Intro: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of DoctorPodcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth (Host): On this edition of the SHSMD Podcast, we have another SHSMD Connections preview, as we dive into AI and findability. AI has really impacted search, so you need to stay on top of this. There's a special workshop on AI and findability. It's Sunday, October 12th at SHSMD Connections 2025, in Dallas featuring Matthew McKinney from Cone Health and Michael Leonard from Geonetric.

It's going to be a great workshop, a blockbuster. You need to be there. They're going to talk all about this, so let's get to this special session preview, right now.

This is the SHSMD Podcast, rapid insights for healthcare strategy professionals in planning, business development, marketing, communications, and public relations. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth.

With me is Matthew McKinney, Director Digital Engagement at Cone Health, and Michael Leonard, Principal Product Manager at Geonetric, as we talk about their session, Focus on Findability, Thinking Beyond Search in the Age of AI. They're going to be speaking on this topic during the 2025 SHSMD Connections Conference Sunday, October 12th. It's at 12:30. It's free to attend, but advance registration is required. You know what that means again? A lot of people are going to be wanting to come to this, so make sure you get yourself registered. It's that simple. So let's talk to Matthew and Michael right now. Matthew and Michael, welcome.

Matthew McKinney: Thank you for having us.

Michael Leonard: Yeah, it's great to be here.

Host: Absolutely. AI is such a huge topic as you both know. So this really is going to be an exciting session at SHSMD Connections 2025. Michael, let me start with you. So how does findability, I love that term, findability, differ from traditional SEO and why is it becoming more important?

Michael Leonard: So normal SEO for the longest time was an acceptable term, and it still is to a certain degree, but also findability is a much stronger umbrella term than SEO would be. You know, we're not just talking about search engines, we're talking about how a user or a consumer in any way finds you, your organization.

So that could be a traditional search engine. It could be the business listings within that search engine. It could also be the AI platforms like Chat GPT or social media. It's really a matter of encompassing all of the different ways that users can find you, because even though those different systems are all still separate, they all communicate in one way or another.

And the more that you can show up and have a higher quality presence on all of these different places that people can find you, the more likely you are going to show up for those different platforms and outrank any competitors that might be out there too.

Host: Yeah, this is something we all need to pay attention to. So Michael, then what are some examples of how AI is already changing the way healthcare consumers discover information? I think it would be good to know that how AI has already changed this.

Michael Leonard: Yeah, I think one of the biggest changes that we're already seeing, and a lot of people don't realize they're doing this, is just the conversational nature of a lot of what we're searching for now. It's not just about asking or, or coming up with a term like primary care near me or something like that.

It is a case of hey, I'm looking for primary care in this area. What are the best providers? What's the closest location to me? And you're not asking all of that at once. You're asking it as if you're having an actual conversation, just like we are right now, to understand all of the ins and outs of what you are looking for. And it's just far more conversational, far more of for lack of a better term, it's kind of like a friend in your pocket in a lot of ways that you can just have those conversations with and, it remembers those things too. So I think that's the biggest current shift that we're seeing is just the way in which people engage with organizations with information.

Host: Well, I'm sure everyone listening to this has experience that you go to Google and you type in your search query and either you've got the AI summary right there saying, Hey, here's what we found for you in those conversational terms that you just mentioned, Michael. So it seems like we're clicking on less links because the answer is right there.

The AI is kind of providing us the answer, which really does change a lot of things as well. So, Matthew, what are some of the key components then of a successful findability strategy in healthcare knowing that things have changed, as Michael has noted?

Matthew McKinney: So it really starts with human experience. We think oftentimes think of patient experience or experience in the health system around, how you're interacted with at the practice or the hospital level, but experience also connects to that digital element. How are they experiencing you online in whether it's chat, whether it's search, whether it's AI, any of that.

And so we need to ask the questions, how are consumers trying to find the information they need from Cone Health? Where are they getting stuck? What questions are they asking? What prompts are they putting into the AI generator to get, as Michael just said, primary care near me or find me the best doctor for my family.

