“I don’t want a dental blog on my website”

Why a high-quality blog is an important component of your digital marketing….

We’ve recently had two or three monthly marketing clients question the relevance of dental blogging and either elected to try to do it themselves (and subsequently failed) or stopped completely.

Ditching your blog is actually quite short-sighted; so in this blog we’ll take a closer look and discuss why blogging is a key component of any digital marketing strategy and how neglecting it is not a wise choice.

Before we delve in, lets look at a couple of reasons practice principles and managers quote when questioning the value of blogging:

• “no one reads them”
• “it costs too much”
• “it’s not sufficiently oriented to the practice”

At face value these may look like reasonable concerns but the underlying reasons for blogging and the many advantages and “value add” it brings, far outweigh the concerns about cost and relevance. So let’s try to address these concerns individually in order to demonstrate why blogging is an important cornerstone of any digital marketing campaign.

Who reads your dental practice blog?

Whilst we would never claim that a dental blog article is likely to go viral and be read by thousands, web traffic analytics data shows us that most of them do actually get read quite widely and provide a funnel into the main headline pages of the website from where contact hopefully takes place. Indeed we know that many conversions (enquiries) happen directly after the user has been stimulated to engage with the business directly after reading the blog article.

Blog articles are very good for targeting “long tail” search terms and provide useful traffic from potential patients who are searching out fairly detailed treatment information. A well-crafted blog allows you to answer exactly the type of questions such a searcher may be asking via Google.

Additionally, Google reads your blog! But what do I actually mean by this? In reality it’s not a real person from Google who decided to visit you, but actually their web “bots” which crawl the Internet and digest all of the information out there. Your blog article then get ranked in the search index and any links you added in there pointing back to your main website pages will gain benefit. Whilst this benefit may not be huge, it is still valuable and will increase over time as more content is added.

Building your blog over time adds relevance and authority to a website domain which is advantageous for Google searches. Of course the content needs to be decent quality, relevant and engaging – any old rubbish knocked together quickly won’t do.

So what does it cost to outsource blog writing?

A typical blog article, researched and written by our degree-qualified dental copy writers costs no more than £30. This also includes posting the article in WordPress and carefully optimising it for best search engine benefit. This is not simply a few minutes task as you might imagine, so in terms of value, £30 genuinely is good. For sure you can purchase articles from off-shore suppliers for half of this but if you’ve seen them, you’ll know they’re completely unusable.

“The articles aren’t personal enough”

This is a valid concern and why we always recommend that the practice tries to submit a couple of blogs per month of a more personalised nature to support the factual content we add. This provides a great balance with “human interest” along with the technical aspect too. But if you are going to do this to support the SEO being undertaken by your marketing partner, please ensure that you have the resources to do it effectively and commit to it. Your marketer will be relying on your input too, so starting and then stopping will simply lead to frustration and compromised results.

What happens if you don’t add content to your blog?

Keeping in mind that your blog content is used widely within the management of digital marketing campaigns, over time you should expect the effect of that to be diluted if you stop blogging. If you already have a lot of blog content in place, the reversal could be quite slow; however if you are still trying to gain ground in a competitive environment, expect the slips to be more pronounced. Essentially, if those around you are marketing effectively when you’ve diluted your own efforts, expect to suffer.

Summary

A dental blog is a key component of a digital marketing programme and neglecting it is not a wise move. Whilst the full range of benefits may not be immediately obvious to a layperson, hopefully the comments above illustrate just why your blog is so important; not just for prospective patients who are looking for your services but also for your search engine presence too.

If you need more advice or would like to revitalise your own dental practice blogging initiative, please get in touch with the Dental Media team on 01332 672548.