MSD Insider 0:00
Welcome to med shark insider with Bill Fukui, your expert host on all things medical, marketing, and SEO.

Bill Fukui 0:08
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the first edition of med shark Insider. This is a program to familiarize you with information on digital marketing. And really today’s is an introduction of kind of where we came from where min shark came from. And today I have the owner of blue shark and the founder of met shark digital as well, on with me, and we are going to share a little background on how this all came about. I think it’s really exciting. I think there’ll be enlightening on really kind of why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Seth Price 0:47
That’s all. Yes, thank you so much. It’s It’s so exciting to have you here. And the fact that med shark is is up and running and fulfilling what we’ve talked about for years. So I’m thrilled to be here.

Bill Fukui 0:58
That sounds great. So Seth, kind of give me a little background of yourself kind of where did you get into digital marketing? You know, by by profession, you’re originally an attorney. But how did you get into the digital marketing space?

Seth Price 1:12
Well, you know, I went to law school. But my goal was not to be a lawyer. And the first moment I could get out of a big law firm, I went to New York, and was involved with the first.com bubble, which was sort of the late 90s, whenever the web was really coming to fruition, and I had a lot of fun with it, I realized there’s something there. And when that bubble burst, I came back to DC and I met up with a college law school buddy who loved practicing law and I didn’t want to practice law. So I said, Okay, let me try to market this firm, and see how that goes. The two of us just the two of us that have sat down in his basement, we came up with this plan. And I built a website, we hired another lawyer built another website, hire another lawyer. And 12 years later, there’s a firm with 40 lawyers and 40 websites, that is sort of one of the larger business to consumer firms in the DC metro. And you know, that passion for digital, I was like, Hey, we’re onto something here. And so five years ago, we said, Okay, we could replicate what we’ve done for law firms for what we did for ourselves for law firms around the country. So today, BluShark digital, represents about 130 law firms nationwide, and growing every day. And it’s just one of those passion plays of mine, I saw, hey, this is how it works. If we slice the bread this way, it’s gonna work really well. And we were able to scale blue shark. And when you raise your hand and said, Hey, I’ve been in this business 25 years, and I think there’s an opportunity here, you know, I was like, didn’t take me very long. I’m like, get your butt to dc we gotta meet. And, you know, we’re not just me, we’ve known each other for years. But you know, what I think we’ve created in med shark is really special. And you know, the space you’ve been in for 25 years. And I don’t think be looking at the marketplace. We had seen anybody who had taken these high level SEO practices and applied them to the cosmetic dentistry and, and plastic surgery space that that space had always been sort of second tier, the law firm space. It’s so competitive, that by taking those best practices of SEO and, and local and paid search, that we were able, you know, to implement things that had you know, before, yeah, they everybody’s competing, but I feel like the world of competition in the law firm space is so great, that I am just thrilled that we are now able to provide that to the medical arena.

Bill Fukui 3:41
Yeah, you know, Seth, you kind of mentioned, we’ve known each other for a bit. And from a distance, we actually had you out visiting us one time.

Seth Price 3:52
Well, before I had an agency or anything before, no idea.

Bill Fukui 3:57
But I think the you know, what I found just my own personal and why I kind of reached out to you is I saw you from a distance as a competitor, because we were in somewhat the same space. But in markets where we were we had some you know, both had clients. You guys were doing a little better than we were I hate to say you guys were doing a little bit better than we were. And I agree that the legal space was so much more competitive. I mean, I’ve got about 93,000 Personal injury lawyers across the country. I have maybe seven or 8000 board certified plastic surgeons competing nationally. Okay, completely different landscape, completely different landscape. So I always ask this question, when I see somebody doing better than we were, how are you doing it? I mean, what were you guys doing that was different, what you would say is a differentiator between everybody else because We’re all in the same business doing, you know, similar things, what makes what made it so that you guys were so successful? You know,

