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Med Spa Success Strategies
SEO & AI SEO (GEO, AEO) for Med Spas in 2026: Fast Tips for Better Rankings!
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Foreigners Ricky Shockley from MedSpa Magic Marketing we're continuing our 2026 marketing and growth series. Here we're giving away our best strategies, our entire playbook on how to grow your med spa with maximum efficiency. So if this is the first video in the series that you're watching, I would strongly recommend you go back and watch some of the previous videos in this series. We already covered the prerequisites for success. How to develop a brand that helps you stand apart how to understand positioning and winning in a competitive environment the trade offs between discount and brand based ad strategies Specifics on customer acquisition cost how to measure and have confidence in your ROI how to allocate budget in order of priority Gave away our top performing frameworks for Facebook and Instagram ads and Google Ads. And we talked about how to maximize lead conversion so that you're not just generating leads, but you have a clear framework and a plan for maximizing the number of leads that turn into paid booked appointments. Today we're going to be talking about search engine optimization and answer engine optimization. So answer engine optimization can also be called GEO or AI SEO. And it's basically people start, we're starting to get a pulse on, hey, we understand people are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Groq, some of these other tools to find businesses and to perform search queries. So how might that differ or overlap with SEO search engine optimization? So these are going to be the strategies that you can use on your own as a business owner to improve your search rankings fast. If you're hiring an SEO company and working with an SEO company, this will give you some things to consider to hopefully get clarity on that investment. What actually moves the needle in my opinion, where your focus should be. And so I think this is going to give you a ton of confidence on how to improve your rankings in organic search in Google outside of the ad space. So let's jump into this today. So the first thing is we recommend doing things in order of priority. We start here with meta ads. I actually revamped this so I'm going to give you some different numbers than a word on the screen here. But really I want a focus on one ads platform. Either meta ads for most med spas, maybe Google Ads is the priority 1A I want to be doing a million dollars a year before I diversify into a second acquisition channel. At about a million dollars a year, I want to diversify into that second acquisition channel and also start taking brand building a little bit more seriously. We talked about that in the previous videos and after you're at $1.52 million a year is kind of a rough rule of thumb, that's when I recommend an ongoing SEO investment. So many of you are watching this, and that's news to you. You're already paying for SEO. You're doing $1.5 million. You, you're not spending much on ads. You don't really know what you're paying for with your SEO provider. My goal here is to give you some clarity on this and the reason behind it. So I'm an SEO professional by trade. I started in the space in 2011. The first thing I became obsessed with as a digital marketer was SEO. And for the next 10 years, I did freelance work and consulting for other agencies, helping them with SEO and ad strategies for their clients, in addition to working with clients of my own. I say that because hopefully that adds some credibility to my recommendation here. I like to set the foundation for SEO early. Your page blueprints are good. The content, depth and quality is dialed in. We've got our basics of on page SEO and we have a pulse on what moves the needle. But our Google business listing is dialed in. But I don't want to spend money on SEO too early in the business because the reality is the progress after you do the initial things right, you is slow, incremental and unpredictable. But we're going to talk about what things you can do to move the needle and set yourself up for success. All right, so ranking factors. There are all sorts of things. If you, if you've ever talked to an SEO provider, you've heard all sorts of technical mumbo jumbo when you get a sales email or a pitch or a report from your SEO company. And I'm not saying this is all like in vain, but they'll send things that are related to core web vitals, nap consistency, citations, schema. All of those things are things that I call housekeeping tasks. It's the equivalent of doing your dishes. Doing your dishes doesn't make your house more valuable. It just makes sure your house isn't a disaster. Those are basic boxes you want to check to make sure your house is not a disaster. But all evidence points to the things that actually move the needle in terms of ranking impact. Fall into one of two buckets. The first bucket are what we call on page SEO signals, content signals. This is. Does Google understand what you do, where you do it? And is the information robust, informative, and is the user experience really dialed in? Are you giving people all of the information they need to make a good decision and to feel confident in the information. The second thing are off page signals, which