Top 5 Reasons Your Medical Practice Needs a Blog
A useful, lively, interesting blog of a medical site increases the reputation and recognition of the clinic, improves sales. With a skillful combination of content marketing and SEO promotion, blogging helps to build an initial touch with visitors, show the professionalism of doctors and increase their credibility.
1. Benefits for Search Engine Promotion
Clinics often abandon blogs and lose a good source of traffic that can convert. Information requests increase the thematic coverage of the site and bring visitors who are interested in the services of the medical center.
A blog is a section of a website that needs to be constantly updated. Regularly publishing useful and relevant content increases the likelihood of a site getting to the top positions in the search. With an increase in the number of articles on the site, there are more sections, so behavioral factors are improving, which is also liked by Google.
Expert materials increase the clinic’s ranking in search engines and increase user loyalty. The search engine sees that the information is updated on the site, the visitors like the articles, which means it is interesting and it needs to be raised in the search results.
2. Lead Source
SEO methods attract visitors to the site who are interested in treatment, the help of doctors, and obtaining information about ways to solve health problems. If there are articles on the blog pages that give complete and understandable answers to these questions, then people will leave their contacts, subscribe to the mailing list or social networks of the medical center.
It is important to provide truthful and expert information so that, if necessary, people remember where they got it and go to the clinic. To turn visitors into customers, they also work out their motivation and reflect this in articles.
3. Expertise and Image Enhancement
Expertise and desire help the visitors to strengthen the credibility of the clinic. The right content can show the ability of doctors, the well-equipped clinic, and concern for the health of patients. The more professional articles about symptoms, treatment options, and other medical information that are published, the more likely a person is to make an appointment and entrust their health to the clinic’s specialists.
But articles with a direct story about the achievements of doctors and the clinic, elements of self-praise do not strengthen the company’s image. All the benefits should not just be listed, but show a specific benefit for patients. In a blog, you can reveal the professionalism of doctors by answering questions, describing cases of successful treatment, and reviewing satisfied customers. Consultations in online chat also work on the image of the clinic.
4. External Platforms for Medical Blogging
An internal blog with unique articles is an effective tool for reminding search engines about the clinic and increasing traffic. But it is not always possible to make it on a corporate website. For such cases, external platforms are suitable. To promote a blog, they use the usual means and methods of search engine optimization. When writing content, relevant keys for the page are selected from the semantic core and links are placed to the pages of the clinic’s official website. This increases the presence of the medical center in search results, improves the image.
5. Articles as an Element of the Sales Funnel
One of the important tasks of external and internal blogs is to convince visitors to use the services of the center and become its patients. To do this, the articles take into account the motivation and degree of user loyalty, use different content formats.
The sales funnel shows marketers and medical practice leaders the quality of traffic and the effectiveness of advertising:
- The number of visitors who signed up for an appointment.
- The number of people who visited doctors.
- How many users became interested in advertising and went to the site.
- Advertising revenue.
Users go through several stages from searching for information to ordering a service. And a blog with expert and useful articles for the audience is the first contact with the clinic. Therefore, it is important to appeal people into the sales funnel with content and try to keep their attention and interest for as long as possible, and ideally, bring them to a sale. Three tools are used for this:
- Subscription Form – You want to read useful materials further, so many leave an email address to receive new articles, and become more loyal users who are easier to get interested in the clinic’s services;
- Internal Linking – Links in articles to appointment forms, selling blocks, specialist cards simplify site navigation, speed up customer promotion through the sales funnel and reduce the number of exits without performing targeted actions;
- Retargeting – You can remind a person about the clinic and return to the blog that he read earlier by displaying personalized online advertising.
The offer to view related articles or other related content also delays visitors.