Seth Price 5:07
we talked about an organic search, which is, you know, a big, big portion of the game, that there are four fundamentals. And we just dug very deep into each of those, it’s simple to talk about right? High quality content. And, you know, for a plastic surgeon, you’re like, I care about pictures and reviews, but Google cares about content, if they care about it, we care about it. So it’s one thing to just put a site up with beautiful photos. And that’s awesome, because people who are referred to you are going to find you. But my goal has always been, how do we get people who have never heard of you to come to you, or those that have heard of you, but that are doing a search independently to see you again, and have that one two punch. So high quality content is what Google wishes demand, if you want to succeed with organic or local search those that is a pillar that we take very, very seriously. And we spend a lot of time and effort creating that high quality content is not cheap, it is not easy. But when it’s done, it resonates. And as you mentioned, it shows success. Second, we do authoritative link building, it’s one thing to have content. But if Google says hey, there are a bunch of different plastic surgeons or a bunch of different, you know, cosmetic dentistry options, the person who has the most votes, almost like an election, we’ve just been through an election. The idea is, whoever gets the most votes, and there’s only one arbiter, you don’t have Rudy’s sitting there arguing about who won, you have Google telling you who wins. And what we have here is we have a situation that our job as SEOs is to follow Google guidelines, but to demonstrate authority. And what we’re trying to make sure is that when we feel the law firm world, there may be some kid who just graduated law school, who’s working out of his parents basement, and our job is to demonstrate that the authoritative lawyer who’s been in the market for all these years, that’s the right answer. So what we do is when we work with people, and these plastic surgeons that we’ve worked with, have great ties in the community. They’ve done amazing things. They’ve done pro bono work, they’ve done all sorts of different projects we want, it’s great that you do that. And it’s great that you give charity, it’s great. You do work in the committee, we want to show it all in link equity, pointing back to the website. So when Google says, Hey, who is the right answer to show, it’s these guys. And that’s, that’s the that’s sort of the content of link. That’s the number one. And number two factors, as far as getting something to rank is so that you can be found by people who have never heard of you before. The two other factors, which is one that I think is often very much overlooked in the medical space is the technical. It’s the on page, it’s not sexy, it’s behind the scenes, but how a site is laid out, if you do different types of surgery, and people are searching for those different types of surgery. Each of those different surgeries need to be in a silo or a pyramid, where here’s the money page that you want people to get to. And here’s all the information about different issues, or different options within that surgery. And so that when Google is looking, it’s not that you have one page of information for a given search, but an entire library or family of information structured in a way so that the user can find it and the Google bot can come through. So our job is to signal to Google through title tags and meta descriptions, and schema markup and a bunch of stuff that we’re not gonna have time to talk about today. But all of those things go into the mix. So when the content that we write is layered, and then the links come in, that is the 360 that Google is looking at for organic search. The fourth and final pillar is local, that three pack or map packs so important, making sure somebody has Google My Business has pictures and videos and reviews to complete that picture. So not only do you come up organically, but you’re somewhat of the answers that when somebody is searching, this is somebody who’s going to solve your problem. And that’s how I approached law. The philosophy is almost more like a plumber. If the hot water heater in the in the basement explodes. And you need help because it’s everywhere. The first person who answers the phone and gives you reliable information at a fair price is going to get your business. Similarly, people have a different spectrum of the urgency that they need that help obviously, in many of the cosmetic areas. It is not urgent but to somebody who’s calling to a certain percentage of people it is it’s very important and how that call is handled is a whole nother conversation. I hope we get to on this on this piece here where our job as a as digital marketers is to evaluate what’s right. If it’s organic search, it’s going to be those four pillars. If it’s paid search, it’s going to be Google Google Ads primarily, if it’s social, it’s going to be a paid Facebook campaign. There are many different pivots you could make. It may be pre roll YouTube ads, there are different places to go. And what I love about working with you, Bill is you understand all these things. And it’s not just saying, Hey, this is what can be sold. But what’s right for somebody, I think both of us take the attitude, we’re not selling anything, we’re going to teach as much as we can show you everything, and then work with you to figure out what is the right answer for your firm in your city, given the competition, given your resources, and then lay that out with both the strengths of them, but also the weaknesses or risks, because much of what we’re doing specially in the organic game is not guaranteed. There are areas you can guarantee things with paid where you know, you’re gonna get X number of clicks, but margins differ so that the things that are closer to a shore thing have much tighter margins and ROI, whereas much of the work that we do organically is what we’ve seen, particularly the history that I’ve done with price benefits, has produced astronomical returns on investment that you can’t get with the short term fix of paid. So I don’t take an opinion of what’s right. The answer is it depends on where you are, what the landscape of your competition is, and what your tolerance for risk is, all of those go into. But what I love about working with you, Bill is I think there’s nobody better at listening to what somebody needs, and then figuring out what is the, you know, menu that will help suit them best?

