There is a right way and a wrong way to leverage your dental blog as part of your marketing strategy. You can get more local traffic from your dental blog in 2022 if you understand what matters to patients and to Google.
Blog About What Matters to Patients
Dentists should focus their blogging on what patients want. This post contains information to help dentists get more local traffic to their website- not details dentists don’t care about like Google’s history or why Pro Impressions Marketing uses specific pieces of software. You write for your audience’s concerns.
Dentists should blog about what their patients care about, including:
- The problems patients have.
- How dental problems impact their lives and make them feel.
- What their lives will be like after getting help from your office.
The actual treatment that you offer is a distant 4th place on that list. Patients aren’t very interested in how you treat their problems—not until they decide that you’re their new dentist.
Good dental content writers understand this and don’t focus too much on treatment details.
Patients are more likely to read what you write in your blog and take action when you write about their needs. This interaction on your website shows Google that you’ve got what people want.
Write Original Dental Content
Your blog should have posts that Google can’t find elsewhere, and they should be the best posts on the subjects they cover. Almost every dentist with a marketing budget has a blog and general dentists provide basically the same services from one office to the next. So, how could you possibly write a unique blog post?
When we start a dental website design project, dentists ask in disbelief, “How can you possibly write a porcelain veneer page without reusing the same words?!” We do it all the time. It just takes work and creativity and an understanding that every dental office is different.
When you shift your focus to writing about patients and their problems, it’s easier to find original blog topics that don’t have thousands of copies across the internet. Of course, you’ll still do some research to come up with ideas. When you do, close down all the other websites that you’re looking at before you start writing. Write new text from your own mind. Don’t copy and paste text from another website and certainly don’t reuse an entire post from another website.
That’s plagiarism and it could violate copyright law, so it’s a bad idea to begin with. It’s also a terrible practice from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standpoint. Google wants to see original content.
We’ve blogged for our dentists since the inception of Pro Impressions Marketing because blogs give Google something new to find every time they come back to your website. A fresh post gives Google a reward for returning and a reason to come again soon.
Many dental marketing companies either don’t understand that reusing content is a bad idea or they don’t care. Their blogging service is cheap because they use and reuse canned dental content. The low cost makes it tempting but don’t do it! It’ll cost you even more in missed new patients.
Make It Clear That You Can Help
Google wants to show its users relevant content. They show dentists to someone looking for a dentist. If it’s not clear that you are a local dentist who treats the problem that the patient has, then Google is less likely to show your office to patients in your area.
The best way to make it clear to Google and to patients that you are a local business—a dentist in their area who can help them with their problem—is to invite them to get help at your practice. This is where you briefly describe:
- what you do to solve their problem,
- how it has worked for other patients,
- and how to get started.
Invite them to contact your office early in the post and then again when you close out the post. This makes it clear that you’re not blogging for the fun of it. Yes, you want to inform them, but your website exists because you actually TREAT the problem.
If your dental marketing company doesn’t understand this, your content will read like WebMD or Entertainment Weekly or a mashup of the two. This can confuse Google about the type of business you run. Are you a dentist or some sort of informational website that rants with a dental bent?
Optimize Your Dental Blog Posts for Local Search
Further identify yourself as a local dentist by optimizing your blog posts with your city name in the text, description and title if possible. You may not know how to do that, but your dental marketing company should be able to do it for you.
Local optimization of your blog posts can feel awkward but it’s more natural if you use the above, patient-focused approach. When your content tells the story about how you helped patients in the past and what you offer to new patients in your area, it’s easy to add the name of your city to the text. It’s probably already in the post.
Need help with on-going blogging on your dental website? Are you unsure about how your blog fits in as part of a larger marketing strategy in 2022 and beyond? We can help. Call (970) 672-1212 or email us now.
