When browsing competitor sites, you’ve probably noticed that most of them feature a blog page with articles about a wide range of topics. It’s no surprise that dental practices write blog posts as a form of marketing, considering that 77 percent of internet users read blog posts. In other words, blog posts are an effective way to appeal to your target audience.
The trouble with blogging, however, is that it takes more than just a knowledge of marketing and your target audience. It takes years of practice to get right, and even then, crafting the perfect article can still be a challenge. Thankfully, this guide from The Dental SEO Experts is here to help.
After reading this article, you’ll know the essential framework behind writing effective dental articles that are optimized for search engines. Keep reading to learn more.
Benefits of Writing Dental Blog Posts
Dental blog posts have many advantages that make them an excellent use of time and resources. So, if you’re still not convinced by the efficacy of blog posts, here are just a few benefits to consider.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key part of any robust digital dental marketing strategy. SEO involves positioning a website to appear highly in search engine results pages by using relevant keywords on the site, along with several technical considerations. Blog posts are a perfect opportunity to capitalize on keyword uses. In fact, as we’ll discuss in this article, SEO keyword research can be used to generate effective article ideas.
Provide Customer Resources
Blog posts can be used to provide customers with dental resources and information specific to your practice. For example, you could publish an article that outlines the steps involved in important surgical procedures, such as root canals. You can also post information about your team, practice history, and qualifications. This makes the customer experience more convenient.
Highlight Services
Highlighting your dental practice’s service through blog posts is valuable both to your customers and SEO. For example, you could run articles that discuss what services you offer and who they’re for, pointing customers toward specific services that you wish to focus on.
8 Steps to Write an Engaging Dental Blog Post
Now it’s time to take a look at the steps involved in writing SEO-focused dental blog articles. Following these steps will help you and your team craft fluid articles that are appreciated by both users and search engines.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of identifying what terms web users are searching for on search engines like Google. This is an important step in creating SEO-focused articles, as it helps to attract the right readers. For example, if you discover that users are searching for “veneer treatment Orange County,” then writing an article related to this topic would help to draw those web users to your site.
On a basic level, keyword research can be achieved simply by typing relevant terms into Google and looking at the top suggested searches. However, this method provides little information on each keyword, such as search volume (SV) and keyword difficulty (KD), which refers to how challenging it is to rank for a certain keyword.
There are many tools available to help you determine valuable keywords, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, MOZpro, and Ubersuggest. When using these tools, you’ll need to select a primary keyword (PKW) and a handful of secondary keywords (SKW). These are the search terms you’ll later focus on when writing your article, scattering them throughout.
Related Article: Top 10 Dental SEO Management Tools
2. Generate Article Title
Article titles must entice users to click on the post while showing that they provide value to the reader’s life. They should also contain your primary keyword to help connect the article with users searching that term.
Take this blog post, for example, and ask yourself: what made you click on this article? The likelihood is that the “how to” part of the title drew you in because it suggested an educational experience. Plus, the reason you were shown this article in search results was because of our usage of the topic’s primary keyword: “how to write SEO friendly blog posts.” (Keywords can also be phrases.) In other words, the title of this post shows that it contains valuable information.
However, educational value is not the only way to entice a reader into clicking on your blog post. Evergreen titles, for instance, are titles and content that always remain relevant regardless of emerging trends. Evergreen content includes how-to guides, lists, and product reviews.
Related Article: Why Keyword Research Is The Backbone of SEO
3. Outline Article
After generating an enticing article title, the next step is to create an article outline. Creating a solid outline before writing your article makes the actual writing process much easier. Your article should be broken down into digestible sections with clearly labeled headings. You should also try to include your primary keyword in at least one subheading.
When creating an article outline, ensure that you use a variety of heading types and use a logical heading structure. For example, the article title should be the only H1 heading, while subsequent headings should be H2, and nested into those should be H3. Heading tags allow search engines to better understand the structure of your content and which sections are most important.
