I have been telling local business owners the same two things for about a decade, and I have never had a great way to prove I was not just being lazy about it. Fix your Google Business Profile. Set up conversion tracking. That is it, that is the opening move.
It always sounds like the answer you give when you have not thought hard about the account.
So it was useful to put the question to someone who only markets one vertical. Isaac Justesen runs PatientPartners, an agency that takes physical therapy, chiropractic, massage and counseling practices and nothing else. Five years in a single niche. If anyone had earned the right to describe an exotic specialist process, it was him.
He said the mechanics of ranking a chiropractor are basically the mechanics of ranking a plumber. Then he named the same two items.
Why those two and not something clever
The business profile is the one every owner set up in week one and never opened again. Wrong categories. No services listed. Those are two fields, and on a local search they decide whether you exist.
Conversion tracking is the one that gets skipped because it does not bring anybody in. That is exactly why it goes first. Without it you spend the next five years arguing about budget from memory.
I turned his version of that pass into a step-by-step SOP so it is not just advice, it is a procedure someone can run this week.
The part I had wrong
I have always treated regulated verticals as a content problem. Write carefully, avoid claims, move on.
Isaac treats it as a jurisdiction problem, and he is right. The restricted language varies state by state and province by province. Comparative statements are commonly out. Words like specialized and expert are restricted in a lot of places. So the rule is not “write carefully”, it is “check the rules for this specific market before you write anything at all”. If you serve more than one state you need a note per state, and that note gets more valuable every client you add.
The bit that made me sit up
I asked about pain points and expected a marketing answer. He gave me an operations one.
“You would be blown away at how few phone calls get answered.”
Everybody audits the contact form. Almost nobody audits the phone. And for a local business the phone is the funnel. The person is on a sidewalk or in a car with their thumb on your number. A missed call there is not a delayed sale, it is somebody else’s sale.
I have covered speed to lead on the show before, with Jake Melendy of Ignitvio, whose team measured around 1,800 businesses and found 68 percent never replied inside 24 hours. Same shape, one layer further down. Isaac will not hand the front desk to an AI yet, and said so plainly, which I appreciated more than a pitch.
Curation to selection
This is the phrase I am stealing, and Isaac stole it too, which is how you know it travels.
Ten blue links is curation. You get a list, you do the choosing. AI Mode is selection. It does the choosing and hands you one answer.
That is not a small rewording. If a searcher is being handed one result instead of ten, then the structured record Google trusts about your business starts to matter more than the page you wrote about your business. Which is the actual argument for why the profile keeps gaining weight while the website loses a little, and I have not heard it put better.
Same reason most location pages are still wrong. They were written to win a list.
And the one thing to stop doing
I asked what he would get every small business owner to quit. He did not go technical.
“Stop using generic Canva templates on your Instagram. Nobody likes them. I would rather have you take a photo of your team, or the trash you’ve picked up, or whatever, and put that out there.”
The expensive version of the same mistake is boosting posts. He sees clinics with a thousand dollars a month total putting a real chunk of it into boosted Facebook and Instagram posts, and it is usually the first thing he changes.
Full interview on Unscripted SEO, with a small business cut on Unscripted Small Business. Listen or watch. Isaac is at patientpartners.co and gives away a clinic marketing blueprint plus a free audit.