Comparison
Cardinal is an Atlanta-based healthcare marketing agency with an established SEO and paid media practice. Aesthetics is one of several healthcare verticals they serve, alongside dermatology, plastic surgery and wider medical groups.
Cardinal is an established agency with real healthcare depth, and for a group that wants full-service coverage from one partner they are a credible choice. We are narrower by design: we do one thing across four engines and measure it monthly. If you need a website rebuilt, we are the wrong call.
Scope
Cardinal Digital Marketing
Retainers commonly reported in the $4,000–$8,000/month range depending on scope.
First Five
Published at firstfivehq.com/pricing.
Straight answer
Line by line
Not a criticism of SEO — it still matters. These are simply different jobs, and most operators are only buying one of them.
| Traditional agency work | First Five | |
|---|---|---|
| Engines covered | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot | |
| Where the work happens | Almost entirely on your website | Roughly four fifths off it, where citations come from |
| What success looks like | A position on page one | Being named in a list of five |
| Primary data source | Google Search Console | Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp, review platforms |
| How reviews are treated | Reputation management | A primary input to whether you get named |
| Monthly deliverable | A traffic report | A score, a per-engine breakdown, and a citation source map |
| When you are not cited | No visibility into why | The exact source that produced a competitor mention instead |
| What compounds | Rankings reset with each core update | Presence in the sources engines read |
Every row above is checkable. If your current agency covers a row we have marked, tell us and we will correct it.
3 questions
Usually the cleanest arrangement. Cardinal handles site and paid media; we handle AI visibility. The inputs barely overlap — traditional SEO works on your domain, while AI citations come predominantly from Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp, reviews and editorial coverage.
Not necessarily, and price is the wrong comparison — the services do different jobs. Our pricing is published so you can rule it in or out without a call. If your budget only covers one, and you have no CRM or booking system, start with the platform rather than with us.
Run the free audit tools first. If AI engines already name you consistently, you do not need us and we would rather you knew that. If they name your competitors instead, that gap is what we work on.
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