Why should you spend time blogging?
Within your own dental website, blogging can play a major role in how you run your practice. Here’s a quick rundown:
– Blogging can play a pivotal role in how you interact with patients, act as a controlled news outlet, and be the voice of the company in a less formal, relatable manner.
– Adding useful and interesting content will help improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
– Blogging is a nonintrusive marketing tool that can benefit your practice for relatively low cost, if used properly.
Interacting with patients is important
You can set yourself apart from other dental practices through the level of customer service that you’re willing to put out. Any qualified dentist can perform a root canal, but how many of them are willing to go to that extra step to make a patient feel at ease? The hardest part in gaining a prospective patient is getting their foot in the door and it’s your job to make it easier for them.
Patient anxiety is all too real, and blogging for dentists can ease prospective patient’s minds and bolster your practice’s relationships with the community. Blogging is also an excellent way to encourage engagement on your social media profiles such as Facebook or Twitter. By sharing your blog posts on social media, you are creating a dialog between you and your followers (or potential patients).
The effect of a dental blog on SEO
In order to bolster your ranking in search engine results pages, you’ve got to play by Google’s rules – and they have many. Having basic information on your website isn’t enough to show up as a relevant organic search result these days, even if someone is nearby and looking for your services. The more quality content you have, the better, because you are establishing yourself as an expert in the search engine’s eyes and blogs are the perfect way to do that.
It’s possible to practice SEO without paying much for it, but it’s a constant juggling act since the rules are always changing and content has to be frequently updated. It’s recommended that dental blog posts have at least 300-500 words per page for your website to be considered as a result and categorized under specific search query terms. Creating a well-thought-out blog post is important to Google because it wants its searchers to have a good experience by finding answers to their questions. Google is less likely to rank a page that doesn’t seem to address a specific topic or a topic with enough information. Blog posts that answer specific questions related to similar keywords are considered authoritative in Google’s eyes and therefore more likely to be ranked.
Blogging your way into your patients hearts
Use your dental blog to its capacity and speak to your patients in a nontraditional way. It’s an opportunity to educate your patients about procedures, theirs and their family’s dental health, and answer their questions while giving your business a personal touch. You can even write about yourself and your employees to put a friendly face on your practice. People like to know who they are talking to rather than feeling like they have to talk to a business. In other words, they want to feel personally connected to you.
Blogging also allows you to control the conversation, and because this is information patients are actively seeking rather than being bombarded with, it’s welcomed advertising. There is potential to change the way patients view dental visits and make lifelong connections with them at the same time.
Regardless of what your goal is, running a dental blog can take a lot of time. Between figuring out what to write about and actually taking the time to write consistently, you’ll need be realistic in what you are able to do yourself and what you’d need someone help to you with.
Tell us what you think! What are your biggest “blogging for dentists” hang-ups? Please leave a comment in the section below! Contact us any time to find out how our expertise in writing blogs for dentists can help you. Call (888) 932-3644.
