Adding a blog section to your company website is a great way to provide information and advice to your existing customers and show new customers your expertise. It’s also usually very simple to add a blog section to your site through the use of a plugin.
Blogs are also a powerful tool in marketing because they provide your site with more opportunities to be picked up by search engines, which means that you will be seen by a whole new group of potential customers.
There is a tricky line to tread with healthcare blogs, however. You need to be informative but you certainly don’t want to crossover into giving medical advice as for medical advice to be accurate you would need to speak with the patient.
What Can You Write About?
When you are deciding what to write about, your existing customers are a great source of information. Keep a log of the sorts of questions that customers are often asking your team over the course of a few weeks and then review it. You will probably find that the same questions come up again and again. These questions are great topics for blog posts, as they are topics that your customers have already shown that they want to know about!
As a healthcare professional you are in a great position to write informative and useful blog posts, because your career is knowing a lot of things that other people don’t and would like to.
Be sure to keep your posts general rather than talking about specific personal cases, and heavily signpost any areas where an individualized diagnosis would be beneficial so as not to appear as though you are providing any kind of diagnosis or advice.
Generally some good formats for blog posts are:
- How to guide.
- ‘Listicles’ for example, if you were a dentist you might write about the top 10 things you can do to keep your teeth healthy.
- ‘What to expect’ type articles. For example, if your practice carries out surgeries you could write a blog on what the patient can expect to experience before and after.
Of course, what you’re able to write about will be dictated by what you know. As you want to be an authoritative voice on your health blog, you must take the time to study the field and become an expert in it to write with confidence and knowledge. Plus, knowing a lot about the medical field will also ensure that you never run out of topics and things to say. Thankfully, the best source of information is the internet, as there’s a lot of online resources that can be used to help you learn and find interesting topics that you can write about. This includes journals that have been published online, online seminars and talks led by industry leaders, and more.
If you want to fully advance in the medical world, you can also obtain an online degree in nursing through Wilkes University, which can really give you a solid foundation of knowledge to allow you to create a really amazing blog.
SEO
If you want your blog to help you to attract new customers then SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is paramount.
SEO means the work that you do to ensure that your site ranks highly in search engine results and is therefore seen by more people. To apply an effective SEO strategy you will need an in-depth knowledge of search engine algorithms such as those used by Google, as well as a specific knowledge of your industry. Many businesses have benefited from using a healthcare SEO agency to help them to rank more highly in search engine results.
Broadly, some of the things an SEO agency might do are:
- Keyword research. Ensuring that your articles use the keywords and phrases that your customers are actually searching for.
- Backlinking. Building your websites trustworthiness by getting it mentioned on other reputable websites.
- Domain authority. Building your authority by ensuring that your content is specific to your target market. This helps Google to know exactly what your website is, and therefore which search queries it will be relevant for.
Plugins
When adding a blog to your health website, it’s a good idea to use some plugins to help with it and make it perform better. A Plugin is a tool or small piece of software that you can attach to your website to give it more functionality and can be used to improve your blog and make it more unique.
When adding plugins, the secret is to only add a few, as too many plugins will mean that there’s a lot more additional code that your website will have to load. Having too much of this code will make your website a lot slower, which can put off users and negatively affect your ranking too.
That’s why it’s best to pick a plugin that can offer you a lot of different functionality. One of the best you can get will include plugins that offer you a wide range of SEO optimization options. By having a dedicated plugin to improve your SEO and make it easier to change things, your blog should perform a lot better. It’s also a good idea to consider a plugin that will boost your website’s load time. A lot of plugins offer this functionality, and it’s an essential thing that you should have if you want to help create a snappy website.
Conclusion
Adding a health blog to your medical website is a great idea, as it will help drive more engagement and traffic to your overall domain, which can boost your SERPs ranking and make your brand a lot easier to find.
It can be tough to get started, as you need to ensure that you’re writing quality content with SEO in mind, and that’s easier said than done. However, once you get into the swing of things, adding posts and writing consistently can become fun and a useful way to provide information to your readers.
