StoryBrand Isn't an SEO Strategy (But It Can Be Part of One)

Whether your website uses the StoryBrand framework, another messaging framework, or simply has strong marketing copy, great messaging alone isn't enough to improve your search rankings.

StoryBrand is an excellent framework for creating clear, patient-focused messaging and stronger calls to action, but it wasn't designed to improve your SEO. That's why many clinic owners are surprised when they redesign their website, love the new messaging, and then wonder why their Google rankings, Google Maps visibility, or AI search presence don't improve.

In this episode, you'll learn why messaging and SEO solve two different problems, and how combining the two creates a website that's both patient-friendly and search-friendly. We'll cover how to keep the messaging you love while using the language your future patients are actually searching for, organizing your content for Google and AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, and avoiding common website mistakes that can limit your online visibility.

If you're planning a website redesign, updating your content, or simply want more patients to find your clinic online, this episode will help you create a website that's easier for patients to trust and easier for search engines and AI to recommend.

Episode Webpage, blog, and show notes: https://propelyourcompany.com/website-messaging-and-seo/

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Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

Speaker 1:04

Hello, and welcome back to the Clinic Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan, from Propel Marketing and Design. Today, I want to talk with you about something that I've really never heard anybody else talk about, and that's the relationship between StoryBrand and SEO. This comes up a lot of times when we do discovery calls because a lot of clinics that we work with are familiar with the StoryBrand framework. Now, if you aren't familiar with the StoryBrand framework, StoryBrand is a marketing framework created by author Donald Miller, and it helps businesses clarify their marketing message by using the classic hero's journey storytelling structure. The core rule is simple: the customer or patient is the hero of the story, and your brand is the guide who helps them succeed. Now, StoryBrand is nothing really new. In fact, the first book, Building a StoryBrand: Clarifying Your Message So Customers Will Listen, was officially published back in October of twenty seventeen. It introduced Donald Miller's foundational seven-part framework for marketing and brand communication. Story Brand is one of the best messaging frameworks available for small businesses. I recommend the book, I've studied the framework myself, and there are many principles that we use every day. Story Brand helps businesses communicate more clearly, And that's incredibly important. But here's what I see happening over and over again with a clinic invests in StoryBrand for their website or their marketing material. The messaging sounds fantastic. The homepage feels clean. The calls to actions usually become a little stronger. Everything is easier to understand. Yet, a couple months later, they're booking a discovery call with our company because they're wondering, "Why isn't our SEO improving?" Or, "How come our online exposure is going down? Why aren't we even showing up more often in Google? Why isn't our clinic appearing in any AI searches?" Now, I want to make something clear. Again, I love the StoryBrand framework, and this episode is not designed to criticize StoryBrand in any way at all. But it's really important to note that StoryBrand was never designed to improve your search visibility. It was designed to improve your messaging. Those are two completely different jobs. Messaging helps people understand why they should choose you after they've arrived on your website. SEO helps people find your website in the first place, whether it's traditional SEO or AI searches. So today, I want to talk to you about how you can combine both, because when you do, they become incredibly powerful together. Let's start by talking about what StoryBrand actually does well. The basic idea behind StoryBrand is that your customer or patient, again, is that hero of the story. Your business is simply the guide. That's a huge mindset shift. Instead of talking effortlessly about your experience, your certifications, your equipment, or how long you've been in business, StoryBrand encourages you to focus on your patient's problems. It encourages clear messaging instead of clever messaging, which, by the way, that element of it completely aligns with

