In this episode of the Unscripted Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Darcy Sullivan, founder of Propel Marketing and Design. With over a decade of experience specializing in local SEO for health and wellness professionals, Darcy shares invaluable insights about optimizing online presence for chiropractors, acupuncturists, and physical therapists. From Google Business Profile optimization to content strategy and effective link building, this conversation delivers practical advice for businesses looking to improve their local visibility.


Killer Quotes

"We've seen like things that were working years ago aren't working anymore... you need a unique approach that actually matches your business offering and the services that you offer versus this copy paste stuff." - Darcy Sullivan on content strategy

"Although it's not the same as maybe some other link equity that you would get from some bigger websites, if you're actually driving links to your website that end up in people booking appointments with you, it's a quicker win." - Darcy Sullivan on local link building

"We're seeing SEO was almost used to be thought of in this like little bubble of like the stuff that you do behind the scenes and now we're seeing it just more as like brand optimization overall." - Darcy Sullivan on the evolution of SEO

"Naming conventions alone could be a whole SEO topic, right? Because the brand name that you choose can have huge ramifications on your online presence." - Darcy Sullivan on branding and SEO


Key Takeaways

Google Business Profile optimization is critical - Keep your GBP listing updated and optimized with correct business name, categories, descriptions, and photos.

Authentic content trumps generic copy - Create service-specific content that matches your actual business offerings rather than using templated content.

Local partnerships create valuable links - Focus on local sponsorships and partnerships that both build links and drive actual patients/customers.

City pages need service focus - When creating location-based pages, focus on your services in that city rather than generic information about the location.

Consider branding implications for SEO - Your business name itself can significantly impact your SEO (e.g., "Redwood Chiropractic Care" vs. "Redwood Spine and Sport").

AI should enhance, not replace - Use AI as a supplementary tool rather than relying on it for complete content creation.

Email marketing works with intention - Offer specific, valuable downloads rather than generic PDFs to capture and engage email subscribers.


Related Resources: 


The Conversation

On Working with Health & Wellness Professionals

Jeremy Rivera: That's amazing. I haven't yet talked to somebody who's doing local for that particular niche. I am curious because I have worked with chiropractors in the past. I did some consulting for Dr. Axe who got his site pretty big before the medic update and have cross consulted with a couple people who've worked with a few chiropractors. But I'm curious because in my experience, physical therapists who you also mentioned that you work with sometimes are kind of anti-chiropractor. Have you come across that or is that just something that I've seen?

Darcy Sullivan: I think that's just something you've seen. Most chiropractors that we work with either they also offer physical therapy or they work with other physical therapists or they do something similar. I mean everybody of course has their own business, has their own style, has their own offerings. But I think it's one of our goals which maybe is something you recognize is that we work with them to make sure they're using the right keywords and associating with their target audience the right way. Nobody's going to Google and saying, my appendage hurts. But when you start to talk to some of these doctors, they're like, we work with a lot of appendages. And I'm like, OK, well, that's great. But let's use the words that your audience is using.

Finding Their Niche

Jeremy Rivera: So when it comes to this particular niche, was that niching down choice just a function of, we've gained experience with X number of clients doing it this way? And so it just became easier or was there a backstory there? Like you were from a semi-medical background or did you have a really good chiropractor experience once and they cracked your spine and you just, I love them, I'm gonna get them to the top.

Darcy Sullivan: No, we started picking up a couple clients that were in that field. It was more expanded. It still is. But we just realized this is a great field. We love the personality. Sometimes you just find personalities that you jive with better than others. And once you start getting in it and getting to know their terminology while also understanding what people are searching for, it makes for a complimented resource and in the same way I think it's kind of nice that we're not people or our company isn't a company that was like, well we work with chiropractors and now we turned to marketing. We're more of that. We're your ideal audience and now we're trying to help you market to more of your ideal audience.

Content Strategy for Health Professionals

Jeremy Rivera: So when it comes to content strategy for this particular niche, how are you approaching that structurally? I would imagine there aren't very many mobile chiropractors trying to go around and do chiropractic without a brick-and-mortar location. So how does that approach bend for you?

