The Internet has become an endless sea of content ready for consumption. With an estimated 350 million blogs online and counting, trying to create something attractive enough to grab people’s attention can seem downright daunting.
Luckily, the formula for engaging content has remained the same and simply requires that you select a topic of interest and provide useful, entertaining, or unique information on it.
As a hearing professional, you’re fortunate to be deeply involved in your patients’ hearing healthcare journeys. It means you know their questions and concerns, what interests them about their hearing, and what kind of solutions grab their attention most. From a content marketing perspective, that information is gold.
Because what’s the point of spending your valuable time on creating a blog for your website if it isn’t attracting more visitors? Useful and interesting information on your blog should not only be boosting your website’s overall ranking in search results, it should also be directly increasing traffic to your site via people discovering your blogs through online searches or shared links.
The more visitors your blogs get, the more easily other people will find them when searching for related topics online. And ultimately, the more visitors your website gets overall, the better your business will do in the long run.
Remember: even if your website’s visitors aren’t in your area, their time spent on your website makes it more visible online (by improving its search engine ranking) and thus, more easily found by locals looking online for hearing services in your area.
So where do you start? Consider the following tips for creating content that works.
Write What You Know
Choosing the right topics for online traffic is a critical step in creating great content, and fortunately, it will be an easy one for you. Your in-person work with patients means you likely already know what their most common questions are. And your patients are the perfect sample of your “target audience” since they’re confronting the same hearing health issues that your online audience would be.
Make a list of the questions your patients ask most. Include other topics that you notice gain interest from patients when you bring them up (i.e. everyone wants to know more about extended-wear hearing aids, etc.). Write about those topics, and any other trending news in the hearing industry.
Once your blogs are posted, share them on social media and watch the response they get. If you notice certain topics gain more engagement or attention than others, consider how you could expand upon them in new ways.
Engaging blogs give a balanced dose of fundamental information and an interesting perspective to keep us informed and reading. It’s important to choose topics that you have helpful knowledge on (or can research enough until you do). You shouldn’t create content that’s so dense it’s nearly academic, but you also don’t want it to be too light and surface-level.
Quality over Quantity
Creating interesting content for your blog doesn’t have to take all day. In fact, the average length of blogs is only 500-700 words. Despite the rising trends of creating longer content for better SEO effects, you need to evaluate your unique audience and offer what they seem to prefer.
With the intense content saturation on the Internet, it’s no surprise that people, in general, tend to read through shorter articles over longer ones. The exception to this is when a topic is being expanded upon authoritatively (i.e. a Wikipedia entry). If you want to offer up a novel, yet lengthy, perspective on the effects of hearing loss on relationship dynamics, by all means do so. Longer content can be just as effective as short-form articles, but itt definitely takes longer to create. It also needs to be engaging enough to hold your readers’ attention.
In general, aim to craft an interesting article in 500-700 words. Be sure to use some of the most popular keywords throughout your writing, and remind yourself that it doesn’t need to take hours to produce. If it does, consider choosing topics that you’re more comfortable writing about.
Chop It Up
No matter how long your content is, it’s helpful for your audience when you break it into sections with clear headers. We do that with most of our own blogs since research shows that people tend to scan and skim online content instead of read it.
Segmenting your blogs into sections with subtitles is also helpful for organizing your content. If you have a few topics you plan on expanding into full blog articles, consider just outlining them first with their relevant subtitles. Especially for topics you have extensive knowledge on, outlining your topics can help keep your writing focused and more concise.
Lastly, although content marketing is a passive approach to gaining new patients, you do have a golden opportunity at the end of your blogs to mention the services you offer. It’s golden because by the end of your article you’ve (ideally) just revealed your professional knowledge and helpfulness, making it a prime time to mention how people could work with you further. No need to get detailed here, just a simple reminder that if your readers are looking for hearing healthcare services, you’re equipped to help them.
Content marketing through blogs is an eefective way to help your website get found online. Today’s hearing marketplace demands a strong digital presence to attract local patients searching online for hearing professionals. If your website needs an upgrade, or you aren’t getting the traffic online (or in office) that you should be, feel free to reach out to us to learn how we can help.
(See what we did there?)