What StoryBrand Gets Right

Speaker 5:19

SEO when done correctly. But we do oftentimes see that people don't consider the keyword phrases people are searching for when they start to put together some of that messaging. It also encourages empathy. It encourages simple calls to action. Simple calls to action are very important when it comes to SEO and actually converting the traffic once people get to your website. And honestly, I, I do think that the framework can help many clinics For some clinics, especially those that are just getting started, oftentimes when I look at the homepage, the first couple paragraphs are talking all about the doctor, their philosophy, before they even start to mention the patients. Patients don't care about your story until they believe you understand theirs. A good place for your story is your About page. StoryBrand does a good job of focusing on the patient instead of necessarily the doctor. And while it can encourage removing unnecessary clutter, what happens is sometimes people try to oversimplify the content and they end up missing on some of that amazing, juicy content that helps you rank on search engines Story Brand also focuses on giving visitors a simple path towards scheduling an appointment, which if you've listened to this podcast a while, you know we like clear, clear calls to action. So with that, I am absolutely on board. So there are a lot of good things that can come out of applying the Story Brand framework to your business. But here's where the problems begin. Story Brand is not an SEO strategy. Just because it's a marketing strategy and you're using it online, it is not an SEO strategy This sometimes can be difficult for people to really understand. And in fact, on a lot of calls that we have for our discovery calls, we walk them through, and the first thing I can say is, "Oh, I see that you have StoryBrand on your website, which is great. But let me guess. When you implemented it, your rankings changed." Or I hear people say, "We re- we rewrote our website using StoryBrand, so our SEO should have improved, but it didn't," because the two are not directly related. StoryBrand and SEO are solving different problems. Imagine opening a beautiful physical clinic. You decorate it perfectly. The waiting room feels welcoming. The staff is friendly. The signage inside is excellent. Patients have an amazing experience. But what if there's no sign outside of your building, or the address is wrong on Google Maps, or no roads actually lead to your clinic? That's essentially what happens when you only focus on the messaging. The experience is wonderful for people who arrive, but fewer people actually arrive, and there is no guarantee that they are the right people. SEO is what gets people through the front door. StoryBrand helps convince them once they're inside. Today, that visibility extends far beyond traditional Google rankings. Patients are using Google Maps, they're reading Google Business profiles, they're asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews for recommendations, and more. All of those systems rely on clear, descriptive information to understand what your clinic does. That means the words you choose matter more than ever So again, I am not criticizing StoryBrand in any way. I'm just saying there's a very different approach between SEO and StoryBrand.

Why Messaging Alone Does Not Rank

Speaker 10:00

Can the two live on your website together? Absolutely. But when you just focus on StoryBrand, usually you end up completely missing some of the biggest SEO opportunities What we tend to do when we work with someone who has the story brand messaging on their website is we try to keep the essence of it while making some of those changes or enhancements so that they don't feel like they're missing out on the SEO opportunities. For example, emotional headlines get replaced with searchable headlines. A common thing that we see is that homepages start with beautiful emotional headlines, something like, "Helping you live without limits," or, "Your journey starts here." Those are inspiring. But think about what Google learns from those headlines. Absolutely nothing. If someone lands there and your web page, your homepage says, "Providing chiropractic care to Louisville, Kentucky," that's more searchable. It might not be as clever or as creative or as emotional, but it clearly states what you do And if you were to use a more emotional header like, "Helping you live without limits," if somebody arrives there, eventually they'll understand you, they'll understand your page, but we're missing a couple key things. Somebody only stays on your homepage for a couple seconds to make a decision, so unless they've gotten to the section on your website on that homepage that clearly relates to them, they might already leave. But before they can even get to your website, we have to make sure that Google understands it and serves it up to them as an option. AI has to understand it first. Google has to understand it first. So when patients search for things like chiropractor in Tampa or chiropractor in Louisville, Kentucky, or physical therapy for knee pain, acupuncture for migraines, shockwave therapy near me, your primary headings and your content should help both people and search engines immediately understand what that page is about. Now, that does not mean that your website cannot have personality. That does not mean that your website has to sound robotic. It simply means clarity comes before creativity. Let's repeat that one more time. Clarity should come before creativity Also, you have to consider that patients search for problems or solutions, not marketing messages. One thing StoryBrand teaches extremely well is focusing on transformation. Patients don't just want less pain. I get it. They might wanna play with their kids. They might want to envision this life of travel or gardening again or really getting back to some of the things that they felt really great about doing before. Those emotional outcomes absolutely belong on your website. But again, let's remember, patients don't begin their search online by typing in, "I wanna play with my grandchildren again." No. An example, and I know we give a lot of examples here about chiropractors, but we do work with a lot of chiropractors. So with a chiropractor example,