Darcy Sullivan: So actually you'd be surprised, we do work with some mobile companies. Obviously that's a different strategy completely, but for the ones that do have brick and mortar, we obviously start with what are the actual services that you offer. Are you actually including that proper content on your website? What does your Google business profile listing look like? We do tons of Google business profile listing audits, which we all know how important those are for local businesses. That's where we start, and then we build from there.

Jeremy Rivera: Where's your view on creating sections of content versus publishing blog posts? Is there anything shifting in your practice or what you've seen in competitors in terms of successful content additions?

Darcy Sullivan: So I think first, you have a couple different categories, at least with the audience that we work with. It's either they went to one of those one-stop shops that just puts together content, and all they do is sub out the name and the location and put it together for everybody else. And they come to us and they're like, we've seen like things that were working years ago aren't working anymore and we have to come and say you need a unique approach that actually matches your business offering and the services that you offer versus this copy paste stuff. So we've got that audience. We've got the audience of people that just never did SEO or they had a designer put together a website for them and we're like well you need to actually have specific pages directed towards the services you offer not just a page that says you do chiropractic care. So even though that sounds so basic, we have to start with that basic. From there, then we talk about including conditions in your conditions pages, and then from there, moving into blog posts as supplemental content to promote the other core pages on your website.

Local SEO and Link Building Strategies

Jeremy Rivera: So to like round the next corner topically, what's happening right now is in your view as far as local SEO and citations, local SEO and local link building, what are some of the challenges or successes or level of requirement there? Do you need more links and more citations? What's moving the needle?

Darcy Sullivan: We like to try to make sure that when they're focusing on link building that they're focusing on link building in a way that helps them locally and through partnerships, through sponsorship activities, through gathering other people's audiences that actually combine with theirs. And it might sound so simple, but like let's say there's a chiropractor who deals with a lot of running injuries. Well, them partnering with a local running group and doing sponsorships and getting a partnership that way, although it's not the same as maybe some other link equity that you would get from some bigger websites, if you're actually driving links to your website that end up in people booking appointments with you, it's a quicker win.

Jeremy Rivera: So it's more of on the ground looking for referral opportunities, looking for co-marketing opportunities, as much as is in that ensuring that somewhere in there we get a link.

Darcy Sullivan: Right, well, and you did also mention citations that obviously your Google Business Profile listing, all of your online listings matter. What also matters is we see sometimes that in the example kind of that you gave earlier about like, what about a physical therapist versus a chiropractor? Sometimes people will open up their office and maybe rent out a room in their office. And then that company is also trying to use the same address, which can interfere, causing friction on your Google business profile listings. So there's a lot of like little things. Also, like how do you go about collecting your reviews for Google to make sure that you're not getting in trouble? So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of little things that go into local SEO. So it's not just like go out there and get some links. It's make sure you're doing things the right way. It's not just go out there and get some reviews, because you have to be doing it the right way.

Common SEO Mistakes and Issues

Jeremy Rivera: What's one of the more disastrous things that you've seen in the last six months, like a bad implementation or just a really bad idea that needed to be cleaned up?

Darcy Sullivan: Well, we've seen Google business profile listings get in trouble because they're changing their name to not match their actual business name. We've seen that happen quite a few times and we have to say no, you have to do things the right way. We've seen people go in and suggest Google business profile edits that they shouldn't. That then people are like, hey, all of sudden it says that our location is in a different state. So if you're not monitoring and staying on top of your listing, you can fall prey to that, unfortunately. We've seen a lot of people lean on AI too much. I'm sure you know exactly what I mean with that. And as much as we love AI we just want to make sure that it's not used to be just taken over for a complete content control which we're seeing a bit of that as well which doesn't usually turn out well.

Using AI Effectively

Jeremy Rivera: So where in your process do you leverage AI and how do you keep it from getting out of control or how do you maximize that contribution without becoming dependent or becoming kind of devaluing yourself?

