed on our website.

That was how we got around it and just constant communications with their tech rep or whoever we were speaking to just to make sure that we were getting it done, following their rules. Then for the physician listings, we can create as many physician listings as we want. It’s the location listings is where we needed to play by the rules in order to get that bulk verification.

Evan: I’d like to add, they got rid of the postcard verification. Video verification is really tough and it’s not approved all the time, it’s time-consuming. Then you say, “Let’s do phone verification.” Most times you could do phone verification, but everyone says, “Well, I got my phone tree and Google calls a phone tree and can’t handle that.” What we recommend there, there’s a one number, it’s 202-455-8888. Every phone verification call comes from that number.

Talk to your VoIP provider and tell them to intercept and route that number to your backline or your cell phone. That’s a great trick to get instant phone verification without worrying about your phone tree.

Alex: We should have started with the tricks. I like the tricks, Torin.

Torin: That’s exactly what I did. I forgot about that. For some reason, there’s a handful of locations where if Google calls that number, we just never receive it. I’ve opened tickets with our VoIP provider and they can’t even find the phone call. That’s how we used to do it and the calls actually went directly to my cell phone. It bypassed the phone tree and once that Google phone number was seen coming through, it would just go directly to my phone number. Then I would type in the verification code and we would be set.

Nowadays, it’s hit or miss even with the phone calls, don’t know why. We opted to do both verification, which is like the holy grail. I think what Evan said is perfect. That’s what we used to do until it just, for some reason, stopped working for us.

Alex: Awesome. Guys, what about getting stakeholders on board. It’s not just the marketer that needs– Well, let me ask, is it just the marketer that needs to be on board with review management, Torin?

Torin: No, definitely the stakeholders need to be on board. I think for anyone outside of marketing, they might pay a lot of attention to the cost of reputation management, which is totally appropriate. I think they need to do a little bit more investigation into it. Maybe the marketer needs to really pitch it to them. I have actually a really good case study of ourselves where we were with rater8 for a couple of years and then the executive leadership that we had at the time said, “Oh, hey, this other company, they do an all-in-one.”

One of the things that they do is also reputation management. They’ll send a link to our patients to complete a Google review. I was a little bit weary because that was a very small thing that they did. It wasn’t their sole focus, but we went with them. Then we saw a dramatic drop in reviews, hundreds and hundreds of less reviews than we would normally get. I tried to help them and try to help build almost short of giving them the code to all the backend code to what rater8 does.

They just could not get our reviews back up to where they were before and our ratings were dropping. Then less than a year after doing that, we went back to rater8 and the reviews shot back up and we’re getting more reviews than we’ve ever gotten before in the history of working with rater8, partly because we’ve added our PAs, nurse practitioners, therapists also to sending surveys out to their patients and also directing them to Google listings as well.

Alex: There is some secret sauce, I guess, to the rater8 magic. Evan, of course, I’ve been smiling. He’s like, “Yes, the best type of marketing ever.” It’s the deliverability of the email. There must be some secret sauce where the algorithm is sending to, stuff like that. If you want to divulge any of that, great. If not, I get it. It sounds like, Torin, you had to get who else involved? COO? As in operations lead because they have to get front office, it’s nurses, everybody else on board?

Torin: Exactly, yes. CEO, COO, CFO, you name it, everyone just had to be on board.

Alex: Then what did you do with the nurse? You’re saying, “Hey, nurse, mention it during checkout.” “Hey, nurse, mention it during care that they’re going to get a cert–” What happens there?

Torin: Yes, so we definitely encourage our providers to have that discussions with patients saying, “Hey, you’re going to get a review sent to your phone or sent to your email.” We also made referral cards for our providers, which also encouraged patients to leave a review. Really, it’s just before we left rater8, we only had our physicians using rater8. We didn’t have any of the advanced practitioners or therapists using it. Then when we went back to rater8, we said, “You know what, their patients should all should be getting a survey because we want to see how their patients are doing, what their experience is like. It shouldn’t just be the physicians.”

We opened it up to all providers. Of course, our physicians are top priority in terms of building their online reputation. For our therapists and advanced practitioners, we wanted to at least survey them, but also redirect them to, say, the Google office location listings, which we’ve grown hundreds of reviews for those listings.

