EP 446: AI Is Coming for Your Spa: How to Stay Visible (and Booked) in the New Era of Search

Welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. This is a show where we talk about all things growth strategy and success in the aesthetic industry. I am your host, Daniela, and today we are diving into something big. We are diving into one of the aspects that AI is shifting and changing, and that is SEO. And the thing is, AI is shifting and changing pretty much everything that we do in our lives, right? We’re here talking about business and how we’re running our spas, and how it’s affecting payroll, and how it’s affecting productivity, and how it’s affecting our marketing and how it’s affecting the way that our clients and patients are searching for us. It’s it’s really, really incredible, but it’s also affecting every aspect of our life. But today, in this episode, I want to get into specifically SEO. What is shifting and changing around SEO and AI, okay, and it’s a lot, it’s a lot. So we use HLM, high level marketing. They are a company that builds websites, handles SEO, does a lot of different supportive marketing, growth, SEO type of tasks, and they have a spa division. So they’re a company that we have been partnered with for several years now, and we use them for our own SEO. We recommend them for websites and SEO for spas. And we, last year, unveiled, we redid our website. It was, it was a long time coming. I know, anytime I do a website, it’s like, by the time you get it done, you’re like, Oh, I already want these things changed, but I actually still really like our website. So I’m happy about that. But since we unveiled our website and really started focusing on SEO. We moved to the first page ofGoogle for several terms that we were aiming to get ranked for nationally.

So obviously, for my ego, that was a really big win, but more than our ego or like, accomplishing a goal, it was actually really exciting, because we were seeing results from that. We were having doctors and med spa owners and estheticians and nurses reach out to us and want to work with us and want support, and they had not heard of us from the podcast. They had not heard of us from social media. They were literally finding us through search. So that was a big win, because we never want all of our eggs in one basket, right? We want to make sure that we are attracting clients from social from SEO, from word of mouth from strategic partners, right?

We want different ways that they’re coming in and finding us. So this was a win, because we were traditionally getting most of our clients that we were working with through the podcast and ultimately social, right? So think about this for your spa, where are most of your leads coming from? If most of your leads are coming from search, then this episode is incredibly important for you, okay? And what I see in Spa is, yes, there’s always word of mouth, and that’s, you know, that’s going to be great. It’s a little bit harder to control word of mouth and have the levers to pull, like we have with social or with search. We want to have multiple ways that people are coming in to find us. Okay, so a couple of weeks ago, I was meeting with our account manager at HLM.

So we meet, you know, I think, every other month or so, to go over our Google Analytics and what’s going on with SEO, and what are the things that are shifting and changing. And we saw that there was this weird trend happening, and it was strange, because our impressions, like the the visibility was up, but our actual clicks were down. And I was like, that doesn’t really make sense. And you know, it’s been about a year now that I feel like I’ve been in the deep end with AI and have barely scratched the surface. There’s so much else out there, there’s so much deeper that we can go, especially with these AI agents that I’ll talk about in a minute. Um, but I was like, what is happening here? Why? Why is this shifting and changing? And I’ve been very curious about how AI was going to incorporate into. Search, because search is changing, people are going directly to chat GPT to find information, rather than going, you know, to Google. And I think we’re going to continue to see that more and more. In fact, it was just last month that I had a call with a doctor in Arizona. She was interested in working with us. She’s doing a build out for a Wellness Center, and she needed some guidance on what energy based devices was she going to purchase. And, you know, just some like structuring of the build out and the overall launch.

And as I said before, like most people are finding us through our podcast, and she was completely unaware of our podcast. And I said, Oh, well, how did you find us and get this? She asked ChatGPT. She was going through with ChatGPT figuring out, like, you know, how do I do the build out, what are the best things? And ChatGPT told her to hire us. So I was like, Okay, well, thank you, ChatGPT. That’s a new one. I actually told some of the people in our growth factor group, and one gal in there said, Yeah, I’ve had five clients come to me from chatgpt in the past month. Like five. That is this is a trend that is continuing to move forward. It’s it’s not really a trend. It’s just kind of the the new way that things are going to be. So anyway, the point that I’m trying to make is that the way that we are finding information is shifting and changing.

