Why Start Blogging?
Search results are driven by keywords and website traffic. If you want your practice to show up at the top of search results, you need website content that supports related search terms. Blogging is an opportunity to add high quality content without lengthening core website pages or crowding the main navigation of your website. The long term results will outweigh the time it takes to produce blogs:
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- Drive more traffic to your website
- Keep users on your website longer
- Collect emails through downloadable content
- Increase website conversions
- Keep your community engaged
Bonus: A strategic blog calendar can also be repurposed for social media and email marketing!
In 2022, blogs on medical websites were among the top-20 most visited pages. Despite their usefulness and long-lasting impact, many healthcare organizations aren’t using them to their full extent, if at all. Ideally, your healthcare organization should be adding new content to your website on a regular basis but only if that content is relevant for your target audience. Let’s explore how to start a blog for your practice:
What Should My Practice’s Blog Be About?
The tricky part about blogging is that you are reaching all of your target audiences in one feed. How do you craft a blog schedule that equally favors all your sub-audiences? First, take a look at target audiences and how to reach them.
Personas
Personas are a useful tool that help healthcare practices better understand all aspects of the target audiences you are trying to reach – going well beyond just the demographics – by taking a deep dive into their motivators, their challenges, their habits, as well as where they fall in the buyer’s journey for your services. Your website visitors will be arriving at your website during various stages of the buyer journey. Some will just be starting their research while others might be comparing practices and getting consultations. Some might even be returning customers or coming from a referral. Your content should be equally educational for all sub-audiences determined by your personas.
Keyword Research
Once you know who exactly is coming to your website, you can dive deeper into what they commonly search to find you. Your practice’s website analytics can show you the top visited blogs, what search queries were used to find it and how long users were staying on these top blogs. These search queries are a good starting point for content planning. Use these search queries to find similar topics and frequently asked questions that need answering.
How Do I Optimize My Blogs for SEO?
Rare do users click beyond the first page of results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing unpaid website traffic driven by higher click-through rates towards the top of search results. With millions of websites on the web, competition is high for keywords relevant to your practice’s services. Optimizing your blog for SEO starts with producing a high-quality, relevant content plan for your audiences; however, there are a number of factors in the ever-changing Google search algorithm that your practice needs to account for:
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- Responsive Design: With over 60% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices in 2022, it’s crucial to focus on the mobile and responsive experience your website provides.
- Page Speed: Search algorithms heavily factor in the overall user experience of websites, and not just the content written. Search engines want to provide the best results possible. If your competitor ranks for the same keywords and has a faster website, they will out-rank you for providing a better experience.
- Meta Data: Page titles and meta descriptions are previews of the content on the web page. You want to make sure these previews are keyword-driven and enticing enough to encourage a click-through.
- Use Videos and Images: Web pages are not the only rankable content in search results. With tabs for maps, shopping images, videos and more, mixing media types will increase your practice’s real estate on search results across all tabs.
How Often Should My Practice Blog?
Healthcare blogging should be about quality over quantity but that doesn’t mean once a year is enough to see an impact on your organic traffic. The best way to determine the frequency of your blogs is to analyze your marketing and communications plan altogether.
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- How often are you utilizing email marketing?
- How many times a week are you posting on social media?
- Are you pushing any new print content?
- Have you been granted any new awards or certifications?
- Are you pushing any new services?
Answering these questions will help you build a comprehensive communication plan that will align with your practice’s goals rather than blogging for the sake of blogging.
Key Takeaways
Creating a healthcare blog is an essential part of your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). With a strategic calendar, your marketing and communications team can boost website traffic and search results performance across all your target audiences. The best part? Blogs are relatively inexpensive and have a long-term positive impact on your website performance.
Contact Points Group if you want to increase patient volume for your healthcare practice, and sign up for our newsletter to receive the latest content marketing tips and tricks. Our medical marketing services include social media, website development, email marketing, and many more!
