Our blog is a great source of dental marketing ideas

Blogging is tough. It takes time and time is money. It is hard to be consistently creative and come up with topics that engage your audience. Most dentists rather extract four impacted wisdom teeth then write a 600 word dental blog.

With that said, writing a weekly dental blog is crucial if you want to compete in today’s competitive dental SEO market. Why? Because, every day, more and more prospects go online and search for their next dentist. I just received a stat from a survey by Fred Joyal’s (The 1-800-dentist) webinar last week: "30% of patients say their choice of dentist is greatly influenced by the quality of the practice’s website. That number is certain to grow with each passing year." But there are a lot of benefits to writing a dental blog as well.

Blogging is the fastest way to move up in rankings with the search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo). I wrote a dental blog last week on rotten dental marketing consultants and by the end of the week ranked #8 for the term dental marketing consultant and received over 100 visits.

A few points of interest from HubSpot about blogging: "Search engines look for fresh content so that they can serve it up later in search results. If they don't index it, results won't show it. The more fresh content you create, the more often search engines will come back looking for more. It's a beautiful thing. It's the cycle of life."

Hopefully, I have convinced you to start blogging. So, what do you write about? How often do you blog? Where do you publish it? Who do you write it for? And how do you blog.

1.      1.)  What do you write about? It is best to organize your writing around a set of keywords you want to rank for and the use of an editorial calendar. The keyword topics can be about services you provide, subjects that interest your ideal patient and practice differentiators. Setting up a 3 month calendar of what you plan to write about each week and assigning practice employees is a great way to spread out the work and give people time to write a quality blog. Invite your vendors to write a guest blog about their product or service.

2.      2.) You want to blog weekly at a minimum. HubSpot says, "Companies that blog at least 20 times per month generate 5x more traffic than those that blog only a few times per month. That's FIVE. TIMES. THE. TRAFFIC. So maybe get blogging, hmm?" I think it depends on your industry and the manpower you have to invest. Start out once a week for 6 months and add more after you have worked that easily into your schedule.

3.      3.) Once you have written your dental blog you need to post it to a few sites to build your blog visits. Where are your customers lurking? You will want to post it on FaceBook, Twitter (2 or 3 times), Google+, and LinkedIn, You may find that a solid patient base attends the High School down the street and they have a LinkedIn group for the community: Friends of Shawnee Mission East High School. Health and wellness magazines in your community may have websites where you can post or submit your blog. Often times, you can include a link to your website at the end of your blog.

4.      4.) Who you write your blog for goes back to your strategy. Hopefully it is to your ideal patient (one you would always take more of, has a decent dental IQ, pays their bills on time, doesn’t complain, follows your instructions, is loyal and refers others). But, you may have a specialty you want to expand – and topics that would interest the reader would make a great dental blog.

5.      5.) I think blogging is best done on WordPress, blogger or any other proprietary software or marketing software. They usually have some sort of tool plugin that will guide you on how many words to use in your dental blog (600 to 800); length of title (70 characters or less); what tags to use: dental marketing, dental blog; your meta description – including proper length; Use of site maps and breadcrumbs. Check out using Yoast plugin for Wordpress at: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/