John Berry, your trustworthy SEOversite VP here, with our Digital Marketing State of the Union. Times are frothy, confusing, and riddled with vicissitudes. What does it all mean for your business? Let’s dive in…
Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing
Terminator foreshadowed 2025 – kinda, sorta… the rise of AI is here. Last year, Google implemented their AI Overview in the search engine result pages (SERPs), and it is having a real impact on traffic. Not sure what I’m talking about? Ask Google a question and see it compile answers at the top of your screen instead of suggesting the best websites to answer your question – in milliseconds.
As a Miami SEO agency, we’re regularly seeing drops in traffic of 20-50% related to broader searches (i.e. “how much is a breast lift?”) versus specific “buying” searches (i.e. “breast lift surgeon near me”), however the reality is that most of this traffic was going to blogs instead of procedure or treatment pages. Further, the AI-compiled information still gives the option to click through to some of those blogs and pages, and many showcase your website’s internal page above Google Maps and organic listings. We anticipate this will remain in flux for much of the year.
Blogs on your website are traditionally written to support procedure pages with longer answers to questions that may simply take up too much room or attention on a procedure page, however, they aren’t always the greatest when it comes to converting a visitor to a form, phone call, or live chat. In other words, losing this traffic isn’t the end of the world and was originally there to simply drive eyeballs – yes, we’d rather have it than not, but it shouldn’t be a major factor when it comes to lead counts.
When evaluating your year-over-year traffic, consider looking at the organic unique traffic to the actual landing page where the traffic entered last year versus 2025. We think you’ll find that as long as your rankings are strong, the traffic you’ve lost likely won’t be of any real consequence when it comes to total lead counts.
AI in Digital Marketing Analysis
There’s no question that this is the beginning of something bigger and shouldn’t be ignored. While AI isn’t currently “pay to play”, it will be monetized at some point. Your web team should be considering how they can impact the AI-generated results (notice I didn’t say rankings?), namely through very high-quality, end-user focused content and quality outbound links to authoritative sources until the complete picture comes into focus. This can help AI read your page, add it to their summary, and increase click-throughs or at least showcase your content, page, or name as authoritative. Likely, with time, those being pulled from AI more often will garner favor from Google’s algorithm and ultimately will result in more traffic with higher intent visitors.
There’s still a lot of runway ahead and we’ve only scratched the surface, but it will pay to be an early adopter.
As mentioned before, AI is more likely to take views away when searchers are still in the awareness or consideration phases of the marketing funnel. Individuals in the Conversion phase are less likely to look up keywords that will populate AI results in the SERPs and will scroll past them, seeking the right practice or med spa.
While some of our long term web marketing oversight clients are seeing increases and others see decreases in visitors, the vast majority have had similar or even improved overall lead count to start the first third of the year. Additionally, our YellowTelescope Consulting clients are largely having a massive growth year in total sales despite the news suggesting our industry overall is down year over year.
Because of this, you need to make sure that your SEO strategy is in a strong place and you’re ranking well for your high-intent keywords such as “rhinoplasty in Miami.” If you do that, the traffic you lose to AI is less likely to be the users who turn into a lead.
Economic Impact on Digital Marketing and Early 2025 Digital Marketing Trends
For the first time since early 2022, the U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter of 2025. Economic instability was a hot topic on many of our calls with clients in the first third of the year. For the plastics and med spa industry, this resulted in a pullback in user intent (readiness to fill out a lead, come in for a consultation, or book a procedure), similar to what we saw from mid-2023 to mid-to-late 2024 before a slight uptick in activity in Q4 2024 following the election.
For our tenured YellowTelescope-trained practices, this has largely been a blip on the radar in terms of the schedule, with most growing substantially overall, though the impact has been felt by most others we connect with. Market volatility often translates to uncertainty when it comes to big purchases, and our industry is no different.
During these times, the efficiency of your team has (getting to leads within minutes or house most of the time, following our proprietary GGG call process that wrings the rag on conversion and sales efficiency, and having rockstars in your sales/patient coordinator seat) reigns supreme. If you are down for the year, it’s important to be positive, realize it can be fixed, and not be upset, but also to realize you simply chose not to invest properly in one or more key areas. When the size of the pie shrinks, there are still people taking even larger slices, like our consulting and web oversight clientele. When people stop spending and make cuts, we take market share. You should, too.
Economic Impact on Digital Marketing Analysis
The tide that comes in, must go out, but both ways you can fill your large bucket with water if you know how to manage the waves. While others lose the bucket, only get water one way, or drown, know that others already have it figured out, and you are invited to join them. In the meantime, as a business owner, your priority should be controlling what you can and further distinguishing yourself from the competition in order to stand out from the crowd.
There is a phrase our President coined years ago that says, “It’s not the economy. It’s your economy.” Even if the economy is not doing too well, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take actions to ensure your economy stays thriving.
Regularly adding before and after photos for every single procedure, capturing reviews from happy patients and clients, and staying active on social media and your Google Business Profile. Investing in paid Google and social media ads, having superb salespeople converting 80%+ in-room for surgery and 95%+ with a high upsell rate for non-surgical services, and more, are keys to success. Further, using your existing email and phone lists for email and text marketing and staying front of mind helps mitigate slower weeks.
Did the State of the Union make you realize your digital marketing or overall structure wasn’t in the best place? Reach out to us today to discuss your business’ marketing strategies for 2025!