As a dental marketing consultant I will often spend a great deal of time looking at client websites and making recommendations about how the content can be changed to do two things:
- Attract more traffic/visitors/potential new patients to the website.
- Convert more of that traffic into new patients at the practice.
Something that all websites should do I think, don’t you?
The first thing we need to do is to identify two distinct places that content can go on your website:
- On the website itself.
- On your blog. (Which should still be part of your website).
Why separate the content out from the main website onto a blog?
Okay, it’s going to get a little technical here but this is important to understand. One of the things we want to do with your website is to pull in as much traffic from Google as possible. The best way to do this is to write content that people want to read, if people read that content, and like it, they are more likely to share it with their friends and interested parties.
Take Invisalign as an example, a patient may be researching Invisalign and clear aligners, trying to work out if they can eat whilst wearing the aligners… They may visit your website and read some excellent content you’ve written about living day-to-day with Invisalign aligners.
That patient may also be discussing/researching Invisalign on other places around the Internet, think about places like mums net. I’ve seen this happen, patients then begin discussing possible treatments and posting links back to websites where they have read about the treatment.
That same patient could post a link back to your website from the mums net forum within their discussion.
This is what is known as offsite search optimisation and it is BRILLIANT for your website. Google will notice these links that people place around the Internet back to your site, the more links you have and the higher quality links (from highly valued websites) the higher your website will begin to rank.
We now get a snowball effect from writing good quality content:
So, I still haven’t answered the question about why you should separate content from your main website into your blog.
The answer is this, people are far less likely to share content if it talks about yourself all of the time, in conjunction with this, Google is far less likely to rank very highly content which talks about yourself all of the time.
Let’s take Invisalign as an example, typical Invisalign content on the website would be written thus:
” Our dentists in <town> can help straighten crooked teeth with Invisalign invisible braces, we offer a free initial consultation and can then provide a tailored treatment plan with payment plans starting at just 25p per day”
Now, let’s rewrite that content to make it more shareable and likeable:
“What is Invisalign?
Invisalign utilises modern CADCAM techniques to produce an almost invisible aligner, each aligner is worn for approximately 2 weeks, a typical Invisalign treatment will have 26 aligners. Invisalign also utilises computer generated graphics to create a 3-D simulation of how you will look once your teeth have been straighten”
The first example makes perfect sense, it includes your local area (so the Google knows where you are located in can rank you for that) it also talks about the treatment process (the free consultation) and makes the treatment more accessible from a cost point of view (payment plans).
However, Google is far less likely to promote this type of content as it is clearly self-promotional.
Here’s the proof, do a Google search for ” what is Invisalign”… Google will show what a section marked ” people also ask”… Have a scroll through some of the answers and see how they are written. Any of these websites (which will get a lot of traffic from this by the way) listed will almost certainly NOT be self promoting within the text that is listed in the Google search.
When someone does a Google search e.g. what is Invisalign… Google wants to send someone to the most relevant answer, often the most relevant answer does not include your sales process!
For this reason Google is far more likely to send traffic to your website if you exclude yourself from the content.
Excluding yourself from the content and making your content purely about the reader and answering their questions is far easier on a blog than it is on the main website pages… After all, on the main website pages you absolutely want to be promoting yourself, don’t you!
Why writing a blog is so powerful
Writing a blog is so powerful and important because:
- It can be very targeted and specific about its content, you could write a whole blog post about what Invisalign is, another one about Invisalign problems, another one about eating with Invisalign, another one about looking after aligners etc the more specific and targeted the content is, the more relevant it will be to the reader, the more relevant it is to the reader the more Google will promote it for you in the search results, the more people you get visit, the more it will be shared and so the cycle goes on.
- It’s a way of you writing about your specific treatments without the sales talk, because you’re not talking about yourself so often this is another reason why Google will this date and more people will share it.
- Blogs are regularly updated, Google knows this and therefore knows that blogs have the most up-to-date content, up-to-date content means relevant content for when people search, Google therefore generally loves blogs.
- Blogs often have an RSS feed, this makes syndicating to e-mail and social media very simple.
Writing in this way will increase your overall domain authority, a higher domain authority will mean you will rank higher for ALL of your search phrases, including the specific ones which drive traffic to your ‘sales’ treatment pages.
Writing a blog is good for traffic to your entire website.
Top tips to get your blog found in the search results
- Phrase your blog title is a question. Google loves answering questions and if the question you use as the title of your blog fits with the questions people are asking on Google then Google will send more traffic to your website.
- Link out from your blog to other high authority websites. This demonstrates that your blog is a useful resource to readers rather than being a basic sales tool. Google will thank you for being a useful resource and rank you higher in the search results.
- Link to other internal pages of your website. This helps website visitors find exactly what they are looking for and also helps you as you can link to your more sales focused internal pages about the treatment.
- Ensure that the meta data (title, description and image tags) are relevant on each blog post.
- Share each blog post on your social media streams.
- Share each blog post via your opt in and consensual e-mail list.
So, are you writing a blog now?