Plus Some Blogging Best Practices
Having a blog may sound like too much work, but putting in a little time and effort into creating a blog for your practice and routinely posting can pay off in spades.
Here are 3 reasons why your practice needs a blog:
1 | Improves Website Content and SEO
Having a blog improves your website content and can make your practice more attractive to new patients. It can even make it easier for them to discover you! Each blog is another opportunity to be found in a Google search, so make sure you are incorporating important keywords in each post, particularly within the first one to two paragraphs. 
2 | Content-Rich Marketing
Blogs provide content-rich marketing to patients. Blog posts can provide valuable information to your patients and can be the perfect outlet to convey additional information. Blogging also creates trust when done correctly. People seek out health information and advice from people, so be sure to show who in your practice authored the blog post. Then, don’t forget to share your blog posts in patient newsletters to make sure they are getting the information they need.
3 | Thought Leadership
On the industry side, a blog can be used to position your practice as a thought leader amongst industry peers. Remember, there is a difference between blogs you write for your patients and those you write for industry peers, so you’ll want a healthy mix of both types if you want the benefits of thought leadership. Once a thought leadership article is published on your blog, make sure that industry peers see it by sharing it on LinkedIn.
Blogging Best Practices
- Stick to a schedule. Decide how often you want to post and make sure that you consistently stick with that schedule.
- Identify topics. Create a topic list based off of keyword research, FAQs from patients, or timely industry topics.
- Write how you speak. Use your own distinctive voice for authenticity, keeping it conversational (which makes it easily digestible) but still professional (for building trust and thought leadership).
- Make it timeless. People may stumble across one of your posts several years from the date you publish it. This means you will want your blogs to still be mostly relevant several years down the road.
- Proofread. Have a trusted family member, friend, or employee thoroughly proofread your content.
- Include at least one image. Having an image included in each post makes it easy to share your articles on social media platforms and makes it more engaging for your readers. Use royalty free sites like Unsplash to grab free images and a platform such as Canva to design graphics or add a watermark or text to images.