Darcy Sullivan: Yeah. So our team is made up of real writers. We don't rely on AI for the content that we produce for our clients. When we're guiding our clients and training them on best practices for using AI, we're trying to teach them how they need to teach AI what their brand is so it's not just spitting out generic content. Also, you know, there are great uses for it if you are, for example, with your Google Business profile listing if you receive tons of reviews but want some responses ready to go for those reviews you know you can ask chat GPT hey give me 40 responses to positive online reviews regarding a specific service and then like put them in a Google Doc so that your front office person can kind of copy and paste those without just saying thanks thanks thanks. So I think there are ways to use it, to leverage it, to say, hey, review this piece of content for me, how can I improve it, versus just do this for me without any guidance.

Strategies for Service Area Businesses

Jeremy Rivera: What's your advice for those service area business models? You said you did have some, and I could imagine, you know, probably physical therapists might be easier to do on a business, on a mobile model or not having a specific, you know, brick and mortar address that they're working out of. In what way might that shift your advice or your implementation or what you want to look out for to make sure that you capture in the content or in your strategy.

Darcy Sullivan: So I'm sure you've probably had somebody on here before talk about city pages, right? Like when you design and build out a page on your website to get dedicated to a certain city or area. That's a great approach when it's done correctly, especially for the people that are in the service focusing on service areas, but when it's done incorrectly and it just looks like it's a visitor's guide page, it doesn't work well.

Jeremy Rivera: So that would be avoiding the trap of, oh, welcome to Oak Glen where a thousand tourists come and Bob Whitney visited in 2013 and there's this plaque on Apple Annie's store and oh, by the way, get your chiropractic adjustment in Oak Glen.

Darcy Sullivan: Yeah, I've actually even seen some where they don't even talk about the services they offer, that they thought that they could just get away with just doing a page on the city and then you look at analytics and you're like, well, people are actually coming to it surprisingly, but bouncing off the moment they get there because it doesn't suggest what you offer.

Jeremy Rivera: So, it is still, despite Google's protestations a decade ago of, don't make doorway pages or location pages, now the game has flipped entirely. And if you want to show up locally for a service, it looks like you got to make a local service page to make a play for those terms. But not in the 2005 realtor sort of way where you're just like let's make a guide to Apple Valley. No, no, want to make a, you know, chiropractor in Riverside page, not a Riverside page that happens to mention chiropractor, chiropractor, chiropractor-y.

Darcy Sullivan: Exactly. Chiropractor. Chiropractor, I love it. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that's something to take into account and also for that target audience, really placing yourself in the community and community involvement matters more. I think we're starting to see SEO was almost used to be thought of in this like little bubble of like the stuff that you do behind the scenes and now we're seeing it just more as like brand optimization overall and making sure that you know it used to be it was just like drive traffic to the website well then you need to make sure when the traffic gets to your website that it's set up for conversions like you know there's all these additional elements and plates and things that go into SEO that maybe years ago weren't necessarily considered to be in that same section.

Cross-Channel Marketing and SEO

Jeremy Rivera: That's definitely true. I was just re-listening to my interview with Melissa Popp of Rickety Roo and she was hitting hard on the fact that, you know, we need to feel ourselves, feel comfortable in cross channel and be confident in communicating to, you know, if there are other parts of the business that are doing radio ads or are doing TV ads or billboards or direct mailers that there's, there's an SEO piece to that because if you send out a piece of direct mail, well or what URL did you pay to print on that piece of paper that'll go with her that person's mailbox? And is that actually the correct URL or did you send a postcard to Riverside and your main page is actually on Pomona? Because that's going to be a mismatch.

Branding and SEO

Darcy Sullivan: Naming conventions alone could be a whole SEO topic, right? Because the brand name that you choose can have huge ramifications on your online presence. Because we see this with chiropractors, I'll just give that example of like, let's say it was a company that named themselves Redwood Spine and Sport versus Redwood Chiropractic Care or Chiropractic Partners. And that's like your area, right, where you're trying to target. Who do you think is going to show up more for chiropractor or chiropractic? The one that actually has it in their name that's casually mentioning it throughout the site because it's their name. So that's just, I think, something that sometimes people don't think about in the early stages.

