Online marketing is a growing necessity, especially for local businesses like dental practices. While patient referrals, mailers, and insurance participation can provide the bulk of new-patient flow for some practices, no comprehensive dental marketing plan is complete without a blog.
Why do dentists need to blog?The short answer is: Google.
When your potential new patients are out there searching for a new dentist, they will almost always turn to Google.Google is the world's dominant search engine. When people enter search terms like "dental emergency" or "family dental clinics in Mytown" or "Invisalign dentist in Mytown", Google crawls the web searching for the most relevant sites that match those search terms.
One of the best ways to signal to Google that your site is worth visiting is to publish keyword rich content on a regular basis. That doesn't mean just publishing a list of keywords. Google will see through that.
These days, Google is rewarding websites that offer the best user experiences. For our purposes, that means a site that answers the query they're searching for.Google measures user experience in a few ways. One is by how long a person stays on your site. If they hop in and then leave right away, it tells Google that you didn't give them what they wanted.
But if they linger on your page and maybe click through to a few others, that shows Google that your site is perfectly in line with the searcher's needs.That's where blogs come in. A blog is a regularly updated stream of publications packed with useful information.
You might answer commonly asked questions you get. Or you could feature your practice's various services. Or you might choose to be more people oriented, featuring your employees and patients as well as your community work. A blog can be many things.It’s an online, digital place where you can:
Here's an example of the blog we manage for Dental Image Therapy Centres. The blog generates thousands of visits to the website and helps the clinics showcase their expertise and the breadth of their services.Your blog is often the first thing a prospective patient may see when searching for information online. Here are a few tips on how a blog can help benefit your practice.
Like with any marketing strategy, the ultimate goal of blogging is two-fold: acquire new patients and engage with your current ones.Blogs provide a unique opportunity to use your own voice to communicate with patients in a longer format, without being limited to the character counts and short attention spans on social media.
Most individuals that are looking for a dentist will start with a simple Google search.The higher you rank on this search, the higher your chances are of a user visiting your business website, and making an appointment.Blogs also make it easier for patients to find your website by providing the one thing search engines love — new content.Even after you have optimized your practice’s website for SEO, adding valuable fresh content is crucial to ranking high on search engine results pages.Blogs enable you to incorporate keywords and keyphrases (“dentists in Winnipeg” or “How often can I whiten my teeth?”) that make it easier for people to find your site. They have a question, and the answer they’re looking for resides on your website.
Creating a backlog of blog posts gives you an automatic store of social media content to draw from.Blog posts are great to share on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn because they generate traffic back to your site and are easy to share.Be sure to add shareable social media links to all of your blog posts so patients can share on their own accounts.When all of these points work together, they help you to increase traffic to your website, generate leads, grow your patient list, and ultimately make more money.If you need guidance or assistance with your dental marketing strategy or starting a dental blog of your own, drop us a line.
We run campaigns and marketing for our clients wherever they do business around the world. We serve as expert local counsel for national and international clients looking for marketing and communications services in the Canadian Prairies.
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