are largely driven by links. How many other trusted and reputable websites have linked to and mentioned your business online? So let's dive into those two buckets since those are the things that actually matter. By all available evidence. You even see in Google's own documentation, they talk about content signals and website signals first. And the next thing is looking at the concept of if other prominent websites link to or refer to your content and your website. Hey, practice owners, Ricky here. And if you're tired of seeing your marketing as an expense, it's time to see it as the investment it should be. At MedSpa Magic Marketing, we specialize in driving predictable massive growth for medspas. We helped one client generate over 2,500 new clients directly attributed from ads in less than 18 months. And these aren't outliers. This is our expectation. We're HIPAA certified by Compliancy Group, rated a perfect five stars on Google, and we provide true consulting and strategic direction to our clients, not just button pushing. If your medspa is able to consistently invest in marketing and advertising and you want a transformative look at the exact frameworks, ads, offers and strategies that we use for our clients, schedule your complimentary strategy session with me@medspamagicmarketing.com that's medspamagicmarketing.com all right, I went over some of these things related to when to implement the SEO investment. So let's jump into SEO basics and nailing your on page SEO. So if you watched this series last year, I want to make sure we have some extra wrinkles and new things that we're thinking about and all the stuff we're doing for our clients to help level up their search engine optimization where they're showing up in Google. And also on the back end of this presentation today, the answer engines, the the AI search engines. All right, the first thing is each service on your website needs to have a dedicated page. So if you've got Botox, you don't want a neurotoxins page on your website where you just list all of the different neurotoxin products that you offer. You want a dedicated page for Botox because people will search by for Botox by name. So the general rule of thumb is if people are searching for the product by name, it needs to have its own page. If they're searching for it only by category, it's probably okay to have it on a category page, but that's checkbox one. We need a good site architecture because when, when somebody performs a Google search, Google's basically seeing think about your website as a folder of pages. Google's trying to find the page in the folder that relates to the search the user performed and to show them the most relevant page. So you make it easy when you have a dedicated URL for each service that you offer. If you haven't done that, go back through the site. This is something a box you have to check. The next thing is you want to make sure the information is in depth, comprehensive and covers any questions a client may have. Don't have light content, right. We don't want just a few generic paragraphs about Botox in a stock photo that's not serving the user. It's not going to probably correlate to conversion for you and it'll hurt you in terms of your ability to rank organically in the search results. So comprehensive, in depth content on those pages that really delivers a ton of value. Our page titles need to include so in your back end of your website settings or if you hover over the tab of the browser, you'll see the page title and the page title should ideally include the service name and the city that you serve. So simple example would be if I'm in Nashville, my Botox page is optimized for Botox in Nashville, Tennessee, Ricky's Med Spa. If you want to add some more flowery language or more enticing language, you can do that and mix it in. So new post, new patient, Botox Special in Nashville, Tennessee Ricky's Med Spa. You still check both of those boxes there, the heading of the page. So the first text that you see on the page ideally reflects that same information. The next thing we want to think about is not just talking about the service. If we treat our service pages as a brochure for the product, we've not done anything that differentiates us. And remember, if somebody goes to Google and they they type in Botox in Nashville, Tennessee, they probably already decided they want Botox. They're trying to figure out which practice they're going to visit. So make sure that the page content is full of convincing language that gets the prospect specifically excited about choosing you. So videos of your providers talking about the service alternatives, explanations of why you like the service, how long you've been doing it, your treatment philosophy related to the service, supplementary things, why clients choose you, your reviews, your online reputation, all of the things that can get somebody excited about moving forward with your med spa and then Give people a clear call to action or invitation on what you're doing next. So if your call to action is to schedule a consult, is it a free consult, is it a paid consult? What exactly is the next step and what's going to happen next? Do you have a new patient, special or exclusive promotion that people have access to? Just be very clear with what. If you're interested in working with us, what am I going to ask you to do and what's going to happen