Creating Effective Content Resources

Jeremy Rivera: Drawing it back to content strategy, have you seen more success in trying to create things like downloadable guides or additional deeper resources versus just throwing every new piece of content into the blog?

Darcy Sullivan: So I would say a lot of people fall short when it comes to that downloadable if it's just missing the connection. So like if I go to your website and you're like, download this whatever about back pain, it's not necessarily showing a value add. Versus, let's go back to the example earlier that we talked about with the runners and partnering with a running club locally. If you do something that's a little bit more niche down and you're just targeting that on the pages that are maybe about your running blogs, that you're then like, download these three helpful stretches for before you start your run, you're gonna see more luck than just like a general.

But we find like when they do like the basics of like, download this really boring basic guide that has a really boring basic name and expect a 12-page PDF that you're never gonna read, that people don't take that action. But if you're like, here, get three videos, three helpful videos, whether they're already sitting on your YouTube channel and you're just sending them in three consecutive emails with the three stretches, you're more likely to get a lead than you are with the old school ebooks.

Process-Focused Content

Jeremy Rivera: Right. What I'm curious about is like, or what I see as a missed opportunity maybe is there's a lot of assumptions that business owners make about like how the process works. And I think things like, you know, for, you know, IV drip therapy, just having like, what even is this? Like, I'm kind of afraid of needles. So what am I getting into? Instead of just a service page for a city, describe the process. How does this work, type of pages, to comfort or just provide better illustration of walkthrough of the processes?

Darcy Sullivan: Yeah, I think that's a great point. And to like layer on that, what we've seen before is, you know, videos the new rage, video, video, video, which, not disagreeing with that. But sometimes what people do is they throw up a video, they invest a lot of time, money, and resources into a video, but don't include the text that relates to it and they just assume everybody's gonna like push play and watch that video where we have to remember that everybody searches differently, everybody interacts differently, and we want that text so Google can see the text that's actually the juicy goodness of the answers that people are looking for even if it's just gonna show that one like little segment about what does this actually do or you know.

Jeremy Rivera: What value does your interior designer actually bring to the table? Like, I'm an interior designer, what does that mean? Like, what do you actually do? Like, laying out, well, I make the color suggestions, I find the color splotches, I can source this particular furniture, you know, whether it's for your ADP or your add-on, your home edition, or your existing house, like, we're going to do this, this, and this, which is different from, you know, like, your typical service page, right?

Darcy Sullivan: Well, it should, the specific services pages should highlight your process, what somebody should expect. You know, done, you know, header tags aren't just for SEO, they're for people to be able to scan and find proper content on a page and jump to that section. So it needs to be laid out properly, but also, yeah, and there are opportunities to also, you know, create blog posts and video content and email blasts regarding just one segment of that as well.

Email Marketing Integration

Jeremy Rivera: Have you actually worked with any clients that have combined or have found an effective way to use emails captured off of their website? Or do you find that that's spinning wheels on one side or the other?

Darcy Sullivan: I find that it's usually the audience where they had purchased a generic piece of content that they're putting together as a 12-page PDF that nobody downloads. And again, we have found if they really niche into a specific group and offer a download that's more enticing than a 12-page PDF that nobody's going to read, like the three exercises that they see more leads from that. Now it doesn't necessarily mean that they're all going to be local and that they're all going to be people that are actually going to end up handing over money to these people, but that does seem to work much better than, again, the generic content. Is that what you're seeing?

Jeremy Rivera: I've seen yeah, I'm just seeing a lot of disconnects between like the way that people treat the audience capture off of the website of basically like if they aren't handing me money right now Then I don't really like they don't seem to connect the value Whereas I have seen like individual cases where you have a finely tuned, say, newsletter that you're regularly sending out to and have ROI off of that newsletter that you've been able to prove by doing, you know, specific server offers or something that you're able to prove.

Darcy Sullivan: So I would say I worked with one company who I can't name the name of the company, but they had it dialed in and we worked with them on a plan for if somebody hadn't come in to purchase in X period of time, they would run the correct email funnel, right? When people came in, they had the correct funnel.