Alex: I love it. I love it. Having the best kind of marketing there is. That’s awesome. That’s cool to know. You came back in full force and Torin got to say, “I told you should have listened to me.” That’s awesome, guys. Looking at 2025, I’m going to leave you guys with one more question, what are we most excited about? A marketing trend could be outside of review management. It could be anything.

While I say that, I also have another thought. Review management is not just important for D to C patient acquisition. It also is very cool when a provider you’re trying to recruit over comes back and sees you guys are the bad in Atlanta or wherever you’re located. Obviously, it’s Arizona. They say the reviews out here are phenomenal for OrthoArizona and all the providers. I imagine review management also very important for employer reputation and recruitment. Guys, a side note, that it’s also good for both sides of the business.

All right. Enough promoting of rater8. Evan, what are you excited about? What marketing trend are you looking at in 2025?

Evan: It sounds so cliche, Alex.

Alex: Don’t say AI.

Evan: AI. You can’t even believe how awesome both on the back end platform side and also on the user side. It’s really cool. We’re just blown away by it.

Alex: You guys use it probably for some of your analysis and it helps the platform. What do you see on the user side that it’s being useful for?

Evan: Just, there’s mounds of patient comments. Years ago, we had a service that we offered, we call it the patient feedback summaries. We charge for it. It was a certain number of dollars per doctor a month. Before our quarterly consult, we’d have our account manager go through, read the comments, distill them into a summary and put it in a Word document and go review with the client. They loved it. They were paying for it. They absolutely loved it.

Then we shut it down because it’s too labor-intensive for us. We just didn’t have the time to do all that. Now with AI, you could just say, “Oh, this doctor, I want to see all the negative comments.” Click on the summary and it just summarize it by category. It’s just an absolute game changing time saver.

Alex: It’s going to take all of our jobs, guys. Our electrician was in the house yesterday and said, “You got the best job there is for the next 10 years, my friend.” [laughs] It’s coming for all of us. I’m glad you’re excited at it. I think it can be a productivity maximizer and I think it is making all of our jobs easier until the terminator and kills us. Torin, what are you looking forward to in ’25?

Torin: Not going to take that, the one that Evan said because we definitely have been implementing it in some ways and it’s been very helpful, but really just going back to the roots of SEO. We really want to focus on SEO and just growing our spread digitally. Rater8 helps with that locally. We want to be known nationally, even globally, just get more users to our website and just really maximize SEO.

Alex: I love that. Take that Meta, Google ads. Everyone always wants to talk about the fanciest stuff. Oftentimes it’s back to the basics. I started this thing as an SEO company. It’s my favorite thing. It’s the best CPL out there. It drives the most relevant patients. They’re the most ready to convert because they did the most research. I love SEO. Are you concerned it’s starting to lose some ground to the AI-generated nonsense and to Facebook groups and Reddit and all of that stuff? I love that you’re investing in it. What do you think is coming over the next few years? Still viable?

Torin: No, I definitely still think it’s very viable. I think there’s so much noise out there. There’s so many different products, so many things going on. I still think SEO needs to be focused on– With everything that’s going on and everything that you can get your hands on, I think some organizations might lose sight of SEO.

Alex: They are.

Torin: They might want to trade it for, I don’t know, just regular advertising. They might want more billboards and stuff like that. That has a spot in marketing, maybe for some people, too big of a spot, but I think SEO, it’s like you said, going back to the basics. There’s a reason why it’s done so well for so many companies and people should not lose sight of that.

Alex: I love it. We talked about reviews. We talked about SEO. We talked about the value of a unique algorithm. Not all review management platforms are made the same. Today was proof of that. There is some secret sauce involved in these platforms that can really help. We talked about the perils of not having a review management solicitation program in place, and we talked about the benefits of combining that with listings and making sure all the providers and the locations are well covered and some tips and tricks on how to get authorization happening for all your listings and providers. Evan and Torin, thank you for joining us on Ignite.

Torin: Thank you.

Evan: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at CardinalDigitalMarketing.com.

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