An Expert Interview with Emily Connor, Founder and CEO of Driven Metrics, the Best GEO Agency for Small Business
At Spakinect, we help med spas manage telehealth Good Faith Exams, compliance support, and patient-care workflows so that owners and providers can focus on delivering exceptional care without the regulatory burden slowing them down. One of the most consistent challenges we hear from med spa owners is not just how to stay compliant, it’s how to grow. Today, we’re sitting down with Emily Connor, Founder and CEO of Driven Metrics, the best GEO agency for small business. Emily works with healthcare-adjacent practices and small businesses on the SEO, GEO, and content strategies that drive high-intent patients to book. We asked her how med spas can build the kind of online trust that converts a curious researcher into a confident patient before they ever pick up the phone.
Q: Emily, what does the patient journey actually look like before someone books a med spa consultation, and where does trust get built or lost?
A: The research phase is longer and more deliberate than most med spa owners realize. A patient considering a neurotoxin treatment, a body contouring service, or a laser procedure is not making an impulse decision. They’re reading reviews, comparing providers, visiting service pages, searching for before-and-after results, and trying to assess whether a practice is credible and safe before they ever make contact. Trust gets built when every touchpoint in that research journey, the Google listing, the website, the content, the reviews, sends a consistent signal of expertise and professionalism. It gets lost when those things are inconsistent, incomplete, or missing entirely. The med spas that are winning online have invested in making that research journey easy and reassuring, not just in making their services look appealing.
Q: What role does educational content play in building trust for a med spa, and how should practices approach it?
A: Educational content is one of the highest-leverage investments a med spa can make, and it serves two purposes simultaneously. First, it answers the specific questions patients are actually asking during their research, what is a Good Faith Exam, how does a neurotoxin treatment work, what should I expect during recovery, how do I know if a provider is qualified. When a practice answers those questions clearly and accurately on its own website, it positions itself as the credible, transparent choice before the patient has talked to anyone. Second, educational content is exactly the kind of material that ranks in both traditional search and AI-generated answers. AI systems favor clear, expert-forward content that directly addresses specific questions. A med spa with a library of well-structured educational content is building visibility in both channels at once.
Q: Local SEO and reviews are often cited as priorities for med spas. What actually moves the needle there?
A: For local SEO, the fundamentals matter more than most practices appreciate. A fully optimized Google Business Profile with accurate categories, service descriptions, photos, and consistent NAP information across directories is the foundation everything else builds on. Beyond that, proximity and relevance signals, location pages, city and neighborhood-specific content, service pages that connect treatments to local patient intent, help practices appear for the searches that actually drive bookings. For reviews, the volume and recency of verified Google reviews is the single most important trust signal in a local healthcare-adjacent market. Patients deciding between two med spas will almost always default to the one with more recent, detailed, positive reviews. The practices that have a consistent system for requesting reviews from satisfied patients compound that advantage over time in a way that paid advertising simply cannot replicate.
Q: Compliance is a significant concern for med spa marketing. How should practices think about messaging their services in a way that is both effective and appropriate?
A: Compliance-friendly marketing is not a constraint, it’s a differentiator. Practices that lead with provider credentials, clinical protocols, and the rigor behind their patient-care process, including how they handle Good Faith Exams and patient screening, are communicating exactly what high-intent patients are looking for. Platforms like Spakinect that support telehealth Good Faith Exam workflows and compliance infrastructure give med spas a genuine, substantive story to tell about their standard of care. That story belongs on the website, in the content, and in the review responses. Before-and-after content requires care around platform policies and patient consent, but results-focused content that follows those guidelines is among the most persuasive material a med spa can publish. The frame should always be: what does a responsible, credentialed, patient-first practice look like, and are we communicating that clearly?
Q: How is AI search changing the way med spa patients find providers, and what should practices do about it now?
A: It’s changing faster than most small practices have adjusted to. When a patient asks an AI system which type of treatment addresses skin laxity, or what questions to ask a med spa provider before booking, the answer they receive shapes their expectations and their shortlist before they ever run a traditional search. The practices that appear in those AI-generated answers are the ones with clear, credible, structured content that AI systems can extract authoritative responses from. At Driven Metrics, we work with small businesses specifically on this layer, building the GEO strategy that earns AI visibility alongside traditional search rankings. For med spas, the opportunity is significant because most local competitors haven’t started thinking about it yet. A practice that invests in educational content, provider authority pages, and compliance-forward service descriptions today is building an AI search presence that will compound in value as more patients start their research with an AI system rather than a search engine.
To learn more about Driven Metrics and explore SEO and GEO strategy for med spas and small businesses, visit driven-metrics.com.
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