next? Clear call to action is very important. So a tip to create kind of a Frankenstein's monster of a really good service page would be to go to your top three to four competitors and look at their websites and their service pages and create a list of all the things that they're doing that you like, that you don't have on your service pages and create a service page that checks all of those boxes. If you can go find what your top five competitors are doing well, and you can take all of the best parts of their website pages and incorporate it into your content and your structure, you're probably going to be serving users well, and search engines are going to reward you for that. So that's a really big one. That's an exercise worth doing, whether it's your SEO team, your team yourself, definitely worth doing and giving a second set of eyes on. All right, so a little pro tip bonus here. Beyond on page SEO, we talked about having a page for each service on your website. I want to talk about this issue of keyword cannibalization for a second. And the chart I have on my screen here shows one of our clients that was ranking number 31st, coolsculpting in Austin, Texas. And she'd been around for a while. The service page had basic on page SEO in place. So it seemed a little weird that she was ranking so poorly for that term. Well, when we did this next exercise I'm going to show you, we realized she had like four or five different pages on her website that were all optimized for CoolSculpting. In Austin, Texas, there was an FAQ page, a blog post, a benefits page, a service page, and that creates confusion at times with Google where they don't know which documents in the folder they should be showing. And you have diminished rankings, sort of a glitch in the system. So a way that you can check this. If you see that you're not ranking where you want to rank and you feel like you've been around for a while, you've got an established reputation, try this you would search in your search bar on Google the word site S I T E colon with no spaces and then your website URL. So site colon your website.com and then a space and type in the search query with spaces. So Botox space in space, Nashville, for example. And this is going to pull a list of results from your website, specifically that address the search query for Botox and Nashville. So you can sort of see how Google's brain is working here because they're going to show you all the pages they consider relevant to the search for Botox in Nashville. You want to see what pages appear there. And you should have one clear page that's optimized for that keyword. If you have multiple pages that have titles or bulk content that covers that topic, you might have an issue with keyword cannibalization. So my recommendation in that case is combine the content. Make make sure you have one clear, powerful, comprehensive page to display to the search engines and to users that clearly addresses everything anybody would want to know about your Botox service offering. So that's a big one. I see that happen a lot, especially when people are blogging, which I'll get to in a second here. So after those on page SEO signals are in place, why might we rank on page two where one of our top competitors is showing up number one in the search results? In part this is going to be based on first those content signals and content quality signals. But, but next are the link signals. How many other trusted and reputable websites have talked about our business online, simple as that is. So we're going to talk about some strategies and some things you can have in the back of your mind to improve your search rankings on your own, even if you're not paying for SEO. So we use a two pronged approach to do this. The first is we use SEO tools. If you sign up for a trial or a cheap service, cheap version of any of these services, you can go get one of these tools. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz. We use Moz because we've been around for a while. So it's an old school tool. But what you can do with these SEO tools is you can plug in your competitors websites and they will show you a list of all of the other websites that have linked to and mentioned your competitor. So you can see if they're the business of the week in the county blog, if they're in a trade directory that you're not in, if they take a certain type of financing that you don't have, if they sponsor a local sports team, they've been a speaker at an event, all of those things. They have a relationship with a journalist who's featured them in articles. You can start to reverse engineer those opportunities. That's one thing that we do for our clients. You could do that on your own, but you can keep this stuff in mind. So if opportunities come up through the course of business, you have them on your radar. So that's the first thing we typically do. The next tool that's a major hack are PR tools. And the ones that we typically use right now are quoted Q W O T E D Help a reporter out and sources of sources. These are tools where journalists from major media sites, mid and major media sites are looking for experts to quote in their articles because they can't write an article on 2026 Skin care trends if they're not a topic expert. So they need to write the article, but they need a topic expert to lend credibility. So they will go to these tools and try