As a healthcare practice that’s recognized the importance of being online in order to thrive as a business, you’ve likely also learned how imperative it is that your website is actually seen by potential patients searching for services like yours. Simply put: there’s little use for a beautifully designed website that’s effectively invisible.
Making sure that your website is visible is a massive topic. There’s good reason why professionals exist solely to execute this goal (i.e. SEO experts). However, there are also a number of ways that you can boost your website’s visibility without needing to hire additional help. This approach is often referred to as “natural” or “organic” search engine optimization (SEO), since it relies on a more organic (and free) approach to getting your website ranked higher in search engines’ results pages.
Of all the natural SEO techniques, our favorite is simply to provide rich content on your website on a regular basis. Yep, we’re talking about maintaining a blog.
Blogs are powerful for generating traffic to your website for a number of reasons. First off, they greatly increase the number of relevant keywords on your website. Keywords are those specific terms and phrases your target audience uses to search for your services. Ideally, you want keywords to be strategically placed throughout your website so that search engines, like Google, rank your website higher than the thousands of other similar websites.
Blogs also expand the amount of content that your website covers, making your reach more versatile. For instance, you might not want to dedicate an entire page on your website to cochlear implants if you don’t specifically work with them, but you could easily write a blog post about them to help educate your audience. This way, you’ve added important keywords related to cochlear implants to your website in case there does end up being someone who is searching for, say, a hearing test for a cochlear implant pre-evaluation. Your blog post on the topic increases the odds that this local patient will end up seeing your website in the search results. In other words, blogs are great for helping you extend your reach.
Blogs are also an effective way to connect with and engage your audience. Not only are you offering valuable educational material about hearing healthcare through your blog articles, but you’re also giving prospective patients a sense of who you are and what you know. Blogs are well-known for their ability to help build trust and authority among an audience of people you may have never met.
By now, you might be wondering about the usefulness of developing an audience online if your patient base needs to be local anyhow. After all, your online audience could very well be spread across the globe.
In this case, it’s important to realize that online popularity often translates to immediate credibility. When a local potential patient lands on your website and sees many comments below a blog post, that alone helps build their trust in you and your practice. It’s social proof that this author is worth reading. Furthermore, the more people reading and engaging with your posts, the more likely it is that someone will share your blog on social media or directly with friends. This not only boosts your ranking in search results (making it easier for locals to find your website), but it also can have an incredible effect on your popularity and online authority in your industry.
Have you ever seen the aftermath of a piece of content that went viral? The term “viral” itself implies an uncontrollable spread and is used to refer to online articles, videos, or audio recordings that have been shared thousands, if not millions, of times. As you might imagine, the original source of that content is often inundated with web traffic. This sort of event is rare, but can have a lightning effect on your website’s ranking on search engine results pages and on your business as a whole.
Simply put, blogs are an excellent way to boost your website’s visibility without having to spend a dime. As a hearing healthcare professional, it’s also an effective way to demonstrate and share the unique knowledge you’ve gained through study and experience. The myths around hearing loss and hearing treatment are ubiquitous and stubborn. Peeling them back to reveal what’s really possible can actually happen — one engaging blog post at a time.
