I started PELORA Marketing in Newport Beach, California because I kept watching health and wellness brands, behavioral health operators, treatment centers, med spas, and longevity clinics across Orange County ask the wrong question. They would call me up and say, "I need help with SEO." Twelve years ago that was the right question. Today it is half the question. The other half is the part nobody is talking about clearly: when buyers stop typing into Google and start asking ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini for a recommendation, your brand either gets named or it gets ignored. There is no in between.
Three letters now matter for traffic. SEO. AEO. GEO. Each one targets a different surface. Each one matters for a different kind of buyer. And every health and wellness brand serious about scaling in 2026 needs all three running, not one.
This article is the breakdown I give every founder on a strategy call. What each one is. What it actually looks like. How much you should spend. And what stacks on top of all of it (creative, video, social, blogs) so the work compounds instead of dies.
The three enginesSEO, AEO, GEO. What they actually are.
Most agencies still sell "SEO" like the world has not changed. The world has changed. Here is the real distinction.
SEO vs AEO vs GEO at a glance.
Get your page to rank in the ten blue links on Google or Bing when someone searches a query. The traditional game.
Get your brand cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini for a recommendation. The new game.
Get pulled into AI generated summaries above search results. Google AI Overviews. Bing Copilot. ChatGPT Search.
All three reinforce each other. AI assistants pull citations from the SEO ranked pool. The brands that run all three compound. The brands that pick one fall behind.
Here is the part most agencies miss. AEO and GEO are not separate jobs from SEO. They share the same technical foundation: Schema.org structured data, FAQ markup, entity disambiguation, citation friendly content. If your site is doing one of them right, you are most of the way to all three. If your site is doing none of them, you are invisible to every buyer who is not already typing your brand name into a search box. (This is exactly what we build inside our AI Search Optimization service: SEO, AEO, and GEO running together as one system.)
The shift is real. By the end of 2026 an estimated 40 percent or more of high intent buyer searches in health, wellness, and behavioral health will start inside an AI assistant instead of a traditional search engine. If your brand is not cited there, you are losing demand before the prospect ever clicks anything.
The pricing questionHow much should I spend on a marketing company?
I get this question on every first call, and the honest answer is: it depends on what your goal is.
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends 7 to 8 percent of gross revenue on marketing for established businesses. The Deloitte CMO Survey, the Gartner CMO Spend Survey, and the WordStream small business benchmarks all land in roughly the same place: most B2C and consumer brands spend somewhere between 9 and 12 percent of revenue on marketing in a steady state.
That number changes dramatically when you are trying to grow.
If you want to grow, spend like you mean it.
Of gross revenue is what I tell health and wellness brands serious about growth to commit. That covers paid media, creative production, web, CRM automation, and search visibility (SEO, AEO, GEO) bundled together. Brands trying to scale fast in regulated categories sometimes go higher in year one, then settle at 12 to 15 percent in year two and beyond.
Source: U.S. SBA + Deloitte CMO Survey + PELORA operating data across health, wellness, and behavioral health clients.
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If you want to grow a behavioral health, health and wellness, or longevity brand in Orange County or anywhere else, 20 percent of gross revenue is the floor. Anything less and you are not building a marketing engine, you are renting attention.
Preston Durnford · Founder, PELORA Marketing · Newport Beach, CA
The 20 percent number is uncomfortable for most founders the first time they hear it. They want to spend 5 percent. They have spent 3 percent for years and assumed that was the answer. And then they wonder why their competitor is showing up everywhere and they are not. (For a full retainer breakdown across our six tiers from Launch to Full-Service, see our pricing page.)
Here is the math nobody talks about. If you do $1 million in revenue and you commit 20 percent, you have $200,000 a year, or about $16,000 a month, to spend on the entire marketing function. That covers a real agency retainer ($4,500 to $8,000), real ad spend ($5,000 to $8,000), and real production ($1,000 to $3,000). It is not a luxury budget. It is the floor for actually growing.
What about smaller businesses with smaller budgets?
This is where I get personal because I know the answer hurts. Sometimes I take on smaller brands at a discount because I want to help them get off the ground. Smaller brands are often the most challenging for an agency to grow, because they do not have the ad spend to test fast, they do not have the budget to produce 30 ad creatives a month, and they do not have the cash to run lifecycle email and SMS at the same time.
But here is what I believe. A real marketing company should help small businesses commit to growth. We should show up, take the smaller fee in the first three to six months, build the engine right, and grow with them. That is how the agency wins long term too. The brand gets bigger. The retainer goes up. Both sides win.
The brands that try to "test marketing for $500" do not grow. The brands that commit to building the engine, even if it takes a year of being scrappy, do.
The full stackWhere the budget actually goes (and why ads alone do not work).
"I just want someone to run my Meta ads" is the most common pitch I hear, and it is also the fastest way to burn budget without growing. Ads are the engine. Creative and video, social, web, and CRM are the chassis. Run an engine without the chassis and you go nowhere fast.
Here is roughly how I tell brands to allocate that 20 percent of revenue across the stack.
How to split the 20 percent across the stack.
Allocation shifts based on category and stage. Behavioral health and consumer brands skew more to creative and ads. B2B services skew more to SEO, AEO, and content. The point is that every line on this stack feeds the others.
Each line stacks on the next.
Ads need creative. Creative needs video. Video needs a brand and on camera footage. The traffic ads send needs landing pages. The leads landing pages capture need a CRM. The CRM needs SMS, email, and follow up sequences. The brand authority that compounds it all needs blogs, SEO, AEO, and GEO running underneath. Pull one piece out and the rest underperforms. That is why "just running ads" does not work.