to get a list of potential sources. You can pitch yourself as a source by providing your insights and your tips. And this is how we've achieved for our clients features and sites like Forbes, gq, Everyday Health, Real Simple, Elle Magazine and more. So really powerful high authority links that are hard for your competitors to replicate and can differentiate you reputationally. It's the stuff that adds extra credibility to everything else that you're doing. So I really like that strategy as well. The next thing is just look out for real world business opportunities. One of my favorite examples there was a a gentleman who went by the moniker Link Moses. His name was Eric Ward, passed away several years ago. He was one of the first people that really did link building and he did it before Google even existed. And he gives this example of a scuba tour company that he worked with who he found out that all the local hotels would send welcome emails with things to do in the area and he got his client inclusion in all of those welcome emails. Now he found that during the doing the types of link research that we typically think of for SEO, the that isn't even publicly shown online. So it's not adding a benefit in terms of rankings, but it's adding a real business value. So think about it. If you're sponsoring a local women's organization and your clients are all affluent women age 35 plus and now you have a whole group of people who might know, like and trust you and it also ties into an online link that's a win win. So the things that create real business value are even better than things that you're doing just for the SEO rankings alone. Hey there. Wanted to briefly interrupt the episode to make a quick ask if you're a podcast listener, it would mean the world to us if you'd leave a review for the podcast, whether that's on itunes or Spotify. It's something I hadn't really remembered or thought of asking for, but it does help us show up more frequently so that we can reach more people with the information that we're providing. So it mean the world to us if you'd leave a review on itunes or Spotify. If you're listening on audio. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button so you're in the loop for future videos and you don't miss any of the content that we're putting out. All right, let's jump to your Google Business listing because the majority of local searches are actually coming from the Maps pack now the traffic. So people are not as much as they used to getting to the blue link, the typical search results. They're going to the Maps results where they can see your Google reviews. So let me go through a few things I see people missing here. The first are your categories. We just looked at a business the other day that does weight loss. They had Med, Spa and four other categories. They didn't have weight loss as one of their category tags and as a result when you performed a search for weight loss in their city, only one of their other competitors had that category tag. So they were the only thing that showed up in the Maps listing. Simple fix. So make sure you have nothing missing from the category list. Fill out all the bells and whistles. Make sure you have nice professional photos that represent your practice well. The bios, the information, the about information is all accurate. Your hours are updated and then another miss is update your service library on your Google Business listing. If you perform a search like Botox in Nashville, what you'll typically see in the Maps result is there are a bunch of businesses that show up that have a little blue circle with a check mark and it says provides Botox or provides Botox treatments. That's simply happening because those businesses have told Google via the service list on their Google Business listing that they actually offer that service. So very simple input something you don't want to miss. Make sure the service list on your Google Business listing is completely filled out and not missing anything. The next thing is you have to be proactive about review requests, review volume, frequency recency and star rating all impact how often you're showing up in the Maps results and realistically how often you're actually getting the phone call. So be cognizant of having a proactive Google review strategy. That's an absolute must for any local business, med spas included. One other thing you might hear a lot of SEO companies talk about is nap consistency, citations, things like that, local listings. All this means is we're trying to make sure that if you have a Google listing that's up to date and accurate, that all of the other top directories on the web, like your Apple Maps, your MapQuest, your Uber listing, Yelp, all of those other directory sites, have up to date and accurate and consistent information on your business. So you can use tools like Moz Local or Semrush Local to accomplish this for you with automation. And it's pretty easy to set up. Takes a little bit of time, but it's good to do that, at least for a limited time, to make sure those that those things are consistent. If you've ever changed offices, updated the name, anything like that, and you haven't done this, it'll be really insightful to go back and do it. But this is a housekeeping task. This is not something that moves the needle in a major way, in my opinion, and I think all evidence points to that. It's