4. Write Enticing Introduction
Once you have a solid article outline, the hard work truly begins – it’s time to start writing your article, starting by crafting an intriguing introduction. Your article’s introduction is the most important part of your blog post – if it fails to grab the reader’s attention, they will likely leave the page. After all, why should a reader invest their time into an article with a weak introduction that fails to properly ignite their interest?
Though there many different introductory guidelines are touted, at The Dental SEO Experts, we recommend using the AIDA format:
- Attention: Grab the reader’s attention. This is often best accomplished with a surprising statistic, a hook, or by asking a question.
- Interest: Hold their interest by elaborating on your previous statistic or question.
- Desire: Create a desire to keep reading by making the stats or question relevant to the reader.
- Action: Call the reader to action. For example, “Keep reading to learn more.”
Following this framework and applying it to your article’s topic, along with your readership, will help to entice readers and create a desire to keep reading.
5. Write Body
Once you’ve crafted the perfect article introduction, the next step is to write the body of your article. When writing your article, it’s important to follow good readability principles to make sure the article is easily understood by readers. This includes writing paragraphs of no more than three sentences, unless absolutely necessary, and keeping the article reading grade below a level nine.
There are several online tools available to help you achieve excellent readability levels, as well as correct spelling and grammar. These include Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and ProWritingAid.
6. Write Conclusion with CTA
After writing the body of your article, it’s time to write a strong conclusion with a call to action (CTA). A CTA is used to encourage readers to interact with the article, explore your website further, or schedule a consultation with your dental practice. In other words, a CTA does what it says on the tin: it calls readers to action.
The CTA should come at the end of the conclusion. Your conclusion itself should not add any additional information that’s already been mentioned throughout the article. However, it should offer a final viewpoint based on the information discussed or a general summary of the post.
In some cases, concluding paragraphs are not required. This article, for example, does not have one surmising conclusion. Instead, we’ve opted to include a paragraph that explains our services, along with a CTA. Ultimately, everything that needs to be said should be discussed within the body of the article.
7. Add Frequently Asked Questions
After writing your article, you’ll then need to come up with some frequently asked questions (FAQs) to answer. These are questions featured at the end of the article to quickly answer the most important questions your readers might have. Generally, FAQs contain only two to three sentences and offer an abridged view of the article’s main content.
Moreover, FAQs are excellent for SEO. If your FAQs hit on common questions searched by web users, they will appear directly in search results, making users more likely to follow them through to your site. Your website will require some sort of SEO plugin, such as RankMathSEO, to allow proper FAQ functionality – simply leaving your FAQs at the end of your article will not allow them to appear in search results.
8. Proofread and Edit
Finally, it’s crucial that you proofread and edit your blog post. When doing so, be mindful of spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as structural errors and conciseness – if there’s a simpler way to say it, say it. As mentioned earlier, tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway Editor are useful when identifying errors and improving readability.
Ultimately, whether your blog post is well-optimized for SEO purposes or not, the most important factor affecting whether it gets read is quality. In fact, search engines do account for article quality and favor posts that offer valuable information. This metric is calculated through page dwell time – for how long you can engage the reader.
Things to Consider
You want your dental blog post to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, so before hitting “publish,” there are a few things you should first consider.
Does It Add Value?
take a step back and ask yourself, does your article add value to the reader’s life? If the answer is no, then you’ll need to go back and make some changes. Value is a subjective term but generally extends to providing educational, factual, or entertaining content. Anything else likely isn’t going to strike a chord with readers.
Adding Images
Though including images is not strictly necessary, they can be used to improve the readability of the article. For example, you can create infographics about important statistics you discuss. However, large image files can slow your website down and negatively impact SEO, so ensure that any images you use are properly compressed.
SEO Copywriting From The Dental SEO Experts
After reading this article, you should now know how to write an engaging dental blog post for SEO. However, at The Dental SEO Experts, we understand that writing is a time-consuming process, not to mention the SEO considerations required. That’s why our dedicated team offers professional dental marketing services. Schedule a free consultation with us today to learn more about our services.
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