If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred times; blogging is important. While this is definitely not new thinking, there are still countless practices that have yet to utilize all the great advantages that a good blog has to offer. This begs the question, why is blogging so important and what steps can you take to ensure you get the most value out of your practice’s blog? In this post, you’ll learn why you should blog.
Why is blogging important?
There are many schools of thought with regard to the importance of blogging. Some like to argue the numerous benefits blogs have on your practice’s brand as their strongest benefit. For instance, blogs serve as an extremely useful tool for new patients on your site to familiarize themselves with you and your office. This, in turn, helps your practice build trust with the reader as they learn more about you and your expertise, making them more likely to convert from a prospective patient to a new patient.
Blog posts are also easily shareable pieces of content that both existing patients and prospective patients can use to introduce your practice to their friends and family.
Meanwhile, others may argue that the value for blogging is primarily technical; with blog posts serving a variety of SEO benefits from ranking higher for certain keywords to improving visibility with more indexed pages.
In fact, it’s been observed that websites with blogs have roughly 434% more indexed pages than websites with no blog! Additionally, blogging can help build your websites’ credibility with prospective patients and search engines alike by establishing you as an informative and legitimate source of information. New blogs serve as great pieces of content to help keep your site ‘fresh’ and can certainly be utilized as a means for back linking.
If you were to ask me – I would say blogs are important because of… “All of the above”. The SEO benefits of blogging are virtually undisputed and their worth can be made extremely apparent by examining a practice’s website before & after they introduce a blog.
Nearly every definition of “Search Engine Optimization” contains some reference to a website’s content – and a huge part of most website content strategies include blogs for a reason – they work! So all this in conjunction with the inherent benefits blogging brings to your practice’s brand really does make it a much-needed part of your overall marketing strategy. So hopefully this helps you better understand the value of blogging, but what comes next? How do you start and what should you write about?
Helpful Ideas for Blog Topics:
While there are plenty of online resources for “Blog Topic Ideas” or “Blog Topic Generators” you can find online, you might be surprised to hear the best advice comes from within your own practice. If you are struggling with inspiration for topics to blog about – here is some helpful advice; write about whatever your patients want to read!
If you find that your patients are regularly asking you about the side effects of a certain procedure, or the recovery time for a common treatment – write about it. A great way to identify topics worth including on your blog is to merely keep track of the questions your practice gets most frequently.
If you were to aggregate your own “FAQ” from patients on a day-to-day basis, you could absolutely use the most prevalent or recurring questions as subjects for your next blog posts. You may be surprised how effective this works when it comes to identifying engaging content that resonates with your audience.
You can also consider incorporating seasonality into your blog by thinking of the types of procedures, services, or questions that are most prevalent around certain times of the year. For instance, you can use Google Trends to identify popular search trends over time and use this information to determine when might be the best time to write about certain topics. It’s obviously much more effective to write about topics when they’re top-of-mind so pinpointing when these topics are most popular definitely helps increase the likelihood of your blog attracting more attention.
4 most important points to be considered while creating blogs are:
- Know your target audience.
- Make relevance your guideline light.
- Find a blog to steal from.
- Leverage helpful content tools.
Blogging in nutshell:
One of the most effective ways to conclude your blog post is to tell your reader exactly what they should do or where they should go next. Sometimes, this is as clear as a call-to-action (CTA) button that may say “Click Here for Your Free Guide” or any other text that guides them towards your desired action.