Bill Fukui 11:40
Yeah, you know, so I, you mentioned a couple of things I get from practices all the time, you know, a lot of them are familiar with the term link building, but it’s so foreign to them on how you do it, you know, and they always it’s this black box of, of how you get those links. And you mentioned, you know, the local local links. I think that’s something I don’t hear from a lot of other agencies, which I found enlightening and quite refreshing when I first spoke to you is how do you get those local signals, I was on a consultation with a practice who actually gave me Google Analytics access to his website. And he’s like, Oh, well, man, I’m generating 4000 visitors to this site a month. So he’s thinking everything’s, you know, great and stuff. But he says, You know what, I’m still I still think I should be getting more leads from this, is it my website is bad? Do I have a bad website, I got 4000 visitors coming to this thing? Is the website bad and I looked at the site, it didn’t look that bad. Or I see I didn’t see anything, that was a major issue. But looking through his analytics, when I started looking through it, I found that out of those 4000 visitors, he may have 450 of them that were local to the marketplace. Right. Okay.

Seth Price 12:59
And you see a lot of that with social, we have some, some doctors, you know, look again, outside the box, you blow up on tick tock, that’s awesome. But unless somebody’s gonna fly to your market, you know, it’s not going to do a lot of good, you really need the people around your office. So you know, yes. So a lot of it is is that, and look, you could write a blog that is generally of interest. But the question is, how do you monetize your your area? So local links have two advantages. One is, it takes a lot of effort to get a link from CNN. And that is a huge, uphill, expensive, difficult battle. Yeah, the good news is the local links are a lot more accessible. You’re quoted in papers, you do things in the community, you have a local ecosystem. Our job is to almost be your PR department, some people at some point, SEO and PR and intersect and really become one. But he’s digital PR. The question is, can we demonstrate to Google, your online digital footprint? And so the first thing you do Google your name, see? Where is your where is your name I mentioned? Right? So to me, when I’m asked to sponsor something, a charity charity event, the first thing I do is I don’t want something in the brochure. Again, I’m not making a value judgment, because on the offline branding, there’s a whole game, that that is valuable. But to me, what I want to make sure is, it’s great, you get your photo in the brochure that it’s there. And that’s very important. Don’t get me wrong, but I want to make sure that part of that package includes a link from that organization’s website back to your website, because the brochure is there that night. And again, it helps with, you know, brand recognition. And there’s there’s a whole offline component that I’m not going to, you know, weigh in, because that’s not my area of expertise. But what is is that if that organization links in and Google says okay, this person has all these backlinks coming from other websites to their website. That’s the differentiator. It’s not difficult that Is it? It’s difficult to get them? But the actual answer is, it’s pretty clear. And that as you do that, and whether it is you know, if you’re donating money and you’re giving scholarships away, each thing that you do, you know, each things that are there, those are the things that work higher level SEO is great content that gets people to link in. But in, in the in the plastic surgery world, it may be making sure that that social that has posts about the great work you’re doing has links coming back, those links may not have as much of an SEO effect and a traditional link inbound, but the traffic from all of that social, when you do get before and after photos going out there. And people are posting, they’re coming back that inbound traffic, that is an important touch point for Google. And that when you have traffic coming in, and people come in or checking out the different things to me, that is the that that is the homerun, that’s what you’re trying to do. And when you get that Google sees it, they see that you’re part of that community, then when people come, they’re getting the information they want. And that’s the game that we play. And that that again, why I love working with you so much because you get it and that it isn’t, you know, I wish I could say it, set it and forget it here, you pay us money. And it’s done. It’s the clients that are most successful. They’re our partners, right? We look at our clients as partners, because when we do that, and that we work together, and there’s a back and forth, and we’ve leveraged staff, and we figure out how can we tell your story in a meaningful way? And what are the resources that are out there that can reflect back to show it when we do that that’s a home run. Somebody who participates in content, things that we do that may be unique, where we interview the lawyers, just like we’re doing right now, you can take an interview like this, about the different options that are out there for somebody facing a particular decision in your in your space, we can take that it becomes content on your site, we transcribe it, it becomes digital words, it is all of those things work together. And if you sit there and you say, Hey, I’m writing a check, I expect magic. Yeah, work can be done. But the real magic occurs when people work, you know, with us as a team, we get results that are just phenomenal.

