How This Doctor Doubled His Practice's Revenue in One Year

Dr. Erez is a functional medicine doctor who recently doubled his practice's revenue in one year without spending money on ads and with zero, zip, nada social media presence.

And the crazy part is he just focused on the basics – improve the website and the Google Business Profile, to attract more patients.

Here's how he describes what it was like back before we met:

"I didn't really have a system for how to like, you know, get get clients or you know, just inc increase the amount of patients that were coming to me. and so I think that I was in a place of trying to figure out how to do that. I had a website and stuff like that, but it was pretty, pretty bad. and it wasn't super polished and it was just kinda something I'd I think I made on my own, sort of."

"I had some levers, like I had some sources from for for clients, but it just wasn't. So I had IFM. So I was listed on IFM's website. and I was getting some leads from them. but I would say, you know, it wasn't very diversified in that sense. Like I didn't barely had a Google business profile. I think it was like halfway completed or something like that."

So he had a website and a Google Business Profile but it was one of those things were you almost set it and forget it. And because he was getting some patients from IFM's directory and some referrals, he'd grown content.

But like most doctors starting an independent medical practice, he was also spread a little thin:

"I think I had multiple multiple jobs. so I think I was doing a telemedicine thing to sort of like cover, you know, just to allow me to do the practice basically and like lean into that more. So I think I had two other side gigs, like online side gigs, and maybe even had some in person stuff too. if I remember correctly at the time. So maybe doing some urgent care shifts. And stuff, you know, just to pay the bills as I was building the practice basically."

So at this point, even though he enjoyed the side gigs and his practice was relatively new, he had no mechanism in place and definitely no time to learn how to get a steady stream of patients to actually grow the practice.

But when I stepped in I was able to take that burden off his back. We'd meet for an hour every week and talk about how we could attract more patients, and sometimes I'd just interview him about functional medicine for content.

"I remember coming away was like, this is so cool. He's just gonna like take this off my plate and like he's gonna like lead me through it and yeah, it's like it's awesome."

Pretty quickly we identified that the lowest hanging fruit was more 5 star google reviews.

Google Reviews

At the time he had 5 reviews, which isn't really uncommon, especially for a newer practice, but in my experiene and in a now corrobated study from local SEO agency Sterling Sky, reaching 10 reviews triggers a significant ranking boost, which could literally lead to a consistent flow of patients just like that.

Here's why:

1. The map pack containing your profile is higher on the page than websites in the search results, so people often check there first. And that's where the reviews are, so it makes sense.
2. The data is clear. What other people say about you can be the deciding factor on booking that intro call or not. I know for me personally, I want to know what other people say about you, no what you say about you.

We knew we had to create a system to ask for reviews so that we could hit our goal and in one month My man Dr. E received 4 new 5-star reviews and a few weeks later he had 10:

"I think the Google reviews made like a huge difference. and not only to like just the you know, the people that were finding me through Google or the Map Pack or whatever, but probably also just, you know, people that were looking me up from IFM that were then going to the Google reviews and being like, he has like this is a verified other way I can like look him up and you know, he has a he has a bunch of good reviews."

Getting More Reviews

So here's what we did, it's simple:

First, I went into his GBP, selected Ask for Reviews and copied the link so that patients didn't have to go looking for it and Dr. Erez didn't have to either.

From there, I made an internal web page which acted like a mobile app with three buttons to request review via:

• Text
• Email
• or QR Code

The text and email had the same template message with the review link already in there so all he had to do was enter their contact info, and the QR code was for a patient to scan if they were in person.

Now this is what we created but you could just create an email template with the message, and you could place it in the notes app on your phone to copy and paste as a text message.

Here's a Pro tip and what I think really makese the difference: Instead of just setting this up as an automated message for them to leave a review, or firing these off randomly, you personally ask them for the review at the end of an appointment when it's clear your patient's feeling like their health is improving or they're pleased with your care.

All you have to say is some version of this:

"You know I'm really happy to hear this has been a positive experience for you so far, would you be willing to leave a 5 star review? Your testimonial could help us treat more patients and inspire them to overcome their health issues."

And when they say:

"of course I'd be more than happy to leave a review"

Say great! I'll message you right away with the link to leave the review so you don't have to go looking for it.

This has an almost 100% success rate because they've verbally committed to it and they understand how significant it is.

No matter how many reviews you have, getting more of them and aiming to always have at least one per month is huge.

