You already know that content marketing is widely considered to be essential for your dental practice. Maybe you’ve already got a dental practice blog that gets some organic traffic.
What’s next?
The sad truth is that most local practices aren’t blogging about the right things in the right way. As a result, they’re losing patients that are going to their competitors.
If your dental practice blog is getting minimal traffic, you might be tempted not to post often or even to write it off entirely. That’s a mistake. Instead, keep reading to learn about the types of content that will help attract more qualified visitors to your site and help you grow your practice.
What Does The Patient’s Journey Have To Do With Your Dental Practice Blog?
I see a lot of local practices who think that all blog topics are created equal. I cringe when I see post after post about internal company business or news that doesn’t tie into defined business goals. It’s a waste of valuable real estate on your website.
One of the best ways to use your dental practice blog to attract more qualified leads is to focus on topics that are relevant to your ideal patient and their journey toward hiring you to perform their dental services.
A good way to start is to make a list of questions that people frequently ask about your dental services. Those can serve as the jumping off point for dental practice blog posts.
There are a few mistakes you should avoid with this type of content:
- Avoid topics that won’t move patients through their journey of choosing you as their practitioner.
- Avoid topics that are too competitive. You want to be able to rank, and as a local dental practice, you’re probably not going to outrank The American Dental Association. You can use a tool like Ahrefs to figure it out.
- Avoid topics with search volume that’s too low.
Your best bet is to focus on long-tail keywords and questions. Remember that voice searches are more popular than ever, and most people ask questions when they do a query with Cortana or Siri.
To make the point, let’s look at an example. If the owner of a fashion boutique were looking for blog topics, she might want to write about clothes. Her inventory is mostly casual clothing and ranges from designer jeans to office casual. She won’t be speaking to her buyers’ journey if she writes about:
- Which clothing is suitable for a formal wedding
- Kids’ clothing for back to school
Likewise, she’s not going to be able to compete with articles about how to choose the right pair of jeans from sites such as Stitch Fix. And finally, she’s unlikely to get a ton of traffic if she chooses an obscure topic about buttons.
The goal with this type of content is to find a sweet spot that helps people find your website AND provides them with information that moves them toward booking a dental appointment with you.
Linkable Content And Traffic
Your second option is to choose dental practice blog topics that are likely to attract backlinks over time. This type of content usually falls into one of two categories:
- It provides actionable information that solves a problem; or
- It contains data that will be useful to other people.
In the former category, we might be looking at a post that explains how to restore and care for cast iron pans. That would be ideal for a kitchen supply store or possibly a cooking school. In the latter category, it might be a wedding expense infographic that helps people allocate their budgets properly, a topic that would be useful for a wedding planner or bridal boutique.
Because you want the content to be linkable and stay linkable, your best bet is to choose evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that remains useful over time. The alternative with a data-driven blog post is to commit to updating it regularly as needed to keep it relevant.
Tips For Finding Dental Practice Blog Topics
Thinking of blog topics can take time, so let’s finish with a few tips to help you decide which topics will help you attract new visitors to your dental practice blog.
- Have a goal in mind. Each dental practice blog post you create should be written with a goal in mind, whether it’s attracting more leads or getting backlinks.
- Mine your Frequently Asked Questions for blog topics. Look specifically at questions where you’ve provided a short answer to a question that could be fleshed out into a dental practice blog post. An example might be a question about a specific dental procedure.
- Use Google AutoComplete to find topics. When you type a keyword into Google, you’ll see a list of potential searches. These can be excellent ideas for dental practice blog topics.
- Look at Google’s “People Also Ask” and “Searches Related To” sections on the results page. When you type in a question or keyword, Google will usually list 3 questions that people also ask about the topic you’re searching. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a box with related searches. Both offer potential dental practice blog topics for you to consider.
- Use online tools to find topics. BuzzSumo is a good tool to learn what posts are trending and can offer ideas for popular questions and topics. Ahrefs’ tool can help you see which topics are ranking and which have a lot of searches.
- Pay attention to the content format. There are some topics that simply won’t lend themselves to dental practice blog content. If the listings you see on a search results page are mostly directory listings, remember that you’ll need to outrank them to see any real SEO benefit. Choose a topic that will work as a blog post for the best results.
I suggest making a list of potential dental practice blog topics and creating a schedule. Make sure that you cover each topic thoroughly and break your post up with images and subheadings. If you can use related questions and long-tail keywords as headings, you’ll be likely to attract traffic for multiple searches.
Blogging can be the ideal content marketing tool for dental practices if you choose your topics wisely and have a goal in mind. The information I’ve included here can help you turn your dental practice blog into a lead-generating powerhouse. For a deeper dive into how you can improve your online blog presence and overall marketing strategy, book a call with us here.
