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Your medical practice should have a medical blog, not a website, but a blog. The modern “blog” has maintained all the features of the former, yet obsolete, webpage, but has unique advantages that best suits it for optimizing your website’s SEO and ranking your pages.
Here are 5 reasons why a Blog should be your choice for a medical Website
1. Blogs are Cost Effective
Chances are that if you have a website, it hasn’t been updated in a few years. Every update costs the practice money and noone really understands the ROI (return on investment).
Blogs are about $10/month including hosting!
Blogs are much cheaper than hiring a website developer to make updates. Plus, re-designing the site isn’t going to improve rankings at all. It’ll be a waste of more money.
Even if you are a do-it-yourselfer, purchasing HTML generators such as “FrontPage” or Dreamweaver can be much more expensive than blog software.
Blogging software is free.
While we recommend WordPress.org, most larger content management systems are free.
Most hosting companys, including GoDaddy.com and BlueHost.com, will install WordPress on your hosting plan…with the click of a button.
2. Blogs are Server Based
Server based programs, such as blogs, can be accessed from any Internet connection in the world. This means they are convenient and easily accessible. It’s convenient to make changes and post new content, or articles, to your medical blog. You can do it from your home, office, local cafe, etc.
Ease of use, convenience and accessibility ensure you can follow my 3 R’s of good SEO;
The 3 R’s of good medical SEO are;
- Relevant Content
- Refreshed Webpage
- Regularly Updated
3. Blog Software Designed for SEO and Search Engine Bots
Blogging software, especially WordPress, is designed to be search engine friendly. The websites created with WordPress are indexed efficiently by the search engine robots.
Well written content (the human part) is just half of good SEO. You want to publish your material on a site designed to be SEO friendly. Wordpress is terrific.
On top of WordPress, I recommend taking one step further. Use “Genesis” or “Thesis” frameworks (these are specific WordPress software packages) to really make SEO a snap for the user.
SEO friendly for the robots and ease of use for you!
4. Customizable and Professional Turnkey Themes
With the popularity of blogs, web design has become turnkey (you do it yourself with a click). No more hiring web-designers as hundreds of dollars per hour! Downloading a theme and installing is so easy…a doctor could do it (look at me!).
Most themes available for WordPress are free of charge. They are completely customizable so that your “blog” can look and act like your “website.”
Two popular frameworks, best suited for SEO, are Genesis and Thesis. I switched to the Genesis theme structure because of the 40 or so child themes that provide the design for the site.
Turnkey web design allows you to also change your theme, or look, as easily and as often as you want…and usually it’s free.
Remember, the design of your site has no value to achieving high search engine rankings. Only your SEO maximized content can get your website in the “top ten.”
5. Blogs are the Purest form of Social Media
Because of the ability to leave a comment, and hence, start a conversation, blogs are the purest form of social media. Having a blog makes a clear statement that your practice is willing to engage and attract your patients.
The ability to engage into a conversation will set your practice, and your doctors, apart from your conversation. Remember, it’s not what you are, but it’s who you are!
To your success!