Searchable Headlines Beat Hype

Speaker 13:54

again, somebody isn't searching, "I wanna play with my grandchildren again." They might be searching something like low back pain, sciatica, TMJ treatments, vertigo chiropractor, sports injury therapy, frozen shoulder or shockwave therapy near me. Or again, the example that we gave before, chiropractor in Louisville. Those phrases need to appear naturally throughout your content, not because you're stuffing keywords onto a website page, because that's literally how your future patients describe their problems

Speaker 2 14:32

All right, let's keep going. Another area where I sometimes see clinics run into trouble is with the website navigation. One of the principles of StoryBrand is to eliminate distraction. That's a good thing. Too many menu items can overwhelm visitors and make it harder for them to take action. But sometimes that principle gets taken a little too far. I've seen websites with navigation that includes nothing more than Home, About, Services, Contact, and Book Now. Yes, it's simple. Yes, it's clean. But it's also hiding a lot of valuable content from both patients and search engines. Think about your patient's actual search. They're searching for sciatica treatment, dry needling, shockwave therapy, auto injury chiropractor, sports injury treatment. Again, I know those are all chiropractor examples, but you get the gist. If these pages are buried several clicks deep, or worse, don't exist at all because everything has been consolidated into one generic catch-all services page, you've lost an opportunity to rank for those specific searches because each one of your pages should have a specific topic around it, and Google wants to understand each topic individually. So, a dry needling page should be about dry needling. A chiropractic adjustment page should be about chiropractic adjustments. Your services page can be the hub that highlights your services and should be more than just a list of your services or boxes with images that then link to each of those specific services pages. But again, we want to provide enough information that Google and AI searches know exactly who you are and what you treat. When someone asks ChatGPT, "Who treats frozen shoulders near me?" It needs a page that can clearly explain your frozen shoulder treatment if that's something you consider yourself to specialize in. Now, that does not mean a paragraph on a page. It means a built-out page around that topic. That does not mean that you ask ChatGPT to write a page for you. It means that you've humanized the page and that the page Actually contains quality content. While you do want to keep your navigation clean, you don't want to eliminate important pages. Sometimes the navigation only needs to show your primary services, while conditions pages live naturally within your content. And if you use SEO the right way, you should have internal linking structures linking to all of those core pages. Your navigation should make sense for visitors. Your website structure should make sense for search engines. You can absolutely accomplish both. Another big mistake I see is a clinic redesigning their website and the copy becomes much cleaner, and by cleaner, what I really mean is shorter. And suddenly, ten or fifteen individual services pages that were helping them rank for those specific services disappear. Everything is m-merged into one beautiful page. It certainly looks nice, but Google just lost a tremendous amount of information. Let's say you offer chiropractic care. That's wonderful. But maybe you also provide shockwave therapy, dry needling, laser therapy, sports rehabilitation, prenatal chiropractic care, massage therapy. Each of these pages, again, deserves its own page. The same goes for conditions, the top conditions you treat.

