If you are a doctor or office manager in a busy practice, you probably already know that your staff is inundated with calls all day long. Moreover, they likely field the same calls multiple times during their day. While these inquiries are all legitimate, they can be time consuming to manage. The simplicity of the answers can make it even more frustrating.
There are inherent dangers in putting medical information online. People tend to approach health-related topics from two very toxic perspectives. They either self-diagnose or search for information from a confirmation bias angle. You do not want your blog to cater to either of these behaviors.
The good news is that there are solutions to these problems. Effective ways exist to approach medical blogging. A well-presented blog provides a number of measurable benefits. It can help enhance the credibility your practice in general. It can stop the phones from ringing off the hook. Most importantly, it can assist you in offering sound medical advice without getting too specific in the realm of symptoms and diagnoses.
Today, I want to split the subject up into both the “what” and “how” of effective medical content marketing, specifically in the area of blogging. When done right, your blog will help you position your practice as one that is worthy of trust. In this industry, there are few things that are more important than that.
What Content to Produce
While I’d like to say that you can get some good ideas from other local practices, blogging is an area where many are sadly lacking. In fact, several of the ones I visited to research this piece hadn’t updated in years. No, I’m not kidding. Some were a little more up to date but showed no signs of consistency. Only a precious few practices really get this right. Plenty of them blog, but few blog well.
This leaves you with a great opportunity. Offering a continuous stream of high-quality medical blog content can help improve engagement on your site, send more traffic to it and ultimately boost search engine optimization (SEO) – the part of content creation and presentation that helps websites rank high in searches. What, then, should you be talking about in your blog? Here are a few basic ideas. Feel free to add your own personal edge to or expand upon them.
Timely Posts on Relevant Topics – Discuss ways to prevent the flu during the fall and winter months. Talk about beating seasonal allergies in spring and fall when most people are suffering from them. Determine what issues are most important to your patients both in perpetuity and right now, and provide ample amounts of content in both areas.
Expand on Your FAQ – If you have a well-populated FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section on your website, you should be able to find subjects that deserve an expanded explanation. For some topics, you could even develop multiple blog posts and really provide some quality information to your readers.
Practice-Specific Policies and Procedures – If you find your staff having to regularly defend the way you do things, consider providing detailed explanations for your policies and procedures in your blog.
You might not get away with telling someone to read your blog as an answer to their question (especially if they are frustrated or angry), but the additional resource can provide a valuable benefit later on. Just mentioning that the content is there and available could allay some of the arguing and also educate the patient better once he or she is in a better frame of mind to receive the information.
Go Long Form – Consider producing more in-depth content in any of the aforementioned areas. Google and the other major search platforms consider anything in the 2,000–2,500 words (or more) category to be long form. Long-form content also helps boost SEO since the search engines favor sites that offer more comprehensive, trustworthy information than average.
How to Get Your Content Seen
You could have the best blog in the medical world just sitting there on your website, but if no one knows it’s there, it won’t help you. Simply put, you need to promote your content. The easiest way to do that is to pair your blogging efforts with a presence on social media. Facebook and Twitter are the two most relevant platforms for medical practices, and each has its own built-in marketing and promotional engine built into its framework.
There are loads of articles on how to promote posts on social media, and I recommend utilizing a few trusted sources for information in that arena. Beyond that, you want to make sure that your content – and your blog itself – are SEO friendly. Here are several simple ways to do it.
Utilize Images and Video Liberally – Original content is always best here, but stock images and video content can also be used effectively. Be careful to limit file sizes so that your visuals and media don’t slow down page loading.
Avoid Text Bricks – Forget what you learned about writing paragraphs in high school. You want to present your content in small, digestible chunks that make it easy for the reader to spot key words and concepts.
Use Relevant Keywords – The cornerstone of good SEO is using current, relevant keywords in a sparing and organic fashion. Don’t seed with pointless keywords or make the keywords the centerpieces of your blog posts. Search engines pick up quickly on keyword trickery.
Consider an SEO Audit – There are numerous online tools that can help with this as well as a plethora of SEO-centered services that can audit your blog and recommend a few changes. I personally recommend utilizing the latter over the former. The human element can be very advantageous here.
Final Thoughts
There is little to no difference between promoting a medical practice and promoting any other type of business. People search, scrutinize, and select their doctors the same way they do anything else. This puts you in the position of having to meet new patients where they are and making it easy for them to find you. You want your practice to simultaneously be the most visible and the most credible around. The advice I’ve offered today can help you accomplish both of those goals when set competently in motion.
