Blogging for Dental Offices: Why You Need to Start Blogging Now
Blogging isn’t just for DIYers and crafty stay-at-home moms. Blogging helps your dental office generate more calls, more patients and more profit. It is the lifeblood of any serious marketing effort and is one of the best ways to convert page views into leads. Whether you are just starting your dental practice or are looking to breathe new life into an established office, blogging is just as important for the dental industry as it is for any other. Every day, hundreds of thousands of potential patients go online to not just look for a new dentist, but look for information about procedures.
Blogging is a great way to bring those searchers to your website, provide them with the necessary information, and convert their interest into a new lead. Not convinced? Here are more reasons why you need to start blogging as soon as possible.
1. A blog is the perfect place for backlinks. What are backlinks? In its simplest form, it a link to your main website. If you frequent forums or blogs, you have probably seen forum posts or signatures, as well as blog comments, which include a link back to another webpage. When that page has nothing to do with the original subject, it is a fairly shady way to try to drive traffic to a webpage. However, in the context of your blog, driving traffic to your main website, a backlink is a perfectly appropriate and effective tool.
Google loves backlinks—they can seriously boost your search engine optimization, especially because when you include a link to your dental website, in your post about something related to dentistry, you are building a tangible reference that the search algorithm can see and use to promote your page.
But how do you include them? One great way is to include, at the end of every post, a tag that says something to the effect that if the readers wants more information about the topic of the blog, he or she should visit your website, with a hyperlink right there. The blog visitor has just read your helpful content and is funneled directly to your webpage, now that your content has established your name as an authority in the field of dentistry. It’s the perfect way to increase page views and to ensure high-quality leads come your way.
2. The bigger your website is, the better. Just as search engines love backlinks, they also love large, dynamic websites. The more content you have, the better—as long as that content is valuable. You never want to just pump your blog full of useless or unoriginal content, but having a large website that is constantly and consistently updated is a major benefit for SEO.
Each individual blog article you publish will be considered a separate page. That means that the earlier you start blogging and the more consistent you are with it, the bigger your website will be. Think of your website as a bug on the internet’s web. The larger you are, the bigger the vibrations you make will be and the easier it will be for the spider (the web crawler) to find you. Unlike a bug on a web, however, you won’t be eaten, you’ll just be easier for potential patients to find.
The most important thing to remember is that originality is king. Copying and pasting from another website will only flag your blog, and eventually, your website. Even unoriginal titles or topics can hurt you, as your post will be lost in a sea of similar content. It can be difficult to find something unique to say about your industry, but dentistry isn’t completely inundated with blogs yet—just keep writing. Write about topics that you know concern your patients. Make your blog a hub of information about dentistry, from the implant process to how to reduce dentist appointment anxiety. The more information you have, the more likely potential patients are to stop by and be funneled towards your webpage.
3. Blogging gives you the opportunity to include a wide variety of keywords, without keyword stuffing. In the past, you used to be able to fill a webpage with a search phrase, literally stuff it into your content, and be the very first search result on Google. Now, the search algorithms are far more sophisticated, and having a single keyword too frequently can actually hurt you as you attempt to rank. This is where simple page content can fall short. It needs to be long enough to include enough keywords, without being too long that no page visitor will read and respond to it.
A blog solves all of these problems. Not only does it provide a much better forum for long content, it also allows you to include varied keywords that would seem stilted and strange in page content. You can hit a wider variety of topics in blogs, and because there will be far more content on your blog overall, you can focus on a single keyword in one post, without using up all of your “real estate.”
Keywords are still the core of all search engine optimization. A blog is a great way to provide fresh, keyword-rich content that drives users looking for “root canal in New York City” and users “best New York dentists” to your page—and you don’t have to figure out how to fit both of those phrases into the same two-hundred words naturally.
More and more, a thriving, active blog is what drives traffic and lead, no matter what your market it is. If you don’t already have a blog, now is the time to start one. If you have one but don’t update it regularly, or use it only for practice news, now is the time to start utilizing it.
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