Service Pages Google Can Understand

Speaker 2 18:39

Each of those should have their own specific page. Google does not rank websites, it ranks pages. The more clearly each page focuses on a specific topic, the easier it becomes for Google and for AI to understand when that page should appear. StoryBrand encourages simplifying your message. SEO encourages organizing your expertise. Those ideas can work beautifully together. You simply need to create individual pages that each tell a focused story about one patient's problem or a solution StoryBrand also encourages conversational writing, and I love that. Patients don't want to read robotic marketing copy, and I guarantee not only do they not wanna read content that was written by AI and sounds like it was written by AI, but you're just not gonna rank for it. And while patients do love reading the content and the quality of content from StoryBrand, there's one important thing we can forget: people search locally. So if you're a physical therapist in Columbia, Missouri, your patients are often searching for physical therapy in Columbia, Missouri, or a specific treatment in your location, or a specific condition that they want assistance with near your location. Google needs those location signals throughout your website, not because you're stuffing your city name in everywhere, because you're not gonna do that, please promise me you're not, but because it's relevant. Your homepage should clearly communicate where you're located. Your services pages should naturally mention the communities that you serve or the location that you serve. Your contact page should reinforce your location. Your Google business profile should match your website. AI searches rely heavily on consistency. If your website clearly states your services, your location, et cetera, AI has a much higher level of confidence in recommending your clinic. Now, StoryBrand also teaches clarity, and sometimes that gets interpreted as writing less. But clarity doesn't necessarily mean fewer words. One of the biggest myths in SEO is that longer content automatically ranks better. That's not true. But what is true is complete content often does. And something that people don't always think about is that, especially with these AI solutions and Google AI Overviews, the AI solution or AI search or Google Overview might pick something that's way down in the middle of your page or the bottom of the page. That's why when we work with clients, we work very specifically on targeting core pieces of content that go on each of these pages, because it's gonna help you for ranking for those specific topics For example, again, let's go back to the chiropractor. If somebody lands on your spinal decompression page, they probably have questions like: What is spinal decompression? Who is it for? What are the conditions it helps with? Does it hurt? How many visits do I typically need? Will my insurance cover it? What should I expect? If your page only contains two hundred words, one, those questions remain unanswered. Two, Google looks at that and says, "Pssh, let's keep moving on and recommend somebody else." AI doesn't care about you, and patients notice that if they can even find you for that service because you don't have enough content that's well-written about it. So a well-written page can absolutely be concise while still being complete. That's what we're aiming for. We're also aiming for using the same messaging everywhere, and this is another pattern that I see frequently. Every page says essentially the same thing: "Helping you live your best life, helping you get back to what you love, helping you move better." Those are wonderful messages, but if every page says the same thing, Google struggles to understand what makes each page unique. Now, for example, still using the chiropractor example, your shoulder pain page should primary talk, primarily talk about shoulder pain. Your migraine or headaches page should focus on migraines and headaches. Your sports injury page should focus on sports injuries. You should not be able to look at each of those pages and just simply sub out the name of the condition for the other condition. So your shoulder pain page should not look exactly the same as your migraine page, just with the word "shoulder" switched with "migraine." Make

Local Signals Plus Complete Content

Speaker 2 23:54

sense? Each page should have its own purpose while still reflecting your overall brand voice. Think of it this way: Your brand messaging stays consistent, your page topic changes. One thing I absolutely love adding to almost every important page is an FAQ section. Why? Because patients have questions. And guess what they're typing into Google and AI searches? Those exact questions. Now, it can be done as an FAQ section, or it can be done throughout a page so that it doesn't just look like an FAQ section where you ask the question in a header and then you give the an- the answer or the information regarding it. Now, that does not mean that you go to AI and say, "What are the most common questions somebody asks about this?" and provide the answers, because we don't want you to have the exact same answers and the exact same questions that every other one of your competitors have. And especially now, when we're in this AI search world and people start to say, "Oh, you should include more FAQs. You should include more FAQs for SEO, for AI," we don't want them to be generic. We want them around your topic, and we want them around information that actually adds value for potential patients. Patients feel more confident when they already know what to expect before they pick up the phone Before we keep going, I just wanna take a moment to say that if you're following this along and you're like, "Huh, I think we should probably use a little bit more SEO help," please feel free to book a discovery call. You can find the link to book the discovery call at propelyourcompany.com or in the show notes associated with this episode. This episode, I think, is gonna be a lot longer than some of the other episodes, so I am glad you're still listening. I hope you're still listening because we still have a bit of things to cover. And the next one is one of the least exciting parts of SEO, but it's incredibly important, and it's your metadata, specifically your meta page title tags and your meta page descriptions, and also your headings. These all tell Google exactly what your page is about, and StoryBrand doesn't really address metadata because it was never intended to, and that's one other place where SEO comes in. Every important page should have a unique title. It should have a compelling description. It ha- should have logical headings. It should... All of your images should have alt image text. Th- those small details help improve visibility and encourage more people to click on your listings. Now, a couple other things as we keep going through here that differ from StoryBrand and SEO is StoryBrand doesn't take into account internal links. Internal links are links within the content on your website that link it to other related content that's on a different page of your website or a blog post Let's think of this with using this example. Imagine walking into a library where none of the books are organized. It would be pure chaos, right? That's what a website without internal links feels like to Google. Now, if you could see me right now, I'm making a web with my hand, and I think if you think about it, like it's called the World Wide Web. It is called the web because everything links together, and throughout your website, different sections of your website need to have links, internal links back to related resources and topics. One, it helps Google understand the hierarchy of the content on your website, and it helps somebody stay on your website longer, which then is an indicator that they are enjoying and finding the content which signals to Google, "Hey, this is great content." So, for example, if you had a, blog post and you were talking about back pain, when you said back pain throughout it, not every single time, but a couple of times, once or twice, you would link to the back pain page. If you are on your back pain page and you're talking about the services that you offer that help alleviate back pain, and you mention chiropractic adjustments, that should link to the chiropractic adjustment page. I think that all makes sense. We just have to remember it and consider it. And again, those links also help patients that are on the website continue their journey through learning. They help search engines understand how your content fits together. And internal