People are using ChatGPT to search, and so if you’re going through, if you’re investing in SEO, and you’re like, Wait, why are my impressions up but my clicks down? The answer that we figured out is AI overviews. So you know, when you do a Google search and you get this nice little summary box up at the top, and it gives you all of your answers. And you can even just click down, and it’s like giving you all of these bullet points, and then it has a little link to the website that it’s pulling that from. Well, I’m getting my complete answer in that AI overview without having to click on anybody’s website. So what was actually happening is that we were showing up in the AI overviews, and people were getting their information, but then we were not, they weren’t clicking directly to our website. Okay, so this is really important, right?

So what does this mean for your spas website, and, most importantly, what does it mean for your bookings? How are we going to strategize to make sure that if we’re showing up in the AI overviews, that we’re still continuing to get new clients or patients through search? Okay, so AI overviews, these are appearing more and more and more, and they’re pulling from the top ranking content. But again, people are not necessarily clicking. So you still want to focus on showing up in those overviews, because think about how you’re searching and finding information, you’re going to go and you’re going to look for your information, and then you may go to somebody’s website, you may go to their social media, you may, you know, like we’re doing almost some research, and search is where we’re getting started.

And then we move along through the pipeline. So even if someone is not clicking on your site, if you are coming up over and over and over again with like in those AI overviews, that’s going to build credibility, that’s going to build trust, that’s going to put your name at the top. Like, wow, if this place is showing up here, here and here, then that means they must be the best, right? That’s going to show that you have the authority, that you are the voice for that particular particular topic in your area. Okay? And get this, so I had mentioned that about the AI agents. So last month, open AI, they have, like a blog that they release, like the different features and AI agents are being rolled out. So right now, most people are using AI to help them create marketing content, whether that’s social media, captions, blog posts, you know, things like this,people that are a little more advanced, or maybe using it to help them analyze their numbers or to create spreadsheets, or using it to create. Create business plans a little more complex tasks.

What AI agents are able to do is to rationalize and do multiple tasks. So what you could say, what a patient or client could say to an AI agent is, you know what, I really want to get a facial. So can you search for a spa that’s not going to take me more than 20 minutes to drive to that has a star rating of 4.5 or higher, that has an appointment next Thursday between 12 and four that offers microneedling. And so the person the user is asking the AI agent to do the research for them and give them a list of solutions, of practices, of spas that have that that meet that criteria. So first of all, that’s crazy, right? But it’s not crazy.

It’s something that’s going to be here before we know what it is here. It’s a matter of how quickly are people adopting this way of search, how quickly are people utilizing the support of AI in these everyday tasks, right? And so how do we make sure that our spas are showing up in those searches from the agents? Well, this is where traditional SEO is going to be incredibly important, because the AI agents are going to find the sites that are optimized. This is having proper headings, having proper meta descriptions, having proper tags.

There’s all of writing clearly and concisely with deep context. It’s also looking at the sites that are updated regularly. So when you create a blog post on the back end, there’s a lot of things that happen with getting posted to directories or different ways that Google kind of itemizes how search is done. This is way out of my scope, right, which is why I hire an SEO company to handle all of these things for me and make sure that my site is optimized. But I want to make sure that all of those things are properly built so that when an AI agent is searching my site is going to come up. Okay, you can be the absolute best provider and get the best results. And if there’s not a way to find you online, you can get left behind.

So this is a really, really important piece of how people are going to find you and how you are going to attract new clients or get new clients or patients in this new world of AI, okay, now, of course, there’s always going to be word of mouth. Of course there’s going to be social but as content is easier and easier to make, and there’s a lower barrier to entry to have someone say, okay, yeah, you can, you can create a month worth of content in about an hour, more people will be doing it. And so there’s more and more competition, which is why, with our growth factor students, I’ve been talking so much about getting crystal clear on your ICA, on your ideal client avatar, so that we’re speaking directly to that person.

