The importance of content marketing for doctors

Content marketing for medical practices is essential, and a key part of building your comprehensive medical practice marketing strategy. Creating and publishing it can take several forms:

Regardless of where you do so, consistently publishing quality content that leads back to or fuels your practice’s website will improve your search engine optimization (SEO).

You may wonder why you can’t publish a small series of relevant content one time and then simply wait until it finds its audience in the form of more hits and traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s not that clear cut. The answer is partly related to technology and partly related to human behavior.

When a search engine like Google instructs its robots (bots) to crawl a website, it considers — among other factors — how fresh or up to date the content is. This is a critical part of the search engine’s process of determining how relevant that content will be to users.

For a search engine to consider a site relevant, it must have recent changes or significant updates — which is where regularly posting quality content comes in.

Ultimately, the more frequently you provide new, quality content, the better.

But current content isn’t just a way to improve your SEO. It also:

Most patients — 89% according to eligibility.com — research their symptoms online before they make an appointment with their physician.

There are a few drivers of this behavior:

By publishing accurate, up-to-date, and neutral content, you can provide your patients with guidance about the information they’re hearing, their treatment options, and how they can get timely, reliable answers.

As a result of your medical experience and daily contact with patients, you have a nearly unlimited resource for developing content for your practice’s website and social media platforms. But while you can and should draw on your interactions with patients as you brainstorm new content around their concerns and any patterns you notice, remember to omit specific patient details or interactions. Keep any examples or case studies you use reasonably generic to avoid HIPAA concerns.

Here are a few steps you can take to create a running list of content topics:

Note: As you plan and begin to create content, ask your practice’s attorney to create a disclaimer to go at the bottom of each post. It’s important to remind patients that your content is informational, not diagnostic.

Refreshing older posts shouldn’t be your only approach to improving your website’s content. However, updating existing content is one method you can occasionally use as part of a robust strategy.

When you refresh a previously published article, edit it in your content management system (CMS) rather than posting it again. Nearly identical pieces will hurt your SEO. Maintain the original URL to maintain any internal and external links that point to that post, and update the date to reflect the republication. 

Here are a few suggestions to help you effectively refresh your posts::

When you refresh your content, you ensure that the information on your website is up to date. 

You can rank higher in search engine results when you provide quality, current, and relevant information on your practice’s website. While this isn’t the only way to improve your SEO, it is definitely one method you want to include in your website SEO strategy.