Metadata Links And Profile Alignment

Speaker 2 28:49

links, and I think we've got a whole episode just on internal links, which I will link,, in the show notes. Internal links are one of the simplest SEO improvements that you can make, and it's often overlooked during a website redesign process. So that's something to consider. We also have to consider that your website doesn't just exist in isolation anymore. Google connects your website with your Google Business Profile listing, your services, your reviews, your business categories, your photos, your business description. Your website should reinforce all of those signals. Likewise, your Google Business Profile should reinforce your website. When both are aligned, Google has a much greater confidence in understanding what your clinic offers. Again, if you follow some of the story brand framework, you might have the description, your business description in Google Business Profile, that's missing a solid opportunity to include keywords and terms that are gonna help you rank better. So we need to remember that because when both are aligned, this helps improve your chance of appearing in local searches, Google Maps, And AI-generated recommendations. Finally, let's chat a little bit about AI. This is where things are changing quickly. People aren't just searching Google anymore. They're asking questions. Not only are they asking questions, but they're asking complex questions. They're asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews. And these systems don't just look for keywords. They look for keywords, but they also look for context. They want to understand, what conditions do you treat? Who do you help? Where are you located? What services do you provide? What makes your clinic different? The clearer your content is, the easier it becomes for AI to understand and recommend your practice. Ironically, this is where StoryBrand and SEO align beautifully. StoryBrand encourages clarity. SEO encourages being specific. AI rewards both. The future is not about choosing one strategy over another. It's about creating content that's clear enough for patients to understand and detailed enough for search engines and AI systems to trust This is where everything starts to click when we start bringing StoryBrand and SEO together if you're a fan of StoryBrand. Now, let me be clear. If you are not a fan of StoryBrand, you do not need to use any elements of StoryBrand to rank when it comes to SEO. But if you are using StoryBrand, you do need to layer in SEO to make sure that you rank And if you are to combine them, the process looks something like this. First, you get an idea of exactly

AI Search And The Final Takeaway

Speaker 2 31:54

what it is you do and who you help. Then you organize the website around those topics. You can use StoryBrand principles to make every page more engaging, patient-focused, and easy to understand. But then you need to optimize everything for local SEO and AI search. The result is a website that's easy for Google to understand, easy for AI to reference, and easy for patients to trust. That's the goal. If there's one thing I hope you remember from today's episode, it's this: StoryBrand helps people understand your messaging. SEO helps people discover your message. Those are not competing ideas. They are complementary. Your website doesn't need to choose between clear messaging and search visibility. The best clinic websites have both, because the most persuasive website in the world can't help your practice if patients never find it If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it or if you are interested, please feel free to book a discovery call. We would love to chat with you about SEO. Again, you can find the link to book a discovery call in the show notes associated with this episode or by visiting propelyourcompany.com