When dentists hear that adding a weekly blog to their website can improve SEO standings, they often find Identiwrite Creative on Google and shoot me and email request for pricing. I want to ask these dentists to think of blogs like dental fillings. The drill-and-fill clinics charge minimal rates, but their work is sub-par, in most cases. Their fillings are not built to last and may quickly fail. In fact, a poorly administered filling can cause more damage than good!

Good vs Bad Weekly Blog Posts

The same is true of blogs. The effects of a bad blog post range from yielding no results to causing serious damage to the website’s and/or the doctor’s reputation.

What makes blog post bad?

  • duplicate content/plagiarism
  • inaccuracies about procedures, technology, or materials
  • incorrect facts
  • unjustified opinions
  • poor grammar, sentence structure, or punctuation
  • misspellings or capitalization errors
  • infractions to ADA or state dental advertising regulations
  • legal issues, such as copyright infringement with images
  • no metadata or internal linking for SEO
  • too short for proper indexing
  • poor layout for web readers

A good post, on the other hand, features accurate, any opinions expressed are those of the dentist, and an explanation is provided. An editor has reviewed the content for grammar, punctuation, spelling, and composition. The text is optimized well for search and the layout is ideal for rushed, online readers. The post presents interesting information that readers will want to share socially with friends and co-workers.

How can a blog keep working forever?

For about 10 years, I’ve had a blog on naming a dental practice continue to get hits in Google. The blog is ancient, but still it has readership. One on how to answer the phone in a dental office has performed similarly. Those one-time investments have been making brand impressions for Identiwrite Creative (and my previous company – I brought the blog with me) for nearly a decade, and they’re still performing.

Here are the nuts and bolts of it all.

Once a blog is published, indexing robots (bots or spiders) from Google, Bing/Yahoo (they share a database), and other smaller search engines will filter the page through proprietary algorithms and rank it in search results. Blogs tend to rank quickly, because they are considered news. Web pages rank more slowly, but have stronger power to hold their spot in search results. Blogs can fluctuate up and down results, and with time, they can end up buried – unless they contain long-tail keywords that fill a niche left empty by other indexed content. To make sure your weekly blog posts are of the long-tail keyword, niche-filling type, they should be 550-70 words or longer and incorporate a varied vocabulary of common and uncommon phrases to describe services, symptoms, and cities/locations.

A blog that meets these criteria can continue to be found in search for years after its initial publication, as in my previous examples. It opens a timeless portal to your website. While your main site may contain 10 to 20 pages, if you publish a blog weekly, you’ll be opening…

  • 52 portals in a year
  • 104 portals in two years
  • 156 portals in three years
  • 520 portals in 10 years
  • and so on!

Each of these portals will remain open as long as your website is active. Furthermore, you can boost the content at any time by:

  • Republishing – simply change the publication date on an old blog to republish it as new (never duplicate a blog post)
  • Linking from social media and other articles – include a link to an old blog from a new blog, article, or social post
  • Share in a newsletter – promote an older blog as new in an e-newsletter, if it is timeless and relevant
  • Use in print – though it won’t have any bearing on search, you can use blog content in print as often and wherever you like, without any negative ramifications.

Who has time to write weekly blogs?

Few dentists have the time or desire to write blogs. Even fewer understand SEO to the degree that they can compose blogs with metadata, internal linking, and keyword strategies that will yield optimal results for online marketing. That’s why Identiwrite Creative was founded. If your dental office needs blogs, but no one on your team has the time or skills to do the job well, give me a call. I’m Shauna Duty, founder of Identiwrite Creative. I’ve been working with dentists for 15 years, and my team of US-based dental copywriters composes hundreds of web pages, blogs, and articles for dentists, every month. We also track SEO results and employ a strategic editorial calendar to ensure the best return on your investment.

Call me to discuss your weekly blog writing needs, at 940-395-5115, or email shauna@identiwite.com.

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