At Functional Medicine SEO, we work with many practitioners on developing content that represents their philosophy of medicine. We help them explain the different modalities they use in their office so that their patients can feel confident about the procedures. It’s our goal to help them avoid common content mistakes and create articles that truly serve their reader.
Here are the top 5 content mistakes functional medicine practitioners should avoid:
1. Not Defining Medical Terms
When you are writing content for your website, you must consider that your target audience is a potential patient. You aren’t writing a medical journal, rather, an easy to understand explanation of how you treat patients. Throwing out medical terms without giving a definition will confuse the reader and cause them to leave your site in search of an article that simplifies the information.
2. Creating Content With a High Readability Score
A readability score is based on the Flesch-Kincade test and provides a number assigned to your writing that determines how easy the content is to read. The score provides Google with the suggested grade-level a reader will need to pass to understand the page. To capture the largest audience, you will want to keep between 6-8.
We recommend the Hemingway Editor to score your article and show you what sentences need to be changed. The best way to reduce your score is to keep sentences to no longer than a line and a half and paragraphs to no more than 3 sentences.
Other readability tips include:
- Add a descriptive header every 2 paragraphs.
- Turn sentences with a list into bullet lists.
- Avoid using the passive voice.
- Change hard to read words to simpler words. GrammerCheck will highlight difficult words and give a suggestion.
This doesn’t mean you have to water down your message or avoid talking about complex medical topics. However, it does mean breaking down those hard to understand concepts into easy to read sentences and paragraphs.
3. Publishing Content Infrequently
Creating new blogs can be quite a task for busy functional medicine practitioners. For the SEO on your website, it’s best to publish 2 new blogs per month. We recommend that you spend one day and knock out both posts for the month. Then, you can schedule them to publish two weeks apart.
4. Targeting The Wrong Keywords
The keywords you think your target audience is searching may be completely off-base. That’s why we recommend you do basic keyword research. Ubersuggest can give you a few suggestions based on the keyword you type in. Also, add in your city to see what local searches are the most popular.
This resource will show you the number of times a specific term is searched for each month. That will give you a good indication of whether or not the phrase has value and worth adding to your writing.
5. Not Telling The Reader What You Want Them to Do Next
After you’ve crafted a highly informative article, you need to tell the reader what you want them to do next. If you want them to call you, tell them to call and link to your phone number or contact page. If you’d like for them to schedule an appointment, link to your scheduler.
Many practitioners offer free assessment tests or other materials that a reader can sign-up for. This is a good call to action, because it gives you the ability to get in touch with a reader that interacted with your page.
Contact Us Today
If you’re a practitioner that needs an SEO company that understands what you do, contact the team at Functional Medicine today. We would love to give you a free strategy session and provide you with a customized look at your site. Contact us today so we can help you avoid these content mistakes and show up in search results.
