The Clinic Marketing Podcast - Local SEO & Healthcare Online Marketing Tips for Clinic Owners & Wellness Providers

Blogging 101: Why you need a blog and what to blog about [Propel Playback]

• Darcy Sullivan

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In this episode, we break down Blogging 101 for clinics and healthcare practices. You will learn whether your clinic really needs a blog, how often you should publish, how long posts should be, and how to create content that not only attracts visitors but also turns them into new patients. We will cover how to fill content gaps, do simple keyword research, and position your clinic as a trusted authority in your specialty so you can grow your audience and boost your online visibility.

Episode Webpage & Show Notes: https://propelyourcompany.com/blogging-101/

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SPEAKER_00:

On this episode, we're talking all about blogging. Do you really need to blog? How often should you blog? How long should your blog post be? And how do you leverage blogging to grow your audience? Hello and welcome to this episode. I'm Darcy Sullivan with Propel Marketing and Design. Today we're going to be discussing some best practices for blogging. We'll talk about how often you should blog, blog post link, and how to convert your blog post visitors into new patients or lead. One of the key takeaways that I hope you walk away from this episode with is the fact that crafting blog posts that fill in content gaps, covering topics that your main website is missing, leads to a growing connection with your target audience. Through proper topic and keyword research, you can develop content for your blog that provides answers to your target audiences or questions and positions you as an authority leader. Before we dive into some of the best practices when you're putting together blog posts, let's start at the beginning. Do you really need a blog? If you have a new website, before you dive into blogging, I would like to suggest to you that you put together the core pieces of content that you need on your website. We have a blog post that breaks down 10 critical pages that every website needs to have. If you don't already have those pages in place, then I would suggest that you first start with getting elements of your core website together before you start to write blog posts. And if you're curious what those pages are, they include your home page, your about page, products or services pages. If you're a chiropractor or another clinic owner, you also want to include those common conditions pages. In addition to that, you want to make sure that you have your contact page, your privacy policy, and your terms and conditions page. The pages that I just described are fixed pages that make up your website and they should be full of timeless evergreen content. While blog posts, on the other hand, can be considered a chronological timeline of relevant information. If you're trying to decide if a piece of content should go on your core website as a fixed page or on your blog as a blog post, keep this in mind. Users come to web pages for information about a company, product, or service. They come to blog posts for information about a topic. There's a quote from Amanda Sellers, who's a historical optimization manager at HubSpot, that I think helps identify the type of content you should be putting on your blogs. Here's what she said: your blog is a honeypot, not a megaphone. Make it a point to position your content around what your audience wants to discover, not what you want to tell them. Here are the five key steps when putting together a blog brand of action. One, determine your blog audience. Depending on your blog post topic, you might want to target a specific buyer persona. We put together a podcast directly about identifying buyer personas if you haven't gone through that exercise. So specific blog posts might either target one or multiple of your buyer personas. So first you want to, again, determine your audience for your blog post. Then you want to create content that attracts your blog readers. If you're just getting started, think of the top three to five questions that you're frequently asked. Putting together blog posts around the most common-assed questions you receive from your target audience is going to put you in a position where you're already close to identifying the exact content that people just like your target audience are searching for. So if you're a chiropractor and there are two or three questions that you always get asked about back pain, then putting together a blog post specifically answering the questions that your current patients are asking you will lead you in the direction for attracting more of your ideal patients based on the fact that you're targeting the content that they're searching for. Next, you want to make sure that you optimize the blog posts that you're putting together. And when we say optimize, we're referring to SEO, search engine optimization. We have a writer's guide to SEO that you can find on our website or in the show notes here. To get you started though, here are a few core SEO elements you want to consider when putting together a blog post. First, you want to identify your target audience, which we already did. Next, you want to identify the targeted keyword or keyword phrase you want to focus on for that one piece of content. You want to make sure that you're using an engaging title, that you have properly optimized your post, meaning that you are using header tags when appropriate, internal links when appropriate, external links when appropriate, and that you're using your keyword throughout that piece of content. You want to make sure that you're taking actions to not only drive traffic to your blog post, but also to convert the blog post readers into either subscribers or direct them to take an action that will convert them into a lead. At the close of your blog post, you want to make sure that you give them directions as to what next steps they should take. So that might mean if you are a chiropractor and you wrote a blog post regarding back pain, that at the end of the blog post, you might tie it up with a pretty bow by saying, if you're suffering from back pain and live in a specific area, please contact us to schedule an appointment. You also want to make sure that throughout your blog post, it's easy for them to schedule an appointment for you. One of the easiest ways to do that is to make sure that you just have a book now button in your header so that they can easily book an appointment with you. The last thing that we want is for them to walk away with amazing content from your website without knowing what the next steps are or that they should contact you because you offer a service that will help them. The final step to creating better blog posts is to make sure that you promote your blog post. You can promote your blog post through social media, to your email list, and share them with potential influencers that can share them with their audience. Let's move into the two other most common questions I get asked about blogging. How often do you need to blog and how long do each of your blog posts need to be? The answer to both of these is it depends. When it comes to the question of how often should you blog, it's going to depend on your resources. Are you able to write quality blog posts once a month, twice a month, or once a week? If you do not have the resources to create a new blog post every single week, then start by using the internal resources you do have and put together a couple blog posts a month. It's more important to have quality content than it is to have quantity. You want to stay consistent in the amount of blog posts that you're putting together. It's also a good idea to take a look at your competition. Are they blogging once a week, twice a month, once a month, or do they even have a blog at all? This will give you an idea about how competitive your market is, which leads us to the next question. How long should your blogs be? It's really a loaded question, as there is no straight answer. We have a very detailed blog post which we'll share the link to in the show notes that walks you through more detail about the frequency of blog posts showing data points and also data points when it comes to the length of blog post. But you want to keep in mind that, you know, five, 10 years ago, you used to be able to get away with writing 300 or 500 words as a blog post. And nowadays that just doesn't cut it. Again, you want to look at what your top competition is doing and how long their blog posts are as well. Day in and day out, we are in analytics looking at what drives traffic to specific websites. And when we look at the keywords that are driving traffic to websites, you'll notice that all of the top websites in fields like chiropractic care, acupuncture, physiotherapy, all of the clinic owner sites that we work with, the top ranking site, all have blogs. And what happens is when you're creating an abundance of content like blogging, every time you put together a new blog post, you're giving Google a new opportunity to showcase your information directly to the audience that is searching for the products and the services that you offer.

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Darcy Sullivan

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