Creating physician blog posts is still one of the most effective SEO strategies and is an excellent way to attract your ideal patients.
The readability of your blog posts is important not only for the patients but for SEO as well.
What Does Readability Mean for Physician Blog Posts?
Google defines readability as “The quality of being easy or enjoyable to read.” So, keeping the text difficulty down to a minimum is a good strategic move that will help with SEO.
The Flesch-Kincaid readability score is a tool we often use before publishing content. This provides a quick check to see how difficult the content is to read and if adjustments need to be made prior to hitting publish.
Perhaps the most significant pushback I hear when it comes to “simplifying” the text in physician blog posts has to do with the concern of not sounding as professional online. Truthfully, this is not something to be concerned about. Patients already have a built-in perception of physicians being professional and intelligent. By simplifying the content, it helps you become more relatable online.
Can Medical Terminology Be Used in Physician Blog Posts?
Absolutely, but when you do, you’ll want to provide the definition along with it.
Headings and Shorter Paragraphs Help the Readability of Physician Blog Posts
For blog posts and web pages, readability also includes breaking content under various headings, as well as keeping sentences and paragraphs shorter.
You may have noticed that I tend to use shorter paragraphs in this post and others. This isn’t because I don’t think you can read long paragraphs. It’s because I want a better readability score and hopefully good rankings in Google.
As an example, here’s my Flesch reading feedback for this post:
Readability Is Easy to Overlook, but It’s Important
Several additional factors go into why readability benefits physician SEO.
1). Readable text reduces bounce rate. By making content readable, you will keep patients on your site longer. This is because they can quickly go through the content and find the answers to their questions. When text is too difficult to read, the patients quickly “bounce off” of your site to find their answers elsewhere.
2). Readable text builds trust. Again, one of your goals as a physician marketing online is to establish patient trust. When a patient skims the blog post and sees that it’s readable, they’re much more likely to read beyond the first sentence.
3). Google is getting better at mimicking human behavior. Something Google has been working hard on is better recognizing and predicting what actual patients will want to read. This means that readability is and will continue to be important in ranking well.
———
When it comes to writing physician blog posts, the best way to think about this is to ask yourself, ”Would an average patient be able to understand this easily?”