Should dentists have a dental blog? Yes, but it’s essential to approach it strategically. A well-maintained blog serves as a powerful content marketing tool that attracts and engages patients by sharing valuable information like oral health tips and treatment insights. However, it’s crucial to assess whether your blog is genuinely benefiting your marketing efforts. In this episode, dental marketing experts Jonathan Fashbaugh and Bob Weber discuss how dentists can evaluate the effectiveness of their blogs. They provide tips on critically analyzing your website and blog content to determine if changes are needed for better results.
Transcript
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Do you need a blog? What’s content marketing? Does Ted Bundy even belong on your website? Maybe that’s what you need. We’re going to talk about that today on Marketing Chairside. Thanks for joining us today. I hope you’re doing well. Today, I am joined by our Director of Search Marketing, Bob Weber. Bob, thanks for being here.
Bob Weber:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to do this.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Today, our episode is geared toward perhaps a little bit more savvy dentist that’s been doing some marketing for a while, but not necessarily, because everyone needs to know the answer to this question. Do they have a blog on their website? Should they have a blog? Is it helping them or hurting them? I mean, the umbrella term that comes to mind for me, or that a dentist may be getting pitched on, is content marketing. Bob, can you tell the dentists watching, what is content marketing even? What does that mean?
Bob Weber:
Sure, sure. There’s an old expression from the early days of the internet that that says “Content is king!” That’s always been this hallmark code word that people have used, and people have tried to get around it and would do other things, but at the end of the day, what Google is really looking for is content. They are really looking to unite what people are searching for with people that have the answer to their question. The best way to really get good rankings and to connect with local people that want to become patients is to have content that answers their questions about dentistry.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. Dentists hire people to promote their website. But, I guess I don’t feel like a dentist and a team should really have to worry about their content, and whether or not it’s hurting them or helping them. But, I mean, can you talk about some things that maybe dentists might not know about that could mean that this blog that they’re spending time and money on is actually doing more harm than good? Because, there’s scenarios where that’s true. Right?
Bob Weber:
Absolutely. We’ve all seen the latest clickbait article about the Royals, or the latest celebrity, or the covid statistics, whatever it is. Those just get clicks, and people tend to want to write about interesting things that are not related to their business or to what their target market’s interested in. You write these really interesting posts, and they’re great content, but they’re not bringing in the traffic you want. You don’t want somebody that’s searching for a celebrity, or some particular topic. You want somebody that’s really interested in dentistry and how your dental practice can help them solve their problems.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. I think it’s tempting to kind of cross that line and get into entertainment with the content that we write, but also just to not have the same stuff over and over on the website. I mean, when we’ve strayed from that, it’s been fun, but we’ve had, just over the years, we’ve been doing blogging since the inception of the company. We’ve written thousands of blogs, I don’t think that’s overstating it. Over the years, you’ve been doing some research that has helped us identify posts that were maybe getting a lot of traffic, but weren’t really helpful. Do you have any examples you can think of?
Bob Weber:
I do, I do. What we found is sometimes these blogs can rank really well and drive a lot of traffic to the site, but that traffic isn’t helpful. One great example of this. We had a client that we had written a blog about back, I think it was 2012, about the TV show True Blood. Vampire TV show, if anyone’s not familiar with it. That post, even last year, was still popular, even though the TV show is long gone. We looked at this, the SEO team looked at this and we thought, “Well, what happens if we take this down?” We were concerned that there would be a drop in traffic, a drop in rankings. We actually went in there, and we left the post up so that Google could find it. But, we noindex-ed it so that we were telling Google, “Hey, this isn’t important,” and hoping it would drop out of the index.
Bob Weber:
We watched watch the traffic and the rankings. While we saw traffic to that page go down because it was falling out of the index, the overall traffic to the site still seemed to stay at about the same level. It really seems like Google will kind of compensate once Google understands that your site isn’t an entertainment site, or isn’t about actors or celebrities or whatever, they will actually give more relevant traffic a little bit of an SEO boost. Overall, our organic traffic stayed the same or actually went up after removing a popular post.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. Well, speaking of popular posts, I have a little bit of a throwback for us here. We actually had a post about Ted Bundy here that I was really proud of. I thought it was just a great post about how his teeth convicted to him of murder. We actually have a category on our website for posts that are too hot for your dental blog. We’ve put some of those ideas on our website, because I figure it’s dental related, the dentists that look at our blog will at least be entertained, but we ended up taking it off of our website. You were part of the people who figured that out, that was a good move for us. Can you tell us some more about that?