That insight helps us drive the strategy around findability and what we prioritize the most. And we're also at Cone Health, we have, we really focus around 10 marketing priorities per year. Not saying we, we don't look at anything else, but these are the 10 that really drive, our strategy for that year as far as where we have access and where we have margin. And so we really focus our strategy, our search strategy, and our digital strategy around those 10 priorities with acknowledgement to everything else that we don't want, we don't want to be, have mistakes online or AI generated poor results online, but really focusing on those 10 help us key in and make sure we're not spending a lot of time and money in areas that aren't our priority areas.

Host: Matthew, you said you need to understand how Cone Health consumers are finding you, how they are searching. How do you understand that? How do you determine what they're searching and how they're searching?

Matthew McKinney: I mean, we can see, obviously from analytics, where the highest traffic is. You can see from Google console and in places like that, you can see the search results, you know, traditional search results. Some of it is just your own experience and your own thought process.

And we also have a lot of experience metrics to understand where people are getting stuck, where people may be having a hard time accessing the health system. So even putting in things that you may use as yourself. I think put yourself in the shoes of a newcomer to the area. What prompt may they be putting into ChatGPT or copilot or pro perplexity to, to get healthcare for their families?

So there are, we use, still use some of the traditional search metrics and search responses to drive this. There are AI tools coming out that help us understand better what people are finding within the AI generated results and that's a learning curve for us that we are, we're getting over currently.

Host: Absolutely. So let's stick with metrics for a bit. So, Michael, which KPIs then should organizations track to measure the effectiveness of their findability efforts, if you will.

Michael Leonard: Yeah. A lot of the same metrics still apply. I would just say that many of them have, changed in terms of how you want to approach them or the purpose of those metrics. So, you might have organic traffic just so that you can see how your site is, and your presence is performing versus if you were paying for advertising. But also understand that, there's a lot of estimations out there, a lot of assumptions out there that, AI is going to see a drastic drop in overall traffic going to websites to other platforms because AI is trying to keep you within their ecosystem. And so knowing that and, also taking into account how you want to continue to look at conversion rate on your website or on any of your different presences, you want to start to understand that while the overall organic traffic might start to shrink; more than likely the conversions that are coming from that traffic should increase in terms of percentage yield. And so those two are still important. It's just that the overall numbers might become smaller. Another newer thing that you want to start taking into consideration would be referral traffic.

I think we've always paid attention to referral traffic. It's when a specific site or a entity provides a link to your website, but now you're able to see a lot of the different generative AI experiences being referred to, as referral traffic. So you can go in right now to, let's say you're using Google Analytics or any of the other analytics platforms, you're able to go in there and see how many users are coming from ChatGPT, how many users are coming from Perplexity within that referral traffic.

Something that I like to say anytime we're talking to anyone about this is those numbers are going to be pretty low right now. But it's fascinating to go back even six months ago and see, oh, you were getting five or 10 views from ChatGPT. And now you look at it today and hundreds if not thousands. So it's still a small overall number for a lot of the organizations we work with. But it's growing exponentially. And it's probably one of the big things you want to keep an eye out for when comparing against how your site traffic is shrinking as well.

Host: Yeah, that's really good information. So still pay attention to organic traffic, but as you say, referral traffic is something you should probably pay more attention to now. So, Matthew, knowing these things, what challenges did Cone Health face in improving your own findability?

Matthew McKinney: Yeah, this is an important one. I mean, one of our biggest challenges is, just resource constraints. We have a small team and a tight budget and we can't jump at every bell and whistle every vendor throws at us for the newest AI technology to solve, the world's problems. So we have to look at those priorities and really focusing our attention on what's most important. Where's our organizational strategy?

Where can we make the most impact and experience? And where, can we move the needle on those marketing priorities? Another challenge for us is internal expectations. In the past, we would get the knock on the door, the phone call, from provider, director or whatever, saying, I'm on page 2, 3, 4 of search results, you know, move me up to the top.

