Blogs are a hot commodity for any business, especially your dental practice. Your website is an investment for your business, and your dental blog is part of that. And not only does it provide net benefits for your dental practice; it also benefits your current and potential patients.
Here are some of the key reasons you should seriously consider having a dental blog on your website.
It Can Make You a Trusted Authority
Answering pressing questions posed by potential dental patients in your area sets you up to be the guiding authority on all things dental. The frequency, reliability, and credibility of your blog posts can help you build a trusting, captive audience online and direct members of this audience to become new patients at your practice. Also, you’ll want to expand the reach and influence of your blog by sharing blog posts on your social media channels.
When it comes to selecting blog topics to write about, you’re not picking ideas out of a hat. Finding good topics requires doing keyword research to see what kind of questions people in your area are actually asking, and formulating blog topics around those questions so you can provide valuable and insightful answers.
What’s great about this strategy is that there’s no shortage of questions to answer–people are always going to have questions, and Google search is the top platform for getting answers. There will always be new topics to cover in your dental blog.
It Can Increase Your Local Rank on Google Search
Quality dental blogs are treasure troves of relevant information and local ranking potential, but only if they’re actually optimized so that people can easily find them. Here are some ways your blog can help you rank better locally:
- Allows you to target a specific area (or areas) using pertinent keywords
- Provides relevant, valuable information that addresses the things people in these target areas are asking
- Link to your blog on Facebook and other social media channels to share your latest blog posts and increase website views
- Includes internal links in the content that lead to other pages on your website
- If your blog is well-established and influential, you can have other influential blogs or local organizations add links to your blog so that people visiting them can be directed to your content
Educate Potential and Existing Patients
At one point or another, we all use Google search to get answers and possibly self-diagnose ourselves. Naturally, you want people to come to you for their dental problems, not Dr. Google. With your blog, you can make your dental practice the go-to information source for people in your area. And in addition to informing your readers, you can give them greater certainty about your ability to help them with their problems.
For example, maybe you have a blog post that talks about tooth pain and its possible causes. Somewhere in this content, you can include a link that directs people to call you, because maybe at this point, the individual reading your blog realizes they have an issue that requires timely attention from a skilled dentist–you.
This ties into what we discussed above about building yourself up as a trusted authority. With quality blog content that’s optimized to the hilt, you can convey your authority clearly and persuasively, and preside over a blog that builds in value over time as an educational resource.
Highlight a Specific Service to Drive Revenue
A blog is also a highly useful tool for promoting individual services at your practice. Every dental practice wants long-term, quality patients who come to them for services that generate a higher amount of revenue. This might include orthodontic treatment, restorative dentistry, periodontics, etc.
If you want to rank for one or more of these services and get more people in the door asking for them, then you’ll need blog content that relates to those services.
For instance, if you want to rank for orthodontics, you don’t want a blog post about orthodontics, which should already have its own optimized page on your website (and you don’t want to compete with yourself). Instead, it should be a subtopic that relates to that service, such as TMJ, malocclusion, or some other issue that might require orthodontic treatment.
If a person is reading your blog content and is on the fence about what they should do about their TMJ or misaligned bite, your content could persuade them to find out more and schedule an appointment with you to see what kind of care they’ll need.
The end goal is to get more calls and appointments for orthodontic care (or any other service you want more people coming to you for). At InTouch, we’ll work with you to create an informative, interesting, and profitable blog that increases your appointments and revenue.
To find out more about our blog service, speak with an InTouch expert at (877) 493-9003.