BlogsHow many should you publish per month?
The realistic cadence for a health and wellness brand serious about AEO and GEO is 4 to 8 posts per month. Not 30. Not 50. Quality compounds. Volume gets penalized.
Each post should: target a specific buyer question, include FAQ Schema markup, link internally to relevant service pages, and ideally cite the founder's actual experience or examples. Twelve to twenty four posts in your first ninety days creates enough surface area for AI assistants to start citing your brand and for Google to start ranking long tail keywords like "behavioral health marketing agency Newport Beach" or "how much does video production cost Orange County."
The pattern that wins: founder gives a 5 minute voice note on a topic, AI drafts the post in your voice, founder edits and approves, schema gets added, post goes live. Time per post for the founder: 30 to 45 minutes. Time per post if you wrote it manually: 8 to 10 hours. The leverage is real.
Video for your businessWhy making video content for your business is the fastest way to rank in search and get cited by AI.
I get asked this constantly. The honest answer: making video for your business is the fastest way to compound everything else. Founder led video content ranks in YouTube and Google search, gets pulled into AI Overviews and ChatGPT citations, and gives you a library you can chop into 30+ social posts a month. There is no replacement for a real face, a real voice, and a real perspective. Stock footage cannot fake it. AI cannot fake it. Your competitor cannot copy it. The brands that consistently make video rank for category keywords, get cited by AI assistants, and convert paid traffic at higher rates because the buyer feels like they already know you before the call.
That said, not every founder is built for it. Some founders are introverts. Some have legitimate reasons to stay behind the brand. If you cannot or will not be on camera, video for your business can still be built around clients (with permission), team members, the workspace, the work itself, and customer stories. The velocity is slower but the work still compounds, and every video you publish becomes a new asset Google, YouTube, and AI engines can rank.
I recorded a short take on this. Making videos for your business and how it ties directly into search rankings, AI search citations, and lead conversion. Plays inline below, no need to leave the page.
Watch · Plays inline
Preston Durnford · Newport Beach
Preston Durnford on making video content for your business. Newport Beach, CA. Click the thumbnail and the video plays right here on the page. No need to leave for YouTube.
The brands that get on camera early build authority faster. They attract higher quality clients. They convert paid traffic at higher rates because the buyer feels like they already know the founder before the call. Twelve to twenty four months of consistent founder content is enough to put most operators ahead of every competitor in their category.
Local SEO · Newport Beach & Orange CountyWhy we focus on Orange County (and how local search still matters even with AI search rising).
I have lived and operated in Newport Beach, California for years. The agency is headquartered here. Most of our clients are health and wellness, behavioral health, longevity, and consumer brands across Orange County, Laguna Beach, Costa Mesa, Irvine, Huntington Beach, Los Angeles, San Diego, and remote clients nationwide. The local SEO play matters because every health and wellness category in Orange County is a small world. Treatment centers, med spas, hormone clinics, recovery and longevity studios, dental, plastic surgery, behavioral health programs. The local search market for those categories is concentrated, competitive, and often very high LTV per client.
Local SEO and local AEO live on three things. First, a clean Google Business Profile with the right primary category, real photos, real reviews, weekly posts. Second, location and service pages on the website with city level keywords (Newport Beach marketing agency, Orange County behavioral health marketing, Laguna Beach video production, Costa Mesa CRM automation, Irvine ad agency). Third, citations and reviews on the directories that AI assistants pull from when prospects ask "best behavioral health marketing agency in Orange County" or "health and wellness marketing in Newport Beach."
The brands that win in this region are the ones that take local seriously. Newport Beach buyers want to work with a Newport Beach team. Orange County operators want a partner who knows the regulatory and clinical landscape across California. We lean into that. We do not pretend to be a "global agency." We are an Orange County agency that travels for the right clients.
My takeWhat I would do if I were building a brand right now.
If I were starting today in health, wellness, behavioral health, or any high trust consumer category, here is exactly what I would do.
- Commit 20 percent of gross revenue to marketing for the first 12 to 18 months. Higher if I had outside capital and was trying to scale fast.
- Run all three engines from day one. SEO, AEO, GEO. Not pick one. Not "we'll add AI search later." Now.
- Hire one team, not five vendors. Creative, paid, web, CRM, and content all running together. Most brands have four agencies pointing fingers at each other. That is the slowest, most expensive way to build.
- Get on camera in month one. Imperfect content beats perfect content that ships in month six.
- Publish 4 to 8 blog posts per month targeting the questions your buyers actually ask. Pull from real client conversations.
- Build the CRM before the ads. Speed to lead under 5 minutes. Missed call text back. Email and SMS sequences live before the first dollar of paid spend goes out.
- Track LTV and CAC by channel from day one. Most brands cannot tell you which channel produces their best clients. The ones that can, scale faster.
The brands I see win in 2026 are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the most coherent system. Brand, ads, web, CRM, content, AI search, all running as one engine, fed by real founder content, with the discipline to commit a real percentage of revenue back into the work.
If that lines up with how you are thinking about your brand, book a call. If it does not, take this article and use it. Either way the work is the work.
Want to see what this would look like for your brand?
30 minutes. Your category, your spend, your funnel. I run the call personally. No pitch deck. Yes fit or no fit on the call. If we are a fit, we send a scope. If not, you leave with a punch list.
Book a Strategy Call (833) 598-2254
Last updated by Preston Durnford, founder of PELORA Marketing in Newport Beach, California.