The Executive Suite: A blog can expand your healthcare practice brand

A marketing strategy healthcare practices overlook when it comes to expanding their brand and patient reach is writing a blog.

Healthcare blogs give practices new opportunities to connect with patients in today’s digital world. Consistent blog posts on a healthcare practice’s website can attract new patients, drive patient conversion, and maintain engagement with current patients. The benefits of blog posts are twofold—from building rapport and establishing authority with prospective and current patients in a digital world, to increasing your brand’s reach through search engine optimization.

By focusing marketing efforts on a consistent and informative blog that lives on your practice website, you will move the needle on both ends of increased patient acquisition and retention.

Educate Patients and Provide Solutions

A 2021 study by PatientPop showed that two-thirds of patients look to their local healthcare provider as the trusted source of COVID-19 information. By sharing regular, helpful, and up-to-date information through an easily accessible blog, providers can educate prospective and current patients while solidifying their role as local healthcare leaders. Proactive communication is essential in educating patients and building provider-patient trust.

Utilizing a blog to educate and connect patients with services you provide at your practice gives them the information they need and the solutions they are looking for.

Improve Search Engine Rankings

A healthcare blog can improve a practice’s search engine ranking with each new blog post. A new blog post will appear on its own separate webpage on your website, and with each new page comes new material for Google and other search engines to find and index. By focusing each blog post on a particular specialty offered by your practice, a specific subject matter that is making news, or certain healthcare conditions and services, your website is providing search engines with increased material to point to on your site.

When it comes to local search, maintaining a blog for your healthcare practice increases your website’s overall volume of quality content; it enhances the topical keyword relevance across your entire site; and improves your domain authority, an important score that drives site rank.

When focused and consistent, blog posts about your practice’s specialty and services can improve your website’s page rank, which increases your visibility with potential patients.

Drive Patient Conversion

Creating quality content and offering free value through a blog can help convert website visitors into patients. A study from marketing firm Hubspot demonstrates that businesses that blog have 55 percent more website visitors, with a 5x increase in the number of pages indexed by search engines.

An effective strategy for converting visitors into patients involves the use of a clear call-to-action (CTA) for each blog post. Once a visitor receives the information they are seeking out about a condition or service, offering a solution by driving them to schedule an appointment with your practice will push conversion. Another call-to-action option includes an email newsletter signup.

Set You Apart From Competition

Healthcare blog posts can be used to dive into very specific topics. By providing information on defined, niche conditions or services, healthcare sites can set themselves apart from their competition. A prospective patient doing a search for practices that provide specialized services in their area will land on a blog post that provides them with the information they need on that service. By offering this free and valuable information, visitors will be more likely to book an appointment with a practice that has already proved their knowledge and experience on the subject, compared to one that has not.

To establish authority on particular topics, identify topic areas that tie into your practice and providers’ expertise. For example, if you run a radiology practice, your blog posts could highlight the latest imaging techniques and which conditions they’re used to diagnose and/or treat. When formulating blog posts, it’s important to think like a patient. Consider the questions you hear from patients most often and write a post catering to your everyday patient.

Keywords are also an important focus when crafting the perfect blog post. Following the radiologist example, if you have the only PET/CT in town, or are the only radiologist performing uterine fibroid embolization, focus on those topics and incorporate the relevant keywords into your headlines and copy. The more you can share about your services, the greater chance you have of being recognized as an authority above your competition.

Improve Patient Retention

Maintaining a consistent blog makes patients feel informed, establishes provider reliability, and promotes engagement between patients and your healthcare brand. Blog posts can provide patients with a constant digital reminder about your practice. By maintaining consistency, you’ll assure followers and patients that you are committed to sharing valuable information on a regular basis. When your blog posts become the go-to source for healthcare insight, patient retention soars.

Strategies to maintain consistency in blog posts include a schedule tracker or editorial calendar. Having a system in place is necessary because the more you post, the greater the potential impact your healthcare blog will have.

With many medical marketing strategies to consider, allocating marketing resources to maintaining a consistent and focused blog is a tactic that can help take your practice brand to the next level.