Dental Blogging – Still Worthwhile In 2023?

Here’s why your blog is still an excellent tool, for users and SEO

Your marketing partner and perhaps your dental coach will possibly have talked to you about the benefits of a dental blog, albeit for different reasons. The former will be mainly interested in blogging to support search engine optimisation, whereas the latter will likely be more interested in how you communicate effectively with patients. In truth, both of those factors are very important, just as much now as when the benefits of blogging first started to be realised some 8 or 9 years ago.

Let’s recap then, on why your dental blog is still a major benefit today and why it makes sound sense to keep momentum with your regular posts and updates.

As search engine specialists here at Dental Media, we’ll begin with the benefits of blogging for SEO and then move through to why your blog is an incredibly useful information source for patients. In fact, those features are very closely linked as we’ll see.

Blogging for SEO

Some purists will say that you should only ever blog to provide information for users, not for SEO. However that’s more than a little bit naïve because when you provide good user information, at the same time you are also providing content which is really useful for search engines. So when we say “blogging for SEO”, we are actually starting with useful content for users and then further optimising it to target specific topics and locations. For example, we may choose to write a blog about the benefits of full arch replacement using dental implants but we’ll then target that to readers from a specific location.

We may then write additional blogs about various aspects of dental implant treatment and perhaps vary the location and demographic targeting depending on the dentist’s preference. We’ll also choose to do similar for other treatments e.g. Invisalign, cosmetic bonding and so on.

These articles must be well-written and unique else they won’t be indexed and included in Google’s search results.

Not only does a blog provide the opportunity to create back-links to support the headline pages of a website, it also creates more content for the website overall, so increasing the website authority and coverage in Google. The blog you are reading today is one of over 500 published on the Dental Media website, starting way back over twelve years ago. It is one of the reasons why we have great search engine results and also lots of website traffic and enquiries.

Blogging to provide high-quality user information

Regular blogging is a superb way to provide useful information to existing and potential new patients. It really does provide a platform to demonstrate that you are an authority on your subject and answer questions patients may have in advance of a visit to the practice.

However, you don’t just have to post information about dentistry. Your blog is also a very useful news channel where you can post updates about team events, special offers, staff news, open days and more. Do this and you will help to build rapport and trust with your user base.

The link to SEO is also very strong and it’s well-known that Google tends to promote websites which answer user’s questions effectively. So by blogging to provide information to patients, you are also boosting your search engine ranking prospects too – a big “win win”.

How long should a blog article be and how often should you publish?

Short content isn’t very good for SEO to be frank, unless it is backed by lots of interest which generates back links etc. Whilst big brands can sometimes get away with “short form” content, this really doesn’t work too well for dentists unfortunately. To counter this, we recommend blog articles of at least 700 – 800 words and not the short spammy stuff you often see published by marketing companies on behalf of their dentist clients.

As part of our SEO campaigns, we recommend at least two optimised blogs per month.

Summary

Dental blogging today is just as important and rewarding as it was a number of years back and we strongly recommend it as part of your ongoing web content initiative. It works excellently for providing patient information as well as giving your SEO a considerable boost.

If you wish to try blogging yourself that’s highly commendable; we can even provide training on blog optimisation to help get you moving. However, it is essential to keep momentum so please don’t fall into the trap of posting two or three articles and then giving up – unfortunately we see that all too often.

Alternatively, why not use the blogging team at Dental Media to blog on your behalf? Our team of writers has many years of experience writing thousands of blogs and boosting SEO for hundreds of dentists, so why not see how we can help you too?

Please call the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 to enquire about getting your blog set up and your content underway.