Now it's the same question. I just prompted, ChatGPT to find myself, and it's not pulling up what I wanted to pull up, fix it for me. So we have to be careful not to jump at every missed result or every AI that's not pulling up, exactly what our internal folks would like it to.

It's all about that focused strategy and ensuring that we are building those connections and having accurate information so the crawlers, so the AI can pull up what we want it to. It will happen, it will happen in time, but we can't jump at every single mistake. We really have to do it methodically and strategically.

Host: I know you'll go into this more at SHSMD Connections 2025 in Dallas. But Matthew, were there specific tactics or tools that were most effective in your strategy, and what results did you ultimately see?

Matthew McKinney: Honestly, some of the strategy that we've put into place is the traditional search strategy. It's is making sure we have structured data on the pages, making sure we have schema in place, you know, especially on those priority pages. The things that are Google is crawling anyway is what AI is going to be looking for.

It's also goes into things like content marketing and ensuring that we have great structured content that's really telling the full story that we want the users to have, AI is going to be looking for structured content in the result. So if we do it right on our end, it's going to spit out right on the AI end.

So there's not a lot of change, I would say, to focus on AI as strategy. We have great partners like Michael at Geonetric to help us navigate these waters. I certainly couldn't do it by myself. So, ensuring you're connected to the right partners and the experts that are looking at this on a daily basis and saying we may want to do this, we may want to do that. You may want to look at your meta description. You may, you know, your schema's not quite right on this page. You may want to add some more addresses here. All of those things are going to go into that AI. We're leveling up the search strategy to make sure we're having better results in the AI world.

Michael Leonard: And just to add to that, Matt kind of touched on this, the structure is artificial intelligence's native language. It's going to understand it better. So we've already talked a little bit about the structure of content on the page, but it's also all of the backend stuff, the schema structure data, knowledge, graphs.

The more that you can connect things on the forward consumer facing side with the structure of the more technical robotic side of things, the more success you're going to have overall too. And what I love about what Cone's doing is just the focus on structure, but also making it human at the same time, not making it so structured that it's robotic.

Matthew McKinney: And Bill you asked about the results. It's, for one thing, we're not, we have not seen our, analytics drop, which, Michael said we're potentially going to see, but as of yet, and as we do searches, as I do my own focused searches in the AI platforms, ensuring that we are showing up, we're in a highly, highly competitive market with UNC and Duke and others, all around Atrium, all around us.

And as long as we are in those results, even the prompts that I'm putting in just to test the system, if I'm putting in I need somebody to look at cancer diagnosis or something like that. We want to be in those results and we want the links to be right for how people can take that next step, that next conversion. Sure, AI is politically correct. They're not going to favor one over the other. They're going to put as many results as you possibly can. But as long as we're in that mix and our information's accurate, then we've done a good job at the end of the day.

Host: Yeah, I like what you both had to say there. So it sounds like being brilliant at the basics, paying attention to traditional SEO strategy, being really great at content marketing. You said make sure you have structured content and of course then the schema structure as well as Michael mentioned. So Michael, I know you work with other hospitals and healthcare systems around the country.

How can a smaller or less digitally mature organization, if you will begin to build a findability strategy?

Michael Leonard: This is something that I recommend to certainly smaller organizations, but any organization trying to get control over all of these new changes is to just start simple. If you're competing with larger organizations or national brands, it might seem like it's going to be an insurmountable challenge.

But really the first step is kind of what we talked about already, that you need to have a strong foundation. And that means, making sure that your website is clean, that there, it's easy to navigate, that the structure of the content is there, it's present. But then also focus on some of the basics. Making sure that business listings are accurate, that your services are clearly described in easily readable language, and that you're answering the questions that the patients actually are searching for. That still, even as I'm saying that, I realize that it does sound like a lot of work, but even starting with your most important service line or your most important location, can really help you build up the strength and the momentum to start seeing some of the value and start seeing some of the returns on your investment for that kind of thing that, if you're struggling to figure out what to do; that's what I would say is just focus on one to two top service lines, and, do those small first steps in them. And you'll probably start seeing results pretty quickly, after you start putting that together.