Okay, so let’s get a little more tactical here and talk about how you actually get featured in those AI overviews. So writing with clarity, so we want to make sure that we have short, 40 to 60 word answer blocks that are going to answer questions just like you would in the treatment room. We want to be kind, we want to be direct, we want to be knowledgeable that can really be helpful in getting you to rank. A great idea for a blog post might be top 10 questions I get asked as an esthetician, you could even do an individual blog post that goes in depth with each of those questions. And this is where you can optimize for SEO, and you can ask chat to do that, you know, create a blog post and optimize for SEO, if you are a speak to think person like me, and even if you’re not, if you’re in practice, you’ve been answering questions over and over and over again for your clients and patients. So there’s a there are some comments.

Questions, whether that’s about pre or post care contraindications. You know who think of the just list out like the 10 most common questions that you are getting about the different services, and you can hit the microphone in chat GBT, so if you’re opening up chatgpt, just hit the microphone and you can speak. You can just say.

You can even have someone ask you the question, then you can answer it while the dictate button is on. If that’s easier for you, that’s going to help you, number one, go faster, and number two, get your actual voice, like the way that you speak, so that chat can have an understanding of your tone, of your word choice, and you’re really training it on your style. Okay, there’s a gal in one of my mastermind groups, my networking groups that I’m in, and she on her morning walk every day is like having conversations with chatgpt to train chat on her style, on her tone, on her thoughts, to help her write content for her business.

So it’s important to have these short answer blocks or snippets within the blog post. But you don’t want just a bunch of content that’s really short content, not in depth. So we want to, we try, here at Addo esthetics, to always have our blog post be 1000 words or more. And I would absolutely recommend that for you as well. Okay, so start with just 10 blog posts with the most common questions that you are getting asked. Okay, again, contraindications, pre and post, treatment instructions, expected results, timelines, personal insights. Make sure that you’re not just listing the what, but the why.

Okay, all right, so here’s another little bit of information. This is something that we just started doing in the past month or so, but AI ranks from voices that it trusts, and so adding BIOS with credentials, especially on blog posts, is really important. So we have this little rectangle block at the bottom of every blog post that has a picture of me, and then it has my bio. And so we’re, we’re letting, we’re building trust, right, and saying, This is the author. This is the bio.

Here’s the content that was written. Okay, you want to make sure that you can link to Google reviews, that you are linking to other blog posts, that you’re linking to other case studies, to highlight the results of what it is. So if you have, let’s say that you have a before and after picture of a micro needling patient inside of your Instagram. You can include that inside of the blog post, like a link to your Instagram. You can directly put the picture there. And you could have a thing that says for more before and after pictures. Go and check out, you know, our Instagram here, or check out this page of our website for case studies.

So the more links that you have in there, the better. And make sure that you’re using language that mirrors the client’s questions. Okay, so they’re gonna say, How long does Botox last? Not? What are neurotoxin duration guidelines? And it’s important to note, like most people are calling neurotoxin Botox, so there’s a lot of brand names, right? There’s Botox, there’s Xeomin, there’s juvo, there’s disport, but most people are going to come in and say, Botox. Okay, so when we’re looking at that as a search term, then that that’s going to be the question that people are asking. So keep that in mind when you’re doing your SEO. Okay, all right, so this is going to be a shift, right? And we’re going to have to shift the different KPIs that we’re tracking. So in the past, we’re really looking at clicks, right? We want to get people to our website.

And right now, if we’re continually increasing our impressions, but people are not clicking as much, now we understand why. Okay, so we’re maybe not going to care about the clicks as much as we used to, but we’re going to care about how frequently we’re showing up, where we’re showing up, and I would really start to look at, how am I showing up in chat, and how am I showing up? Yeah, you know, that’s something that I would be asking my clients and patients, like, how many people found you through chat, GBT or through AI agents?