still something you want to do to make sure that you don't have unnecessary issues popping up with inconsistent information across the web. I'll take a sip of water and get to blogs here. All right, so most of you who have done anything with SEO have heard that a blog is part of an SEO strategy, and we completely disagree with that analysis. I wrote an article over a decade ago called the Inbound Marketing Sham after coming back from an inbound marketing conference in Boston, and I understand the core concepts, and I think that many of the strategies that we think we're accomplishing with blogging completely fall apart as local businesses. So let me go into why I think a blog is a bad SEO strategy. Caveat here. If you're blogging because you have something valuable to say, it's actually from your providers or you as the owner, and you're sharing it as an engagement tool for social media and your newsletter, great. But if you're doing it strictly because your SEO company told you to, and you've outsourced this function, I think it's a total, total miss and a waste of your marketing investment. Here are a few reasons why this is probably a whiff. Number one, these articles generally don't rank. If I go back to my example on the screen and I do 10 reasons everyone searching for emsculpt neo near me, right? There are probably dozens if not hundreds of other websites that have written articles similar to that. So it's very unlikely that your local business is going to rank for the content that you created. So that's with number one whiff. Number two is our content doesn't earn links. In most cases, it's not like we're creating content that's so informative and powerful that other websites are picking it up and referencing it. That really doesn't happen for most local business blogs. When you see something like Moz's Beginner Beginner's Guide to SEO as a content piece, that is such a thought out, well researched, heavily invested content piece that other people across the people across the world have used that as a resource and referenced it for years. It's earned a ton of links. Your your local business blog is probably not earning links. There's another strike against us for SEO value. The third thing is if we get lucky enough that one of those niche content pieces actually ranks, what are the chances those people are actually even local to us? If I'm attracting search queries from Austin, Texas, and I'm in Boston, Massachusetts, it does me almost no good. So I have a client that's an audiology practice still on our client roster, and they were working with an SEO company that showed them all this organic traffic growth. And it all came from these blog posts. One of them was how do piercings affect your hearing? Doesn't earn links. That was one that got lucky enough to rank. But almost none of the traffic is even local to her and it doesn't map to a purchase. So we stopped blogging years ago. She maintains number one rankings for every keyword in the tracking library right now. So it's a total myth that you need a blog to rank. And again, for these reasons it's usually just a giant whiff. And then the last one is it can actually create those keyword cannibalization issues. Because if you're over optimizing your blog posts, you can for phrases and keywords that should just be included on the service page, you're introducing unnecessary confusion. So if I have reasons people are searching for or choosing emsculpt or why emsculpt is important for over 50 people, my argument would be that should either be on the service page or organized as a subsection of the service category page, not a standalone blog post where it can actually create more harm than good. So blogs, in my opinion, major waste of time, energy and money for 95% of people doing it. So to wrap here, let's talk a little bit about AI SEO or G Generative Engine Optimization. Answer Engine optimization, it's so new, I still don't think we've even settled on an acronym yet. But what is different than SEO? So the first thing is lots of things are the same. There's a lot of overlap on a lot of this stuff. The same general theory that impacts your organic rankings are the same general things that impact your generative engine optimization rankings or your AI search optimization rankings. But there are different inputs, different specific references, but the same framework. So these engines are trying to find the most reputable, most trustworthy sites. They just have different criteria for how they rank those. So what is a little different from what we can tell to this point? To my knowledge, on the AI SEO or GEO side, the first is that third party references might be more heavily relied on. So when you go to Google and you type or go to Chat GPT and you type in best Med spas near me, you'll see that they're referencing a lot of other websites who have created curated lists. So the one that I did the other day showed three best rated Com Score, Doc, yp, Trust, Analytical and Local blogs. So that was kind of interesting. You might want to do reverse engineer this for your business. Go to Chat GPT, go to Gemini, go to Grok, ask it, look at the sources and figure out where it's pulling the information that that might be an indication that those are places you want to try to optimize for your presence. The next thing is, from what I understand from doing this exercise just before