How Blogging can Help Promote your Opticians
Can blogging help promote your opticians or eye care practice? It almost certainly can! Lots of practices ignore the power of blogging. However, it’s something that can have a huge impact on your online reach by improving your rankings within the search engines.
In fact, it’s been reported that those businesses that find time to blog regularly can attract 67% more leads than those that don’t.
So, what is blogging?
Blogging is the process of posting regular information either for personal use or to fulfil a business need. For businesses, websites often have fixed content such as products or services that are rarely updated. If they wish to post news, useful advice or make announcements this is usually done in the form of a blog.
Blogs often contain text but often contain images, diagrams and even videos.
Google looks at a number of factors when ranking websites, but its main goal is to deliver the best results to the user’s query. So for example, if a user searched ‘tips and tricks for inserting contact lenses” a page built and targeted around that query would show rather than a page simply offering contact lenses as a service.
Therefore many businesses use blogs to answer common questions searchers may have, and build in-depth pages about the subject. So if you specialise in Bone Conduction Hearing Aids, then you might have a general page under services, however, other practices may have the same. To capture more specific traffic you could write a blog “The different types of subtle hearing aid technology”. This could target for people searching subtle hearing aid technology and you can explain the benefits of bone conduction hearing helping to persuade people to give it a try. This unlocks more doors and potential visitors, increasing the likely hood of attracting new patients.
Build Links
Links are an important part of search engine ranking, the most powerful links and from reputable external sites for example the BBC or Guardian. However, it’s highly unlikely that you’d be able to get one. The best way to attract links naturally is to write content that other sites might reference or share. This will help boost your domain authority and increase the chances of outranking similar sites.
Blogs can also give you an opportunity to add internal links (a link from one of your pages to another), if you did decide to produce a blog about different types of subtle hearing aids, you could link ‘bone conduction hearing aids’ back to your main site and create an internal link. This again tells robots this page is about this as they keep linking to it and boosting the credibility of the page.
Website Size
Another key metric google looks at is website size, usually larger sites have a greater deal of information. Allowing them to target more searches. Think about websites like trees, a bigger tree has more leaves and longer roots, obtaining a greater amount of water. Those sites with few pages won’t capture many searches.
Whilst size is one factor, just be aware that quality is also considered, adding new pages with just the title for example won’t capture the searches.
Blogs Help Create Content for Your Optician’s Social Media Channels
One of the common questions I get asked about is the types of social media content for opticians and what to post. There are many ideas (we’ll save these for another blog), however, sharing blog posts demonstrating knowledge can create engaging content for your socials. This also helps push people back into your site, learn more about your practice and potentially turn them into new patients. If the blog isn’t time specific then that content can be reshared multiple times over several months.
The point is, 25 blog posts can give you a post every two weeks. If they are general next year you can share the post again for those that didn’t see it. Updating the content if needed or changing the social post image.
Blogs can help make you an authority figure/expert
The more knowledge you have and regularly demonstrate the greater your authority. People will look at you as an expert. This can then build your credibility and attract new patients from a wider area. Those that position themselves as experts in a certain field could attract patients from around the country.
So, how to get started with blogging?
Great, so you’re now aware of the impact of blogging, just how do you get started? Whilst the initial content writing relies on your knowledge and research, there are still a few steps to take to get your blog online.
Firstly, you need to check with your web designer if your site has the capability for blogging, in most cases, this shouldn’t be too difficult, many websites are built on platforms such as WordPress that have blogging capabilities available.
Next, you need to come up with a title, this should direct the subject that you want to write about. There are advanced tools to discover search traffic for certain keywords. However, the easiest way is to think about what users might search for or create key advice articles that visitors might find useful.
Other inspiration might come from competitors, see what sort of thing they are writing about and see if you can do it better. Please note, copying blogs word for word is plagiarism and can land you google penalties for duplicate content. The best way to take someone else’s idea is to read it, minimise it and then try to do it all on your own.
Now it gets a little complex and this is where SEO experts come in. Whilst you may have written the content, for the maximum exposure you need to arrange it for SEO. This involves layout, heading tags, metadata, word count and other factors. It also needs to be engaging and easy to read. You can often pay a marketer (such as OpticSites) to do this for you.
Alternatively, there are tools available that can help structure and guide on best practices including Yoast SEO.
Adding images or video is another step which might require professional work. Images need to be resized and formatted to fit, larger image files might take longer to long and impact load times causing visitors to bounce. Plus if you want something more professional it needs to be designed to match branding.
Problems Opticians face when trying to blog
One of the most common reasons opticians don’t blog is due to time, finding a quiet hour regularly with everything else going on is hard.
Secondly, you might not be a very good or engaging writer. This will likely lead to bounces from your site and not being able to maximise reward. It also puts people off as they struggle to get their words down correctly.
Conclusion – Blogging can really help promote your opticians
There are so many positive reasons to start a blog, by putting aside a couple of hours a week or outsourcing your SEO could really transform your online presence. Helping to provide regular traffic to your optician’s website for years to come.
If you are struggling with your digital presence, speak with us about growing your optician’s online, get in touch. We can design custom packages to suit your budgets and requirements.