8 Reasons Why Your Practice Website Should Have A Blog
“Not only are bloggers suckers for the remarkable, so are the people who read blogs.” - Seth Godin
Introduction:
If your medical practice already has a website, you may already have a blog. But if you don’t, consider starting one. A blog can boost your practice's brand awareness, increase patient conversions, and even improve customer service.
Blogs help you connect with your patient base outside of the patient care setting and allow them to interact with your practice in a more personal capacity. Blogging also helps to present viewers with fresh content regularly, keeping your practice top-of-mind of your existing and prospective patients.
With that said, here are 8 reasons why you should start blogging on your website today! 👊
1. Drive traffic to your practice's website
With the right blog, you can drive prospective patient traffic to your practice's site consistently. A blog is also a great way to generate appointments. If people visit your blog and sign up for your email newsletter, download a resource that you’ve put out there, or fill out a quiz about possible symptoms there suffering from with respect to a condition (for example, a sleep apnea quiz), they become a potential patient for your practice. Blogs are a great way to get people engaged with your brand.
2. Convert traffic into new patient leads
Blogging helps your practice's website to be more than just a place for people to visit. It gives them the opportunity to interact with your practice in a way that isn’t possible through other forms of content on your website. By blogging, you have the ability to help drive traffic back to your website's appointment request forms, thereby converting that traffic into leads. For example, if you're a cardiologist and write a blog post about heart healthy foods and share it on Facebook and Twitter, and you create and share more novel posts consistently over time on a regular schedule, you can expect a boost in visitors to your practice's website.
3. Become an authority in your field
Blogs are a great addition to your site as they give you the ability to create authoritative content. They also help you establish credibility and become an expert in your field. Moreover, they provide you with an opportunity to build both a patient audience as well as an audience of fellow healthcare professionals that, upon sharing your content, will help push your practice's brand recognition.
4. Build relationships with potential patients
One of the most important aspects of starting a blog is establishing a connection with your potential patients. This can be done through engaging in conversation on your blog, posting stories about how you operate your practice, or even sharing inspiring content that you think will resonate with them. These interactions also make it easier for you to keep up with what people are saying and sharing on social media.
5. You can repurpose blog content for social media
This is a great way to get more mileage out of your blogs and increase traffic. However, it's important to use the right type of content on different social media platforms. If you're talking about hip exercises to prevent the need for hip replacement surgery, TikTok, whose audience skews toward teenagers, may not be the right platform; yet, Facebook, whose audience is composed of all age ranges and has slightly shifted toward an older demographic, may be an excellent platform to share this post.
Furthermore, if you have affiliations with medical devices, supplements, or products that you are selling, distributing, or reselling via your practice, your blog can serve as an affiliate marketing function to promote said products. All you'd need to do is incorporate an affiliate link in your blog post of the product that your practice wants to promote.
6. It drives long-term results
A blog is an essential tool for building a long-term relationship with your patient audience. The best blogs will eventually become an extension of your practice's culture and marketing strategy, which means that each article you publish has the potential to create a lasting impact on your brand.
Your blog serves as a platform through which you can share information, knowledge, and tips on your preferred topics. This approach allows you to provide valuable content with value gained in return. The more time readers spend on your website, the more chances there are for them to get familiarized with your practice and become your patients down the line.
7. Blogging helps with link building
Your blog should be the top source of information for your practice. By writing consistently on your blog, you’ll want to build links back to your website and help increase its authority.
You can use a free service like Google Analytics to track how many people are visiting your site. This will give you an idea of what kind of traffic is coming in from where. You can then decide whether or not it makes sense to invest money into advertising.
If you have a blog that has been around for a while, you may find yourself having trouble getting new readers. If this is the case, you need to make sure that you are providing value in some way to your patient audience. This means that you should be offering something of interest and benefit to them. For practices, the best blogs typically share easy-to-read educational content that resonates with their patient base. You'll want to provide this quality content on a regularly scheduled basis to grow.
Also, make sure you have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe to your blog. This will allow them to receive updates whenever you post new articles.
8. It increases SEO
Search engine optimization is a vital part of any successful digital marketing campaign for practice's seeking sustained growth over time. A well-written blog can help you rank higher in search engines. When someone searches for a topic related to your practice's niche -- the symptoms their facing, the conditions you treat, the procedures you offer, the specialty of your practice, etc. -- they will often only click on the first few results. These are usually the websites that have the most relevant content.
If you want to get more traffic from Google and other search engines, make sure you use keywords relevant to your practice throughout your site. This means using them in titles, headers, subtitles, and even in the body of your articles. If you do this, it will help prospective patients find what they’re looking for when they type in a relevant keyword or phrase into their browser.
Regardless of what services your practice offers, your target patient audience is likely searching for services like yours on search engines like Google.
Other resources to help you get started with blogging
Start your own blog checklist:
Here is a quick checklist to get you started with you website blow. Remember imperfect action beats inaction, get started and keep publishing.
Start planning your blog topics by Identifying what resonates with your audience. If you are stuck you can use sites like - https://answerthepublic.com/
