Is Dental Blogging Still Relevant In 2024?

Here’s why an excellent practice blog is just as powerful as ever

In 2023, Google introduced what it called the “Helpful Content Update” which was aimed at promoting those websites which provide great content whilst demoting those which provide “thin”, copied or relatively worthless content.

This Google ranking update created quite some repercussions with a lot of websites being demoted and losing lots of traffic overnight, whilst others benefitted considerably. Some of the websites which were hit were huge blog sites which subsequently started a big discussion amongst SEOs as to whether blogging had become defunct and actually more risky than beneficial.

However, close inspection of the blogs which were penalised showed quite clearly that they were publishing unhelpful, often copied content with the sole objectives of supporting ads and spammy keywords. So they were penalised not simply because they were blogs, but absolutely due to the content they were publishing.

Here at Dental Media we actively encourage our clients to use regular blogging as a key part of their web marketing and patient acquisition strategies. What we saw as a result of the Helpful Content Update was that clients with excellent blogs actually benefitted quite considerably, vindicating our confidence in the technique.

It’s therefore clear to us that a dental practice blog was, is and continues to be a powerful tool. Let’s take a look at the main reasons why you should be blogging regularly.

The benefits of a dental practice blog

• Provides an excellent source of information on your website to encourage patient engagement
• Provides an excellent platform to publish information demonstrating your competence in a particular discipline or disciplines
• Provides the “human element” – for example regular updates about new team members, practice events, charity support etc
• Provides an excellent way to increase your website footprint and improve SEO. Optimised blogs full of informative treatment content are an ideal way to provide internal back-linking opportunities to headline pages, as well as for attracting links from third-party websites.

How should a dental blog post be structured for maximum impact?

This is very important. All too often we see “short form” blogs, around 350 words, being published by SEO companies working for dentists. These are simply regurgitating treatment information on a superficial level and increasingly being generated by AI. These are definitely not going to help with patient engagement or search engine optimisation, indeed they fall into the category which Google’s Helpful Content Update could penalise, simply because they’re not helpful!

So how should you structure a blog post? There are no hard and fast rules here but there are some very useful guidelines to keep you on the right track. Firstly, if you are going to cover a treatment topic, for example full-arch dental implants, then research it properly and don’t skimp on the information – typically we publish in excess of a thousand words as this is a minimum level required to present comprehensive information. Of course not all of your blogs have to be in such detail; no-one wants to read reams of information about your new charity event or latest team member, but periodically you do need to publish comprehensive, authoritative information if Google is going to give you any credibility and boost your website ranking as a result.

The usual platform for dental practice blogging is WordPress and this provides a number of important tools to help with your blog optimisation. There is the usual information you should provide for any web content e.g. a title, meta-description etc, but you should also optimise your blog content in other ways too. We’ve discussed this in detail in another Dental Media blog and we also provide detailed instructions for our marketing clients. Our team also provides a comprehensvie blogging service for dentists – so if you need this done for you, we will be pleased to assist.

In terms of blogging frequency, try to aim for a minimum of two per month and one per week initially will really help to build momentum. However, don’t fall into the trap of blogging for the sake of it as with that, you’ll very likely end up regurgitating generic content of the type that Google’s Helpful Content Update might ultimately penalise!

Summary

Blogging is still an excellent tool which we which we recommend dentists invest time in, both to provide helpful information to patients and to help improve web presence and Google rankings. However, it has to be done correctly to make sure that it’s effective and won’t fall foul of Google – more than ever these days, Google doesn’t want you clogging up the web with “rubbish” and if you do, you can end up with a website which plummets in the search rankings.

If you need help with getting moving with blogging for your own dental practice, we’ll be pleased to help. Please call the web content team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for more information.