If you have done any reading on SEO for your website, you’ve likely read that you should be blogging for your site. Or…you may have read that blogs are dead and don’t help your practice like they used to. The truth is when it comes to SEO you have to test and try things to figure out what brings you results. In our experience, most of the doctors that we work with who have written blogs end up having a couple that eventually brings them leads after our SEO strategy has been in place for a few months.
Here are a few reasons why we think that blogs do help your site and a few best practices so you give yourself the best chances to get leads.
Blogs Show Up In Search Results To Answer Questions
Very often, a blog is going to show up in search results when someone types in a question. If the person is located near you and your blog answers their question, there’s a very good chance Google will show your content to them.
Try this yourself and see what type of search results you are shown. Go to Google and type in any question that a potential patient may ask. For example, when we type in “is feeling tired a symptom of menopause” on the first page of the search results are several doctor’s offices. While none of the offices were located near us, a few of them offered telemedicine across the US.
The chances are that doctors in our area haven’t written blog content or any content for their site that answers that question. But, the fact remains, that Google showed us doctors’ offices both in our area and ones that offered telemedicine that answered the question. This is why answering questions in your blog content is very important.
Change The Keyword Cloud Of Your Website
A keyword cloud shows you how prominent certain terms are on your website. You can run your site through a site checker like this one to show you what words are most used on your site. The goal is to make sure the largest words are relevant to what you offer to your patients. Google will look at your site as a whole to determine what you offer. When you write blogs, it will help your site increase the relevant keywords that describe your treatments and approach.
Keep People On Your Site Longer
When you have a well-written, in-depth blog post, it will keep people on your site for longer. This affects something called your bounce rate. A bounce rate indicates how long someone stays on your website before they “bounce”. If you have a high bounce rate, that can be a signal to Google that your site isn’t relevant to the user. Bringing your bounce rate down can help your SEO. It’s important to know that just like any part of an SEO strategy, reducing your bounce rate won’t automatically mean you’ll start showing up in search results, but it can help.
Provide Value To Site Visitors
Any time you can provide value to a user, Google is going to rank your site higher. Writing content that answers questions and satisfies the user will always help your SEO. While Google won’t tell us exactly what needs to be done on a site to get it to show up in search results, they have said time and time again that focusing on user experience should be your priority.
Best Practices When Writing Blogs
Here are a few things you should think about before you post a blog on your website:
- Is this blog post relevant to what you offer?
- Did you include relevant keywords in the title and the beginning of the article that will help a potential patient find the information you wrote about?
- Have you answered questions with your expert knowledge?
- Did you make any promises in your content that could cause a patient to believe they will get a specific outcome?
It’s important that you really think about the blogs you post on your site because you don’t know which blogs Google will highlight. It’s not uncommon for us to see a blog post that has nothing to do with the practice start bringing in a lot of traffic. For example, you may have shared a recipe on your site that gets a lot of visits. This may be great for someone that does nutrition coaching, but if you are an integrative orthopedic doctor, this won’t bring you much in the way of leads.
Before you publish content, make sure it is relevant to the treatments you provide and has a title that communicates clearly what the person will learn in the article. Then, make sure you write an answer that will satisfy the users’ questions.
Contact Us Today For SEO On Your Blogs
If you have been publishing content on your site but you’re not getting visitors to your website, reach out to our team. As part of our SEO strategy, we optimize existing blogs and new blogs that you write. While we can’t and won’t guarantee that your blogs will bring you leads, we do everything we can to give your content a good chance to show up in search results.
Contact the team at Functional Medicine SEO today and we’ll be happy to do a strategy call with you. Just fill out our form and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