Bill Fukui 17:18
You know, the you had mentioned the the content and personalizing that content in the voice of the attorney or the client. I mean, that’s so valuable part of not only, you know, getting clients to approve their content, which can be a challenge. But when it’s in their voice,

Seth Price 17:38
it because I started the legal space. So I know in the legal space, if somebody comes in and sits across from me or my partner, nobody’s leaving without signing, it’s just not happening. Right? Like, you know, the gears, you get somebody in the door? And are they talking to us, you know, we talk on the phone, that percentage goes down a bunch, but when somebody’s sitting there across, and my guess is for most of the clients that you’re dealing with, if somebody sits down, and they have a full consultation with somebody, they’re not saying you know what, I want to go check three more places out, they could, but the majority of people, if you get them to the office, you look them in the eye with all the experience you have, that person is going to end up working with you. And so what I try to do is take that same information that’s inside their noggin, and get that onto the page, if we can do that, whether it’s video, or whether it be through words, when we get the information because we talked before about Google trying to see high quality content using How do you do it, high quality content, we can write it, you know, by with independent writers great, that that sort of checks a box, but we blend that with the words coming out of somebody’s mouth. It’s a game changer because you know your space so well. I mean, think about it, undergrad, grad, you know, med school fellowships, all of these things that have gone into it. There’s so much experience inside that noggin that if we can get it and put it out there that blows both goo people away and Google away. And that’s the one two punch.

Bill Fukui 19:03
Yeah, you know, and I do think more and more websites. We kind of you kind of mentioned social and those types of things. I think websites have really taken on more of a relationship role, as opposed to just being an online brochure. I think that that’s right, that type of content, you know, the images that you put on there. I think this sense of forming a connection with visitors that never met you before. I think people with that spend a lot of time on social media, they get this sense that I know you long before I ever meet you

Seth Price 19:39
absolutely look between the social touches, the video touches, the web touches. If you bring all of that together, there’s a relationship by the time they get there. You have you or not, you know in a perfect world, you’re not even selling on that call that person has already sold because they have seen your work they get it and they want it. And given that world that referral is a big part, it’s also crowd, crowdsource referral where they may have two or three names in that they’ve been given. And the idea that if we can differentiate and tell that story, there’s nothing better.

