Everyone seems to be blogging nowadays. In its early days, blogging was considered an online journal. However, as time progressed, blogging has become a professional tool for driving business growth.
It is not just a platform to express creativity or share personal stories, but a tool for businesses to promote their brands. If you are a medical and or dental practice, there are many great reasons why you should consider blogging for your practice.
Why Medical and Dental Practices Should Be Blogging?
Blogging provides tons of benefits for medical and dental practices, especially independent ones. Through blog posts, medical and dental practitioners are able to engage with their prospective clients, provide valuable information, increase online authority and reputation.
Content marketing and blogging allow medical and dental professionals to connect with their patients in various ways. One upside of blogging is that you don’t have to overwhelm your patients with a ton of other marketing strategies. Serve them interesting and engaging content and prospective patients will discover you through search engine rankings.
For example, one of our clients, Carolina Pharmacy, uses blogs that give information on disease treatment, healthy living, medication types and other pharmaceutical services. Carolina Pharmacy also utilizes blog posts with local keywords to target patients in each of their locations.
Search engines also favor medical and dental websites that regularly post quality content and blogs. By consistently creating content for your blog, you can make a positive impact on search engine rankings especially if you follow these guidelines for search engine optimization.
Another great advantage of blogging is backlinks. Backlinking is when someone else’s blog or page links to your page. Why is this important? Backlinks are one way of increasing the reputation of your website, and search engines love to highlight websites with credible authority at the top of the search results.
Here are some more reasons why your medical or dental practices should blog:
- Blogs are a solid foundation for online presence through SEO.
- Blogs are a great way to demonstrate your expertise online.
- Blogs allow patients to discover your medical or dental practice.
How to Blog for Google and Your Patients? What are all of the Elements Needed to Create a Blog that will Rank on Google?
Now that you have learned the benefits that you can get from blogging, you might have this question in mind.
How do I start creating blogs that will rank in Google?
The first thing that you should know is the anatomy of a good blog post. When creating a blog, consider these important things:
- Catchy headline
- Relevant images
- Introduction
- Lead-in
- Main points
- Conclusion
- Call-to-action
A catchy headline will allow you to catch your reader’s attention so they will actually start reading your blog post. Relevant images, on the other hand, will help break up chunks of text so that your readers will not get tired of reading long articles.
To keep your reader hooked on your content, a good introduction comes into play. You can also lead in your readers to your content with bullet points that will help them know what to expect in your blog at a quick glance.
When delivering your main points, you should always keep in mind to write for your readers and not only for the search engines. This means that you should write content with a natural flow of information and not forcefully stuff keywords.
When writing a conclusion, you do not need to reiterate your main points. A single paragraph that wraps up your article is enough. Lastly, a call-to-action with your contact details will help your readers to reach out to you easily.
If you want to create a blog that will rank in Google, you should know how to optimize SEO elements. The first step in optimizing SEO elements is to do keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding competitive keywords that you can use on your blog to help you rank higher in search engines and drive more traffic to your website.
You can use keyword research tools such as Ahrefs to find the keywords for your blogs. When doing keyword research, you can use seed keywords as the foundation of your research. Seed keywords can be a simple description of your business that you can also localize for the best results such as “medical practice in New York” or “dental office in Charlotte, NC.”
We love using Ahrefs’ keyword explorer for keyword research.
Once you have decided which seed keyword you will be using, you can generate keyword ideas in the keyword research tool of your choice. You can sort these generated ideas by keyword difficulty, search volume, clicks, clicks per search, cost per click and more.
Choosing a variety of keywords from keyword tools that are relevant to your main topic and using it once or twice throughout your blog can help search engines to crawl and rank your page more easily.
Perhaps the best way to drive organic traffic to your website is through on-page SEO techniques. On-page SEO is using keywords in strategic parts of a blog post. Keywords should be used in the:
- Meta title – a title element of the page that tells what the page is about.
- Meta description – a summary of the contents of the page.
- Permalink – the full URL for a page.
- Header tags – header tags are used to differentiate the heading (H1) from the subheadings of a page (H2-H6).
- Alt text – are the keyword phrases that you add to the backend of your website code for each image to tell Google crawlers what the image is about.
How to Determine Which Blog Topics to Write About for Your Medical or Dental Practice
Determining blog topics to write about for your medical or dental practice is a pretty straightforward task. The first thing that you need to do is to focus on the niche that you are in. For medical and dental practices, these are some of the blog topics that you can write about.
Trending health topics: writing about trending health topics requires that you stay up-to-date with medical and dental news. There are a couple of websites that you can visit to find out which topic is trending and then make blogs about it. For medical topics, you can check out Labroots, Medscape, Sciencedaily and others. You can also check MedicalNewsToday, OralHealthGroup, MDLinx and DentistryToday for dental news.
However, trending topics are not evergreen as they come and go, so you should make sure that you take advantage of these topics and create blog posts about them while they are trending.
Information on your expertise: blogs are a great way to let your patients know what they can expect from you. You can also discuss other medical or dental issues to show your expertise. A good example of this is this blog from Advanced Sports & Spine.
Medical and dental advice: another great way to establish your authority and expertise is to create a blog that contains medical and dental advice. Modern Family Dental Care’s blog about getting a second opinion is a great example of a blog post giving medical or dental advice.
Promotions: patients love to see ways that they can save money on when it comes to medical and dental procedures. You can talk about current promotions and discounts to attract new patients.
List articles: list articles provide an easy way for patients to get information about a certain topic. You can use list articles to provide short but useful insights on a variety of topics. Day Break Massage & Wellness has a list article that serves as a good example.
Tutorials and guides: you can create blogs to provide your patients with a step-by-step guide of doing something. You can also use videos and images so your patients can see clearly what you are describing in your guide.
Medical and dental blogs are effective ways of building your brand authority and attracting new patients. Contact Med Rank Interactive at 980-217-1633 and we will create and manage your blogs for you.
