5 dental blogging tips
Get your practice blog on track with these handy hints
Those in the know about dental marketing, in particular how to make your presence felt in Google, will undoubtedly tell you how important blogging is for your business.
As we’ve covered elsewhere, a well-maintained blog is excellent for helping with website visitor engagement, demonstrating knowledge, building credibility and for building website traffic as part of a thorough SEO campaign. However, important as it is, too many practices go badly wrong with their blogging, with mistakes ranging from posting too infrequently through to writing decent content but then failing to optimise it.
In today’s blog we’ll take a quick look at 5 key elements which you must build into your dental blogging programme to keep it firmly on track.
Accept that blogging makes a difference
This is one of the biggest hurdles with some practice principals and/or managers simply refusing to believe that blogging does make a difference. Irrespective of the data, some just aren’t able to get on board with the concept and consequently don’t get behind it or only do so half-heartedly. Without commitment, the full benefits of blogging will not be realised and your digital campaigns will fall short. Even super busy business leaders like Richard Branson make time to contribute to their company blog and actively support it.
Write great content
Simple huh? Also pretty obvious. Whilst most of us aren’t literary geniuses, you don’t really need to be when it comes to creating good blog content. It needs to be professional enough, but the key feature is that it must be interesting and something that your users will be keen to read and share. Don’t just regurgitate what others are doing; try to build in some unique/personalised content about the practice which existing patients (and potential new ones) can relate to. If they find it interesting, they come back.
Maintain a degree of consistency
Your blog is a key part of your digital campaign and as such deserves time and effort if you are serious about achieving results. Too often we see practices start off well, only for their enthusiasm and input to wane after the first couple of months. Lots of good quality content leads to better reach and coverage in the search results – so it pays to be consistent. One article per week is a good benchmark. In terms of the size of the article, the general rule is not to skimp it. So think in terms of hundreds, not tens of words. The odd, long, in-depth article will help too. Of course it’s also OK to add a few short articles into the mix periodically, but as a general rule always think “quality” and “interest” when you are publishing.
Optimise your content
This is another area where we see huge opportunities missed. There are 3 or 4 “data” fields in WordPress which you can use to optimise your blog post to create best effect for Google. So take time to re-write your URL (www address), your page title and meta description. Slightly less important but still worthwhile is to use the usual html mark-up opportunities within your post e.g. ‘h’ tags to denote important headings. Too often we see people simply copy/paste from Word into their blog and press publish. Take an extra 15 minutes to do the optimisation. You should also add a couple of links into the body text of your blog and link these back to the headline pages of your main website.
Broadcast your content
Writing your blog content is stage one. Stage two is also extremely important, i.e. getting it in front of people so they can read and hopefully, share it. There are numerous ways to broadcast your new blog; obvious ones such as adding excerpts to Facebook and Twitter but also lots of other digital channels too. There are opportunities out there if you look closely and persevere.
Summary
Your dental practice blog is a powerful tool in the overall digital marketing tool-kit and deserves your time and attention. We always recommend having at least some input into your blog to help personalise it, but if you can’t, then there are dental blogging services such as those available here at Dental Media to help.
Need some additional advice and guidance about your own practice blog? Please get in touch on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to help.