Bill Fukui 20:15
Yeah, now and completely understand and agree, I love the concept of, you know, the this partnership, where this is not a mercenary thing. I’m a firm believer in that this is clients that get the best results, do not just pay money and Hibernate, and, you know, let their agency do their own thing. This is in order to get the kind of content that we’re looking for. Give, you know, when I was in this space for many years, and I see a lot of the competitors in the cosmetic and plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry space. Two things, I got a couple of questions. Number one, amazingly, I’ve heard is that adding content, blogging and recurring content and that kind of stuff. I’ve heard that that doesn’t really help. And how do you address that? And number two, in terms of content, how much content? I mean, when you’re when you say, Well, how much is enough for what should I be doing? Give us somebody to

Seth Price 21:21
answer your questions in reverse order. Okay, the first is for to be able to compete in a competitive market, if somebody has a 10 page site, and somebody else has a 200 page site that is seen as much more substantial. And that you can, as I mentioned, before you pyramid information or silo it so that if you have a type of surgery that you’re looking to get clients from that you want, not just one page on it, but all of the supporting pages, maybe five pages supporting that first page, and then 10 pages supporting each of those five pages. So you’re building it out over time. So more is important in the sense that you don’t want to be a skimpy thin site because hard to be authoritative with that. One of the things that I also love seeing is if it’s your money pages, going from 500 words, when we do in the legal space to a 2000 word page for some of those money landing pages, just to show Hey, we are the authority in this space. Great. But what you alluded to it’s not pages for the sake of it. And something that I’ve seen, historically, is that agencies will sell what I call regurgitated news blogs, or nonsense blogs, because it’s easy if you’re with a mega company that has a publicly traded company, and they have managing directors and then regional directors, and then sales reps, and then sales assistants, all these people, how much work can be done in this creative what we’re doing is pretty intensive, high quality writing rare that these bigger organizations at scale can do that at scale. What ends up with things end up collapsing into, again, are these low level blogs that are easy to scale, talking about in the legal space, a dangerous intersection, or talking about celebrity things in the in the plastic surgery space. They’re easy to write, if x celebrity had surgery went well or didn’t go well, yes, because anybody can do that. It’s almost like being an old AP writer, you take a story, and you rewrite it for the blog. To me, those are the things that when you look at it, we get a new site, though, when you when you meet somebody and they come to us, they say, Hey, I’m looking to do this. We triage that work, right? So what do I do? I we look at the site and we say okay, of the content you have, what content is great, check plus what punted is check, hey, we could dust it off, improve it a little bit to get it to that checkpoint. And what is checked my as it used to be rewritten, cut combined 200 word pages that are really aren’t doing you any good. But what we find is a lot of these sites that we acquire, that we work on, have been weighted down with volumes of crappy blogs. That’s where you’re you’re sort of pruning, and you’re getting rid of that because it sucks, you paid for it. But it’s not doing you any good. So it’s not volume for volume sake being very clear. It’s high quality content that does one of two things. It’s either answering a question where somebody is searching for a particular type of work, and you’re either giving them the answer to that or a supporting page. And the great thing about the supporting pages is those supporting pages have answers as well for longer tail searches. So that if somebody is going for, let’s say, a touch up of something years later, and you have a page on that, well, that’s not your money landing page for the surgery. The idea that somebody’s coming back for a second time years later, is that that may be somebody who’s answering a very specific question. And if you’re blogging, that it’d be thoughtful and meaningful and genuine and not just spun out words to fill it and that’s the, I think that when you talk about high quality content, it is not words for sake of words, but rather words with purpose. And when you get to that point, that’s why the partnership you talked about before is important. Because you can’t do it in a vacuum. You need to know somebody’s personality sensibility. What is because, again, if you want people to come to you for that, you want to make sure that the words match the photos that match the person, right?

Bill Fukui 25:19
You know, and when you’re talking about the quality of the content, and that it has meaning and purpose. One of the things that I found is that a lot of practices develop, you know, if you’re not participating in your own content, you don’t even know what’s there. So when practices do know what content we’re producing, a lot of it should be, I believe that a lot of content that we create should be based on what what, what would help your staff? How many people call you have this question? Wouldn’t it be great to have this resource on our website? We’ll look.

