Question from a physical therapist:
We wanted to make an effort to start blogging more with the intent of increasing our Google profile. I was wondering if this is the right focus/strategy and if so, do you have any resources or advice on how to do this and optimize it?
Yes, make the effort!!! Without doubt! Blogging is very important because it really does help to position you as an expert which in turn will boost your organic ranking on search engines AND it can positively impact your Google Ads quality score. Google is looking for evidence of Expertize, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-A-T), so you need to ensure that your posts have an author associated with them and that the author has credentials displayed. If you use WordPress there are several good author box plugins and most other platforms will have some way for you to display author info and credentials. Also, because it’s about building E-A-T it’s important that your content is original. It’s easy for Google to check for similar articles around the web so if you’re using other people’s posts as “inspiration” for your own, be sure to really change it up so it’s not an obvious rehash of someone else’s content.
Original, informative, authoritative content will rank highly on search engines, particularly if it’s niche. It will bring in visitors from all over the country and in fact some people we work with get literally thousands of visits from all over the world to some of their blog posts and you might think that’s not a good thing because a large percentage of those visitors will never become patients as they’re not local. However, this really doesn’t matter because what’s happening here is your website is building its authority. All of the traffic that you pull in through your blog posts is signalling to search engines that your site is a good source of quality information (just be sure that your average time on page is excellent for any high-traffic blog posts!). A high domain authority means better ranking for your website as a whole.
Regular blogging is beneficial in many ways and you really should get in the habit of posting a new article on your blog at least twice a month. Try to write your posts as answers to questions that people might ask a search engine and try to write at least 600 words. Ensure your keywords appear in the title, subtitles and main content. Share your post on social media and use it as an excuse to send a broadcast email to all your contacts including past patients, current patients and new leads. For more information you can download a free guide on blogging best practices for SEO.
This article was originally published in Paul Gough’s Cash is King Newsletter in March 2020
Flemming Arnott