But a lot of these small businesses are just on MailChimp and they don't have anything special set up where it's just, you signed up for our email, great, now once a week we're gonna send you an email and you're gonna get a happy Thanksgiving picture of a turkey. I think that it needs to be done with intention. And when it is, it's usually executed really well.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, it's like, wow. I know it seems there's I just saw one of those earlier today on a packaging site. And at the at the bottom in the footer is like sign up for a newsletter. And it was like five fields. I'm like, why? Why? What? What do I get about what you're not even saying what you're going to send in the newsletter? Just. Yeah, I really need a newsletter about my cannabis packaging needs.

Top Actionable Advice

Jeremy Rivera: As we kind of round out the interview here at the end, what's the most actionable advice you can give to either small business owners in your niche that you're comfortable working with in that, you know, health and wellness, local health and wellness service space, or for SEOs who are working in that space, what's your number one tip that they should go execute on this after they listen to you?

Darcy Sullivan: Well, your Google Business Profile listing. Anyone trying to rank locally needs to keep an eye on their Google Business Profile listing and not just leave it and forget it, make sure that it's actually optimized, and keep up with it regularly.

Jeremy Rivera: Well, let's talk about optimized real fast. What's on your checklist of optimized for a Google business page? Because it's nice to, like, yeah, go look at your stupid stuff. But, which is good. It's good advice. I want it. But I want, let's get a little more granular when you say optimized, what are some of those check boxes to tick off?

Darcy Sullivan: Okay. Okay, so is your name your actual name? Business name. Is your address correct? Have you gone in and added the correct main category for your business and other categories? Because we see if you do select other categories, as long as it aligns with your business, that you're going to get more visibility. Are you including a business description? Have you like, you know, they're going to ask about parking. We've noticed if you don't fill out, like it's going to ask for your social media sites now. It came, we had a couple of weeks ago, one chiropractor was like, huh, it's pulling in another chiropractor that had the same business name was pulling in those Facebook reviews and showcasing it as that business.

 So even though you think Google's the almighty and they should know everything you still have to tell it some things like what your social media profiles are about your business, that you're including a link to your website, that you've got videos, that you've got photos, that you're doing Google posts, that under the Q &A you can start asking questions as the business and answering them. And that starts with some of the basics like what services do you offer? What should I know before I first visit? What should I like if there's any issue with parking you want to make sure that they know about it ahead of time so that they're coming in happy not mad because they were just driving around for a half an hour trying to find a space to park.

Jeremy Rivera: That totally makes sense. Also don't forget to add your tracking tag to your URL so that you can know, hey, these clicks came from that. Because it is kind of a little bit of a black box sometimes at agencies because we aren't given like... Like people don't look at the traffic stats and details of the Google business profile. They only look at Search Console or only at analytics, but there's some really valuable data as far as how people are interacting with that. So from the SEO side, I think the advice would be jump in there and look at the stats, look at the impressions, look at the actions listed. You know, what are the, what's the volume of recorded calls off of it? All of those are important signals that can, and especially shifts in those signals, can indicate, uh-oh, something's majorly wrong or hey, something's really good.

Darcy Sullivan: And hours, we didn't mention hours, but hours, openness is a ranking factor. Like if you have your business listed as being closed on Tuesdays and you notice that your traffic is down, phone calls to your location are down on Tuesdays, should you reconsider maybe being open on Tuesdays? That's a business decision that also plays into SEO.

Jeremy Rivera: So repeat again where people can find you. Are you on any particular social media yourself where people can interact with you?

Darcy Sullivan: Sure, so our website is propelyourcompany.com and you can find us on Instagram at propelyourcompany and that is only 1L.

Jeremy Rivera: Okay, propel. Got it. Thanks so much for your time and insights, Darcy.

Darcy Sullivan: Thanks so much for having me, this has been a blast.

Find Darcy Sullivan and her team at propelyourcompany.com and on Instagram at @propelyourcompany. This interview was originally featured on the Unscripted Podcast.

Resources from Darcy

Free Local SEO Workshop - Learn the five SEO secrets to owning the first page of Google without buying ads

Google Business Profile Listing Ultimate Guide & Checklist - Everything you need to optimize your Google Business Profile