Host: Well, Matthew said earlier they have 10 marketing priorities that they're working on at Cone. You said start small. Maybe find one or two service lines that are really important to you and start with those two, so that really makes sense. Michael, you mentioned business listings. Matthew, I'd like to get your thoughts on this being on the ground. How do you feel about business listings? And maybe touch a little bit on content marketing and enhancing findability. Maybe touch on those two things a little bit more for us.

Matthew McKinney: I think it's important to recognize as I stated earlier, like this is an AI is an enhancement of your existing search strategy. Business listings is a core foundational piece of search and, ensuring that you have the most accurate results in your business listings. Those are pulling, you know, Google is pulling those, you know, they're already pulling them to the top in the three pack.

They're even now pulling them up in structured AI results, that you're looking for. Same with any of the other platforms, ChatGPT, they're looking at that. It's, once again, business listings is structured data. The AI platforms know exactly which pieces, your hours, your address, your maps, all of that.

They know which pieces they're looking for and are going to serve those up on the results. So ensuring accuracy in business listings is critical and, foundational to the, your search strategy and your AI strategy. Same with content marketing. For years, search has kind of been important for search to look at new content, right?

You have the same foundational service line page for, a little while. You're not updating that on a regular basis, but your blogs, your videos, all of that enhanced content is new content. And Google has always looked at new content favorably. AI is really no different and it's, it is measuring, it's looking for the newest, best, latest result.

And if you can enhance your content with some additional content marketing, like I said, a blog, a video, even a news, you know, an external news story. All of that is going to be crawled by the AI generators and just like in your normal search results. So it's all part of the mix and all part of your search strategy that you should have had to begin with, and you're just adding an extra layer to it.

Host: I like what you had to say there. As you said, AI is looking for new content all the time, so the more content you can pump out on a regular basis, be it a blog as you said, or even I would imagine, social media or podcasts, even, those things all help. So that really makes a lot of sense. So AI is rapidly changing Michael. It seems like ChatGPT has got a new update or there's new ones coming online all the time. How should healthcare marketers prepare for future changes in AI and search technology? How do we stay ahead of it?

Michael Leonard: I think remaining curious, digging into the tools that you have available to you, even if you are a smaller organization or you have a smaller budget. Not only staying on top of the latest updates and what they're changing across these different platforms is important, but also just understanding what those tools are capable of in terms of researching on your own. That's kind of one of the main focuses of our session at SHSMD is, talking through what organizations, what marketing teams can do to just go out there and use ChatGPT to research ChatGPT. Research what it's looking for by using it and so that is the key thing for me is just remaining curious about what these tools are, even if you are falling behind on all of these updates that are coming out, because I agree 100% that these updates are constant, it's constant disruption, not only of traditional search engines, but of each of these platforms. And so using those tools, using the methods that we're going to talk about a little bit more in depth at SHSMD, is the priority there of doing competitive analysis within these platforms, doing SERP synthesis research, which I won't get into too deep of detail here because I know we don't have infinite time. But those are the things that we're going to be talking through to give these organizations the tools they need to be effective at showing up in these results too.

Host: Again, this is a free conference pre-session. It's on Sunday, but registration is required, meaning, there's going to be a lot of people that want to get into this, so make sure you pre-register. Matthew, are you seeing any trends or innovations on the horizon that could further impact findability?

Matthew McKinney: Like Michael said, it is about staying curious. It is about understanding every day there's a new GPT version coming out. Every day there's a new platform or maybe your vendor of choice implemented AI into their product. And so understanding what you're using, understanding what your consumers are using, and in this case, it's really about what your consumers are using.

