You may be picking up a hint of sarcasm in the title, I’m not a fan of writing blogs and I have to write one every 2 to 3 months or so for the Hive Marketing website, which I guess in the grand scheme of things isn’t too bad.

But for those of you, like me, that struggle to write something remotely interesting or useful for a blog that either the practice owner has asked you to write or you need to write one for your own practice, here are some great pointers.

The purpose of writing a blog for a website is primarily for your digital marketing campaign performance. In fact it helps your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign. This is what pushes you up in the Google organic results, ranking you higher so that when potential customers do a Google search for one of your services, your organic results are served as high up as possible. Pay Per Click ads (PPC) and Google Maps results are both served directly above the Google organic results.

Secondary to the digital marketing, your blog may be read by a customer so always bear this in mind too. A blog can also be utilised as a way of helping your rankings for certain treatment keyphrases even if you don’t have an individual treatment page built on your website.

Every 6 months or so, Google complete a Core Algorithm Update and one of the main focus points in the most recent couple of updates was industry relevant website content and regular website updates. Adding a weekly or even a monthly blog can fulfill both of these focus points. If your business website falls short of these then Google can end up penalising you by dropping your positions in the ranking results.

How to choose a blog topic

Where do you even start? Well to help you with this and to take any of the focus away from you and what you personally know or don’t know about writing a blog, firstly start with taking a look at your marketing progress over the last 6 to 12 months.

How is your business ranking in the Google organic result positions? Are there any particular keywords or keyphrases from your SEO campaign that just seem to be struggling and have made little or no progress over time?

Think about your Associates; do you have Associates complaining that they haven’t got enough work on and you are concerned that they may drop or reduce the days that they work in your business? What is their speciality? Or what treatments do you need to drive into the business that will make them happy to stay?

Take a look at the practice diary. Where are the gaps? Which treatments are on ‘go slow’ at the moment? What treatments do you want more of? Do you have enough high value treatments coming in?

Consider where you are driving your business over the next year. What new treatments are you introducing? Are you increasing your monthly treatment sales targets? For example; do you want to increase dental implant cases from 5 a month to 10 a month?

After you’ve considered all these points you will likely have at least one thing written on your list. Let’s say it’s “dental implants”.

How to pick a blog title and topic focus

Writing a blog about dental implants is likely a lot easier for an implantologist than it is for a Practice Manager. But let’s imagine you are the Practice Manager and you’re responsible for writing the blog content for the business.

The title of the blog should be something interesting and perhaps a question that someone may ask for example:

• Does getting a dental implant hurt?
• What are the benefits of having a dental implant?
• Dental Implants or Dentures: Which is the better treatment?
• How can we replace an entire set of teeth in one day?
• How can we stabilise your loose dentures?
• Is it possible to have dental implant treatment with severe bone loss?
• Finding a good dentist – what to look for if considering dental implants.

Blog content

Assuming that relations within the practice are working well, you can ask the implantologist for a few bullet points for your blog, tell them the title and the topic and fingers crossed they might throw some content your way. Failing that look on your website implant treatment page, grab some information and ideas from there, however, you must make sure what you are writing unique content, you cannot copy content, Google are likely to spot this and penalise your website.

Take a look at what your competitors are doing, how are they writing their blogs?

Word count – gone are the days of being able to put a few choice keywords down in a paragraph. The Google recommended minimum word count of unique and industry relevant content is now 1000 words. Might sound a lot but actually once you get going you’ll find it easy to reach. Up to this point for example is 847 words. (Not far to go now, phew!).

Keywords – this is where the previous research is relevant. When you looked at your ranking positions for certain keywords or phrases in your local area, there will likely have been keywords like these for example “dental implants oxford” or “missing tooth oxford”. If these are the phrases you are wishing to move up in position in the Google search results then make sure that you mention these within your content.

It can be casually done something like this:

If you are looking for dental implants in Oxford then XXXX Dental Practice is the place to visit……

………dental implants are the perfect way to replace a missing tooth or multiple teeth.

XXXX Dental Practice in Oxford have a Specialist Implantologist that can take care of your dental implant needs…….

Where to post your blog?

There are a number of places you can publish your blog. We recommend publishing it on your website in the “News” or “Blog” section if you have one and on your practice social media pages. If you haven’t got a “News” or “Blog” section then it doesn’t take much to build that into your website and it’s possible in most cases. If you’re unsure of how to check this let us know and we can see if your site has the functionality to be able to do this.

If you still really don’t want to write your own blogs then let us know and we can send you some more info on our blog writing service which starts at £455/mth + VAT for 2 x 1000 word blogs a month published to your website.

End word count: 1142, I went over, but that’s fine, you don’t get penalised for that, I hope.

Happy blogging everyone!