GBP Photos

Real quick, this one is simple and easy, but it makes a difference because people do check out your photos. Since his practice is 100% telehealth, we created some nice graphics to pair with the reviews. Anything that's informative about the practice and shows that you're an approacable human works.

Now onto those website improvements and the metrics that improved with them.

Website Improvements

Luckily for Dr. Erez, he's based in San Diego where there's both a solid search volume for functional medicine and low competition. Hence why we never needed ads.

And in 2023 he was on the first page of Google, but I knew that with some tweaks to his site, we could bring him closer to the top of the page and then we could work to increase the percentage of people that booked an intro call.

And we did just that:

"I think we did that really well. so, you know, people organically coming to the website, from Google and from other chat GPT, some of the AI, I definitely get like a a decent amount of patients, you know, from different sources like that." - People organically coming to the website

So let's break it down:

The Home Page

The first thing we did was go into semrush and identify the best keyword for his site to rank for, which ended up being functional medicine san diego.

Right off the bat i noticed that his main heading, title tag, and meta description didn't contain the keyword 'functional medicine san diego', so his site wasn't explicitly saying "hey I want to show up for this search result"

So, we added it. Then I realized he didn't have an H1 tag, even though the first heading looked like an H1, so we fixed that, too. We wanted to make sure every technical piece was optimized before we worked on the actual content.

(There's actually a free SEO toolbar chrome extension you can download that will tell you if for some reason you don't have an H1 on your site or if there's other stuff you need to optimize, so I'll put the link in the decscription for that.)

Next, we realized that he had a lot of great content, but it wasn't easy to scan and it lacked the visual elements to accompany the text and provide section breaks. Which I felt was overwhelming some visitors, causing them to click off the page and look for another provider.

So we restructured things a bit to make it more scannable.

Interactive Quiz

After that, we wanted to come up with a valuable resource that people would actually engage with in exchange for their contact info, cause we knew that not everybody would book a call right away and we didn't want to just hope that they might come back to the site in the future.

We wanted to be able to send them educational content and help them make the right decision for their health.

So we created the 'functional health score' assessment which gave them their score the moment they completed the quiz and entered their email address.

And it worked. After a while, we had a nice a little email list we could nurture into new patients.

Other Key Pages

And the final pieces were his About page and the addition of expertise pages and blog pages.

"I think we also worked on SEO quite a bit and put a lot of content on the website, the blog articles.we hit some like gold mines too in terms of like just articles that went a little bit viral."

Now, I see a lot of doctors get this wrong, but a good about page is crucial for two reasons:

• It's almost always the second most visited page on your site behind your homepage
• This is where you really lay out your Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust (EEAT) which is a framework Google uses in the ranking algorithm

So a few quick tips on these 2 pieces:

• Make the About page about the patient, not yourself! Continue to cover what your practice does for the patient, why it's the right choice for them, and why they can trust you. So you want to be saying 'You' way more than "I'.
• Sprinkle in your years of experience, your credentials, link to any media appearances, basically anything that can convey your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, put it on this page.

Now for Dr. Erez's expertise pages and his blog, we simply wrote helpful content for the conditions he most commonly treats and that culmination of text and information on his website signalled to Google and AI that he is a helpful, trusted source and provider of functional medicine. Plus it lead to more pages being viewed by more visitors, which is another good signal for the ole algorithm.

RESULTS

Within just 6 months, monthly traffic went up by half. Leads more than doubled. He moved from eighth to fourth on Google. And when people found him, there was finally more than one way to reach out.

And six months after that, his revenue doubled from the year before, and it's grown every year since.

But this was never really about the revenue. It's about what the revenue buys you. The security to run your own practice full time, and treat patients the way you always knew they should be treated.

Here's my favorite thing he said all interview.

"Yeah, I mean it's awesome. it's awesome to just feel like you have control over which patients are coming to you. you're just set in in terms of like the patient flow. Like and that and then you're just trying to improve your like what you're doing for the patient, right? You can focus on the stuff that you actually love, which is just diving in really really deep on the stuff that you love and you're good at. Like that's the goal with this stuff. and that's why patients come to us so that we can, you know, do better than the conventional, you know, standard of care"

Once you've got the systems in place for your website and your GBP, it's time to build an audience on YouTube. That's our current focus for Dr. Erez. And if you don't know where to start, check out the related posts below.