Seth Price 25:57
And that’s the FAQ Frequently Asked Questions. Yes, yes, yes, yes. If you could take because every doctor knows that when somebody comes in, sits down in front of them, they have the same basic 10 question. That’s where we start, right? Start with the basics, and then say, okay, what are the next 50 oddball questions? Where’s the oddball? Like? Not asked every day, but they’re asked periodically, and you start building those out because Google wants that that’s what people are searching for. So the more we’re able to anticipate what people are interested in and get those questions answered. That is SEO.

Bill Fukui 26:29
And I think the other thing is, if they have those real assets, and they know they get these frequently asked questions, is great for their staff, when they’re following up with them to have links to them. They never send probably the

Seth Price 26:42
best eminent that’s one way Look, it also is a way of answering questions when people have them. And look, yes, that’s there. And then you want to the trifecta is when you add the video to it, so you have your content, and then you have a video, again, that’s bringing you 360. That’s, that’s at the highest level when you get there. And that’s why every piece of content we have we want part of that overall content strategy and not just content for content alone.

Bill Fukui 27:10
Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense and content, and the website can be leveraged in, in so many different ways. As you’re saying, video, speaking of videos, where do you see video kind of going? I mean, everybody says, if it’s a video world, now the internet and mobile, it’s all video kind of stuff. Where does that fit in with, you know, SEO and strategies? It’s

Seth Price 27:35
definitely an important factor. But I feel like the basic pillars need to be there. Video is becoming more and more important, but it is not. It is certainly, you know, the fundamentals for search are still content in all different forms. And so while we want that, and it’s important, and there are other social, I would say for social, it’s more important even than SEO right now, you can only really rank very well without any video, I like it for conversion. And that you want it it helps people stay on the page longer because they’re watching. So all of that is wonderful and awesome. That said, it is not you know, I think that the video component is playing emails more powerfully on the social side right now than on the straight SEO side.

Bill Fukui 28:21
Yeah, no, I would agree with you. I’ve also found that a lot of what about video blogging in terms of

Seth Price 28:29
awesome, the the thing is, it has to be your time. And so I like it with purpose. Any of these things are great, right? If you deepen anything, if you become the Tick Tock doctor, if you build the Instagram, all of those are awesome. The question is, do you dig deep into them, pick the ones you want to be on. I’m old, so I’m on Facebook, but my wife, she’s on Instagram. And if you want to target women, you’re gonna get you know, for many, many demographics of women, Instagram is where they are, if you want the younger set, they’re going to be on Tik Tok. And you have to figure out where your people are, and then target accordingly. That said, that is part of the sort of the branding component. And there are plenty of cases to be gotten that way. The second component that I love so much is the direct search when somebody says, I’m ready, I want somebody to do this task, the water heater exploded, I’m ready, that I don’t like my look, I don’t I need something changed. And when they go for that direct search, I want to be there and be one of the top choices because to me, there’s no better moment than that.

Bill Fukui 29:34
Yeah. Well, that’s great. So, I this has been great. I’m learning I’ve been in this business a long time. But every time I talk to you, I always get little nuggets of you know, even more experienced, you know, providers, man when I when I you know when you talk to somebody He that as you said, kind of eats sleeps and drinks this stuff. You always get something from them because there is a passion and I see that in you I that’s one of the things that draws me to you.

Seth Price 30:12
Well, we’re excited to have you here this is gonna be a fun ride and you know let’s let’s make sure you know I can’t I can’t wait to see the your your next few episodes and let’s make sure we do this again sometime soon.

MSD Insider 30:23
That sounds great. Seth thanks man. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thanks for joining us for the med shark insider with Bill Fukui join us next week for another dive into all things medical marketing. All episodes can be streamed at WWW dot med Shark digital.com/med Shark Dash insider

Transcribed by https://otter.ai