It's understanding you know, I'll go back to the human experience, what you as a user and are doing, or what your consumers are doing. I don't have a magic, wand. I don't have a, crystal ball to know the latest greatest AI. I just know that if I pull up my phone and search for a primary care provider near me, like it's spitting out something before I can even get to those search results. So that's what I'm looking focused on now with curiosity to the future. Michael might be able to lend a little better glimpse into the AI future that he and his team are looking at. And I'm going to lean on him too to make sure I'm headed down the right path.

Michael Leonard: We're definitely in the wild west phase of AI. Even just recently when ChatGPT went from 4.0 to 5, we saw drastic changes in the way that that AI was responding, the results that it was generating. And that was very similar to how Google was in the early days of, here's a big update. It's going to drastically change the way in which users consume the information that we're providing. But I think we will get to a point in the near future, maybe in the next year or two, where there is relative stabilization of these generative platforms. But I think a lot of that will come down to also how we are providing the information to these platforms.

So, there's always been this question out there since generative AI came around. Like, are website's still important and they absolutely are. And they're not going anywhere. But I think the way in which we utilize websites will start to become a little bit more about sending that information off to some of these platforms so that they have all of the information they need, that everything is connected in one place for them to access on top of all of the others, like social media.

 But, overall, what is going to change is simply the way in which we interface with a lot of these platforms is my opinion. Things will change drastically and I may be wrong tomorrow based on how quickly these things change. But, that's also the important part of keeping a pulse on things and staying curious about it, is being adaptable to whatever changes are coming.

Host: I like how you put it the Wild West and make sure you stay curious. This is going to be a great session. Can't wait for it at SHSMD Connections 2025. Before we wrap up, I'd love to get final thoughts from each of you. Let's start with you, Matthew. Anything else you'd like to add? Anything we missed that you'd like to cover?

Matthew McKinney: No, I think want to continue to emphasize that as small team, large team, you're not changing your SEO strategy, you're not changing your searchability strategy. You are just being mindful of how it is appearing and how people are searching for it. And it's really thinking and utilizing that human experience, that digital touch points.

How are individuals finding you online? And in all of the places, they're finding you online and looking at that in a holistic picture. And AI is part of that journey. So just be mindful. This is not all about data and tech and everything. It's about experience. And this is a part of your health system hospital experience.

Host: Absolutely. Great thoughts. Michael, how about you? Final thoughts?

Michael Leonard: I'm actually going to in a way compliment Matt, but also do the reverse of what he just said in terms of during these times of uncertainty where there's a lot of fluctuations in traffic, or in the way in which we engage, data is going to become extremely important in the grand scheme of things, in that you will want to start relying more if you're not already on a lot of the other data points available at your organization. Kind of ties into the KPIs that we talked about earlier. Those might be fluctuating, but if you can rely on say, how many consumers are turning into patients. How many users are actually engaging with the physical locations, to supplement some of your understanding of the traffic that might be fluctuating online; you're going to be able to have a much clearer picture of how well you're doing overall, but also inform what Matt just said about giving the consumer what they're looking for and what they're expecting across the board, even when you might not have a clear picture of how well you might be performing in this new world as well.

Host: Great thoughts. This is going to be a great session. Can't wait for it. Matthew and Michael, thank you.

Matthew McKinney: Thank you.

Michael Leonard: Thank you for having us.

Host: Absolutely. Once again, that is Matthew McKinney and Michael Leonard. They will be speaking at the 2025 SHSMD Connections Conference in Dallas. Make sure you get registered at SHSMD.org/education/annualconference. Once again, their session Focus On Findability. Thinking Beyond Search in the Age of AI.

It is a Sunday. Pre-workshop. It is free, but pre-registration is required. And if you found this podcast helpful, and how could you not? People, please share it on all of your social channels. Get that content out there, right guys? And please make sure you hit the subscribe or follow button to get every episode and to access our full podcast library.

More content or other topics of interest to you visit shsmd.org/podcasts. This has been a production of Doctor Podcasting. I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya.