Publish Content on Your Dental Website Like a Pro
Creating content for your dental website means more than just throwing fancy jargon together. In the dental industry, the content you generate can be your ticket to attracting potential business. After all, your website is basically the face of your dental practice. Whether you’re revamping service pages within your website or publishing monthly blogs on popular topics in your industry, optimization is the key to exposure. Many dental professionals view content marketing as time consuming, but it really doesn’t have to be. By incorporating these simple dental content writing tips, you can create engaging content that will help rank your website locally.
1. Research Topics Your Clients Want to Know About
The first step towards treating a dental patient is to identify why they’re coming to you in the first place, right? Well, this same concept applies to content marketing.
The goal is to publish content that your audience can benefit from. One way to engage your audience is to target frequently asked questions and turn them into blog posts. If your clients are bombarding you with questions about oral hygiene for children, turn this topic into a blog to provide some in-depth insight. Include statistics and valuable data from outside sources (like another dental professional or trusted dental newsletter) to increase credibility.
The goal is to engage your audience by providing answers that are fresh, relevant and helpful. By doing this, you can become their go-to for all things dental related.
2. Don’t Forget Your Keywords
Let’s focus on a huge content marketing component: keyword usage.
You can spend hours focusing your time on creating blogs, articles and infographics that address hot topics within the dental industry. However, if you’re not using the right target keywords (or any keywords, even) to get this content ranking on search engines, you’re wasting your time.
Here’s a little secret: to create appealing dental content for your readers, you first have to create content they can find.
The key (no pun intended) is to incorporate keywords that people will search for. Now, this does not mean you should drown your content in a specific set of keywords – Google can penalize websites for “keyword stuffing”. As a result, Google will flag these websites as spam because you’re using keywords in an unnatural way. If your website gets flagged, this will decrease your search rank priority. You could be handing over leads to your competitors!
Instead, choose one or two keywords and sprinkle variations of them into your writing. The goal is to use your keywords in an organic way.
Want to know how well your keywords are ranking? Programs such as SERPs allow you to analyze keywords and see how they’re ranking both locally and globally. These programs typically require a subscription for more in-depth analysis. A professional internet marketing plan will include this feature in your package.
This example shows how the keyword phrase “emergency dentist in Cooper City” is ranking locally via SERPs:
Longtail Keywords
These are more specific than regular keywords. For instance, instead of using a simple keyword like “dentist”, you can also use longer, more specific keyword phrases like “emergency dentist in Pembroke Pines”. Longtail keywords don’t carry the same ranking value as their shorter, more common counterparts. However, optimizing your dental website with these specific phrases will still generate traffic and increase your local search ranking.
3. A Headline is Worth Thousand Words (But Should Use Way Less)
Your content headline is your one chance to make a strong first impression. This impression should generally be made in 5-15 words, so use your time (and your reader’s time) wisely. The age old “never judge a book by its cover” saying has become somewhat irrelevant in the world of online content marketing. Your headline can either reel your audience in or cause them to skip to another more captivating headline.
Statistically speaking, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will continue reading. However, by creating an eye-catching headline, your audience will be more inclined to read through your content. Be sure to include your target keyword within your headline for ranking purposes. For example, if your target keyword phrase is “toddler oral hygiene”, your headline should read something like:
10 Healthy Tips to Improving Oral Hygiene for Toddlers
Emotional headlines also have the power to create a stronger connection with your audience; in the marketing world we call this Emotional Marketing Value. Not sure if your headline conveys enough EMV? You can analyze your headline online and receive tips on how to improve it. Below, I analyzed the EMV for the above mentioned Oral Hygiene blog post:
4. Be Consistent; Avoid the “Whenverly” Publishing Pattern
Picture this: Jack is a successful dentist who wants to increase traffic on his website. To do this, he jumpstarts his own online content marketing plan by posting monthly blogs for his readers. After a couple of months, Jack’s dental website starts to increase in traffic!
The only problem is that he’s pretty busy running his practice, so it becomes hard to keep up with these monthly blogs. Over time, monthly updates become bi-monthly updates. Eventually, he was posting dental content onto his site whenever he found the free time. As a result of this, Jack’s website traffic began to decrease as his readers were no longer receiving timely updates. His potential clients are now flocking to a competing dental practice with a much more consistent content marketing plan in place. Jack is guilty of, what I call, the “wheneverly” publishing pattern.
The lesson here is to keep your readers consistently engaged. Writing content for your dental website can be a time consuming process, especially while running your practice. However, improving your search rankings is an ongoing effort and requires dedication in order to target your audience effectively.
To help remain consistent with your blog posts, you can create an create an editorial calendar for your content marketing. This tool is extremely useful to help you plan and stay organized.
5. Visuals Matter, Too
Incorporating images into your content improves your chances of attracting your target audience. We live in a visual culture, so our eyes naturally gravitate to content containing visuals. Images also help simplify your content. This infographic shows that blogs containing images receive 94% more views than blogs without them. The dental industry utilizes a great deal of visuals (x-rays, photos of the mouth, etc). These visuals should be incorporated into your content to help drive your point and further engage your readers.
Websites such as Freerange Stock and Freepik allow you to search for images. Some of these images are available for free download, while others must be purchased. While you may have to do some digging to find the image you want without having to pay, these are some economic and easily accessible options you can use when managing your own content marketing campaign.
Make Your Content Marketing Efforts Count
Building a solid and effective content marketing plan takes time. You’re not guaranteed results overnight, but by implementing these basic steps you can improve your online exposure and overall SEO efforts. Keep in mind that content marketing is only a slice of a much larger SEO pie–there are other important factors that must come into play if you want your online marketing efforts to succeed.
At Clicc Media Inc, our tailored internet marketing plans for dentists focus on the key elements that will increase website’s traffic and rankings. We provide a thorough analysis of your content to identify how it can be improved and optimized to yield positive results. Contact us today to learn more about how content marketing can completely revolutionize the performance of your website.