filming this video, the training data is not a lifetime reference in many cases. So when they when you ask Chat GPT to give you the best med spas, it's not looking at like a live time Google search page, it's not looking at livetime Google reviews. It was trained on a data set that it's referencing. So it's very possible that some of the data they're using is out of date. So keep that in mind on kind of how the the answers are generated. And then one final tip is the information that's on your website seems to massively over index in terms of what you say about yourself. So when I did the search for on ChatGPT Med Spas, Nashville, Tennessee, first of all I did near me and it just defaulted to Nashville, which is the major city near Me, I actually live in the suburbs. But if just to say that's correct and I'm looking at Nashville, it actually pulled sites where the page title of the website or a primary part of the text on the homepage said the words basically top rated or best med spawn Nashville. So it's almost like going back to the old school SEO days where you could game the system a little bit. It appears right now that that's somewhat the case with these answer engines and these AI tools. So make sure that you're being really, really detailed with your keyword usage on your page content because that seems to matter a ton with at least chat GPT in my exercise. So your website content over indexes a couple other things be nuanced. I think as people start to get more comfortable with these tools, they start to perform searches that are a little bit more detailed. Hey, I'm looking for a med spa near me that has 4.9 or higher Google star rating, that's been around for more than a few years, that offers Botox and also a weight loss program. People are going to start adding like multiple different inputs to the search query. And so the, these answer engines, these AI engines are going to get better at figuring out how to combine a multiple, a multiple set of inputs to figure out what the best matches for your query. And they're going to look at information that's online from other sources. So it goes back to, you kind of have to be known for the stuff that you want to be known for. And on your own website, you have to be explicit about who you're for and what you do so that you're not making chatgpt guess or connect the dots. You want to make it very clear that if somebody is looking for this series of things, that your business checks all of those boxes and that you might be a fit. So reputation and public knowledge, what you're actually known for will matter. So this goes back to all of these things are leading us to a point where it's less about gaming the system and truly about building a brand, being known for something and developing a reputation that stands apart from the competition. Authenticity, transparency, these tools, including Google, are all constantly getting better at just showing people the most relevant search results to find the most reputable and trustworthy businesses. So, so if you want to be in the mix, working on being the most trustworthy, reputable version of yourself is going to make more of a difference than anything we even talked about today. So if you want help, if you're reconsidering your SEO. You want clarity on your game plan, you can go to Medspamagicmarketing.com and schedule a free one on one strategy session with me. I wanted to read a review here from a recent strategy session I had because I mentioned this often on when I'm talking to people, but I think it's one of those things that people don't believe is everybody says this. My strategy session is not a sales pitch. I will at the end of the strategy session give you information on our programs and pricing. But ultimately all I'm going to do is go into a deep dive specific to your practice and the problems that I think you can solve to make an impact today. How do we solve problems that make your marketing more effective? What do you need to stop doing and what do you need to be doing more of? And how do we get specific so this is a recent review on our Google listing from someone who got on a strategy session with us after talking to multiple other Med Spa agencies. Said after talking to several other after taking several other meetings and with marketing companies for our Med spa, we had a call with Ricky for Med Spa Magic and it immediately felt different from the others. At no point did I feel pressured to purchase anything. Instead, Ricky focused on sharing meaningful insights, practical tools he's developed over years of success in the space. It was without a question the most valuable marketing call I've had since opening our doors. Although we mutually agreed we may not be at the scale where their services are necessary, I genuinely look forward to working with Medspa Magic in the future. In the meantime, I'll be implementing many of the ideas Ricky generously shared. So that's our goal. One of our core values is to do what's in the best interest of our clients and the people we talk to, free of self serving financial impact. So we'll give you the right direction whether it's working with us or not. I'm confident you'll come out with a better blueprint for better marketing success in 2026 and beyond. So you can go to medspa magicmarketing.com to schedule that. Call that. Thanks and we'll see you on the next episode in the series.