Bob Weber:
Yeah, yeah. That’s a great post. It was really a well written post, and honestly belongs on someone’s serial killer website, because what it did is it ranked really well for Ted Bundy related terms. Ted Bundy’s probably the most famous serial killer ever, and we were generating a ton of traffic to this post, but it was not our target market. It was not people looking for dental marketing, it was people that are interested in serial killers. That doesn’t help us. That’s not great.
Bob Weber:
At the same time, again, I think Google has gotten so good at understanding what a page is about. Years ago, when we were doing posts like this more, it seemed like Google wasn’t really sure, and they would just say, “Okay, well, this site’s got a popular page. We’ll rank it better.” But, some of the new things that have come out, some of the natural language processing and Google’s ability to go down into a page and even pick up excerpts out of a page and serve them up as search results, Google is just getting better at this all the time. They have thousands of people, hundreds of people, whatever, working constantly to be better at this.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right.
Bob Weber:
They’re getting to the point where, it seems like they can understand that, “Okay, this site is about dentistry, and this site is about serial killers,” so when you have a really great serial killer post, they send you traffic about serial killers and they don’t send you dentists. We want to talk to dentists, so it’s not great.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right, just like that True Blood post, where they were sending the website people who were interested in Hollywood details, and maybe what the next season of True Blood was going to have, and whatnot. Yeah, they weren’t looking for dentists.
Bob Weber:
They were looking for technical details about how the fangs would retract during the show, how they did that special effect. Yes, not people that are interested in dentistry at all.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
I mean, if a dentist recognizes that they have off topic kind of content on their website, that might be a telltale sign that their blog needs some different direction. What are some other problems that might be making a dentist’s blog more of a liability than an asset to their marketing?
Bob Weber:
One thing that we see a lot, and as an SEO I always have to emphasize is, Google really wants original content. There’s people, there are companies that will post the same content on multiple sites. For whatever reason, sometimes you just end up with this duplicate content, and Google is not going to reward that. Google could even penalize your site for what looks to them as plagiarism, or whatever. That’s one thing that we always do. Our clients, we write original content. We have a great content marketing team that just creates new things that are really beneficial for a dentist’s SEO. If we get a new client that comes in and we, as we’re going over their existing site, we have a tool called Copyscape that we can run against it that searches the whole internet to make sure that that content that’s on there is not the copyrighted material of someone else, we’re not stealing from someone. Then, if it’s a client of ours, we would remove that content, and just write all new content and make sure it’s fresh and it’s new.
Bob Weber:
Another thing I would like to throw in there is, Google really likes new things. If you’re not writing new content, and if your site’s not being updated on a regular basis, you’re just not getting everything you could get out of your SEO. Something just needs to be done, because the fresher content, the more interesting, even going back and updating existing content, which is something we do a lot as well on a regular basis, take old content that we’ve written that’s good, but maybe it’s not up to date. Maybe we can make it better. Maybe it’s just not the best page of its kind on the internet, and so we send it back through and our writers look at it and they edit it. Sometimes, they write all new content. It just lets Google know that you are active and you are putting new information out there that people need.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. I mean, there is a lot of dental websites that I’ve come across over the past few months where, guess when the last time they posted a blog post was. It was March 2020, and then they put their marketing in a box to be put away, and maybe they’ll revisit it when the coast is clear. Well, I mean, if that’s you, the viewer, the dentist, and you’re like, “Yeah.” You go to your website and you see that posts have not been happening, you need to know that a lot of your competitors have kicked back on their marketing a long time ago, and that the traffic that was subsided during the covid era or time, the height of it, the inception of that pandemic, when you were shut down, a lot of people stopped their marketing, but not everyone. The ones that kept it engaged are seeing a much better recovery from things. You need to get that turned back on.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Bob, thanks for being here. I mean, I wrote a blog post about a lot of these concepts here. I’ll put a link in the description with this. But, we have some steps here for how you can look for indications that your blog posts are maybe not getting the most relevant traffic, and then just kind of a reminder of some of those other telltale signs that you might have a problem with your marketing. Look for that in the post with this video, and we’d love it if you’d like and subscribe to our channel. We’re going to keep bringing out these topics that can help you improve your marketing and solve problems with your marketing, because we just want everyone to get better results from their marketing, and we want to be a part of that process in whatever way we can. Thanks so much for your time. Bob, thanks again.
Bob Weber:
Sure, yeah, it was great to be here.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
We’ll talk to you later.
Bob Weber:
All right, bye.
