How a blog can help attract patients to your practice.
Want to attract more patients into your clinic and increase revenue?
Start blogging.
Blogging is an essential part of an effective online marketing strategy that your medical practice should adopt in order to increase phone calls, fill more seats, and ultimately increase revenue. When combined with an email marketing campaign and integration with social media, you will find more traffic flowing to your website, and ultimately more foot traffic into your clinic.
There are three proven benefits to including a blog on your clinic's website that will help to bring more patients into your medical practice.
1. Establish rapport in your community.
Offering short articles with actionable and helpful advice will strategically position you and your practice as the knowledgable authority within your community. This point is very important as the trust is the basis of the physician-patient relationship. Blogging can begin to establish rapport while it will also show that you understand the nuances of a particular medical topic that they might be dealing with.
2. Drive more visitors to your website.
Giving away free useful information (or general advice) will drive visitors to your website from various platforms (google search, social media posts, other website articles, email newsletters). The best way to increase business when you are in a competitive market is to give something away. This is the case even if it's a short blog post with some links to helpful resources. You will be appreciated and regarded as the expert you are, and you will have a new prospective client.
Ultimately, once the visitor is directed to your blog to read the article, there should be a way for the client to call or contact the clinic to set up an appointment.
One word of caution... Just make sure that you comply with HIPAA regulations when you write. Do not reference specific patient examples and if you are presenting a controversial medical article, add links to opposing views beneath the article.
3. Improve your SEO ranking.
Adding a blog with regular posts will boost your website's online visibility. Each time you write a blog post and post it to your website, Google and other search engines will enable your website to be ranked higher on the search results page. While your clinic is only open a finite number of hours per week, a blog never stops working for you.
Additionally, your blog will be more likely to show up towards the top of the results if the blog is well-designed and optimized. You can hire a web designer with an eye for design who can layout your article in a pleasing way that includes images and SEO optimization. As an example, Hatcher Designs offers a website care plan which allows us to work with you or your staff to optimize your blog headline, keywords, header tags and content so that your blog post can be ready for maximum exposure.
This is all great information, but in between seeing patients and charting, I need to find time to BLOG now? You're kidding me right? I went to medical school!
Come up with a list of topics and "main points" that you'd like to educate or inform your prospective and current patients about. Have your staff (perhaps a nurse, PA or a dental hygienist for instance) take turns writing a blog post. Go for quality over quantity as a good post can go a long way in continuing to draw visitors to your website. You can also have a guest-writer write the blog for you.
Another option is to send the copywriter (or ghostwriter) the main points that you'd like to convey and any supporting resources. The copywriter can then research the topic to "fill out" the article to make it feel complete. These services can be found with a quick search online. Hatcher Designs also offers these services with the Premium Plus Website Care Plan. Learn more about Hatcher Designs HERE.