Okay, now, as I mentioned in the beginning, you’re going to have multiple lead sources, and we want to continue to have multiple lead sources, so there’s search, there’s social, whether that’s paid or organic, there’s word of mouth, there’s strategic partnerships. If you have a busy storefront, you can have foot traffic or walk ins. So we want to look at, we want to make sure that we have a diversified approach of getting new people in.

Now I want to just make sure that I’m adding a side note here, because it’s not always about getting new people in. We want to make sure that we are retaining our existing patient base or client base, that we are loving on them and letting them know that we value their business, and that’s a really important piece. It is so much easier to go deep with an existing patient that already knows likes and trusts you than it is to attract a new client, and it’s more expensive to attract a new client as well. However, we are losing approximately 20% of our patient base or client base every single year for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

People move people’s financial situations change. People start families, and, you know, maybe they’re they’re pregnant or nursing and can’t do some of the services that we offer. There’s a variety of reasons that someone would no longer come to your spa. So we have to plan on attracting 20% new patient base just to maintain right and that’s why I say that, if you’re 80% full, is full. So if you’re at 80% productivity on the schedule, you want to leave space for new people to get in. If you are 100% booked and you’re booked out for six weeks, and you’re feeling good about yourself because you’re booked out for six weeks.

Your business is slowly dying, because if somebody new is trying to get in, they’re not going to be able to get in within that two week time frame. It’s going to take them longer and they’re going to go somewhere else, and that is not a good thing. Okay? So we want to make sure that we have space to welcome new people. We want to make sure that we have multiple avenues that people are coming in from, and we want to have an understanding of how we’re going to attract that 20% new patient base to kind of maintain. And if we need to grow, affording to grow, then are we trying to attract 25% 30% what are we looking for in terms of growth for our business? So I’m a big fan of building your email list, making sure that we’re getting people on our email list that are potential clients and patients, not just people who have already come in to see us and nurturing them that way.

You obviously can be creating content on social, you can be creating content on YouTube, you can have a podcast, and all of those things combined are going to really help your online presence to come up more frequently in search. Okay? So remember, we are not fighting the algorithm. Here we are learning how to work with the algorithm, how to stay relevant, how to adapt our content, how to be clear and deep and strategic in the actions that we are taking so that we’re going to rise up and be the trusted experts that we are going to be the website, the business that chatgpt, that AI overviews, is going To pull from when they’re looking in the online space. Okay, so with all of these changes with AI, which, by the way, it’s every month or two, there’s something different.

So we you just have to learn how to be in that space where things are constantly evolving, constantly adapting, constantly changing. This is the beginning of a whole new way of life, of a whole new way of doing business. This is why for our growth factor elite program, we’re in the beta right now, but we actually are teaching this. Live every year, and we’re teaching it live every year with the intention to do it for the next five years or more as a live program, because we know that we’re gonna have to redo the content every year. We’re gonna have to update it to make sense with what is going on in business and what’s going on in the way that we are operating our businesses?

Okay, there’s going to be a lot of changes in the way that ads are done. There’s going to be a lot of changes in the way that social is done. There’s going to be a lot of changes, as we’re seeing right now, in the way that SEO is done. These don’t have to be bad things. These don’t have to be scary things. It’s it’s actually an opportunity for us to be creative and adapt and actually run far more profitable businesses. So I want you to be paying attention.

There’s never been a more important time for your company to have a CEO to really understand the shifts and changes and navigate your spa through these things, vitally, vitally important. Now I hope that I can be here to support you through this podcast, through the things that I’m learning. I by no means have it all figured out, but I am doing my best to stay on top of it and share everything that I’m learning with you. So thank you so much for listening. To keep this conversation going. I want you to head over to the spa marketing Made Easy Facebook group. Ask questions in there, comment in there. Let us know what’s working for you in there, and this is going to be an exciting, exciting couple of years in business.