For most doctors, blogging is not something that comes easy. And the strategy behind it is not usually something that is top of mind.
I’ve been a student of digital marketing and SEO for many years now. And in working with many clients, I can tell you that there are many common mistakes made when blogging to try and establish a personal brand.
If you want to be successful in having your posts get in front of potential patients, it’s important to avoid these common blog mistakes at all costs.
Fortunately, these blog mistakes are all relatively easy to remedy.
1). Not Posting Consistently
Consistency is the key to creating a solid online marketing platform as a doctor.
If you only post occasionally, you will lose out on traffic.
I often tell my clients to think of posting as investing.
Which has a higher probability of succeeding long term – making consistent investments at scheduled intervals, or making one-off investments?
If your goal is ranking well in local patient searches, which it should be, Google will factor in your posting consistency when establishing rankings.
Plus, over time, you will develop a loyal following of readers who will come to anticipate your posts on a particular day, which is excellent for your personal brand engagement.
2). Creating Posts That Are Too Long or Too Short
Finding the sweet spot in posting can be hard. As a general guideline, I suggest posts be somewhere between 500-900 words.
There are two reasons for this:
- Anything under 300 words is a negative SEO factor. Google looks at those posts as not having enough content to be of real value. So 300 words should be the bare minimum.
- By writing posts geared towards answering a patient’s question, they’re still looking for something quick and easy to read. Most of the time, a post over 900 words will be considered too long.
3). Creating Posts That Are Not Scannable
Doesn’t it seem that people’s attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter?
Well, the data actually suggests that’s true.
To avoid this negatively impacting your posts, you want to make sure people can quickly scan it.
The best way to do this is to break the sections out with Headings, like what I’ve done in this post (as well as all of my others).
4). Not Using Images
Images are a great way to help convey your message and provides SEO benefits as well.
One of the things Google looks for is text in the Alt Text of images. Alt Text is simply the text Google will display of for some reason your images doesn’t load.
You don’t want to overdo this, but it’s helpful to put a keyword in this section as well to tell Google the image is relevant.
In the example below, we are trying to rank for common searches about “sex during pregnancy.”
You also want your images to be of high quality. People today are turned off by poor images on a web page.
I personally use Shutterstock, but there are even some free options out there, such as Flikr and Pixabay.
5). Not Knowing Who Your Readers Are
If you’re like most of the doctors I work with, you’re not writing for the benefit of other physicians; you’re writing to attract patients. So it’s important to speak plainly to them, just like you would in an in-office consult.
It’s ok to include medical terms in your posts, just make sure you provide the definition.
If you’re serious about building a personal brand, you’ll benefit from avoiding these common blog mistakes.
Are you guaranteed success? No. But it will remove some of the biggest challenges to establishing readership and getting ranked by Google.