Why does dental blog content matter in dental marketing and what makes quality content to attract more patients to your practice website? The answer begins from the patient perspective.
When people have dental health-related questions, some may directly contact your practice for answers, whether by phone, email, or Live Chat. Yet when people need immediate answers to dental health questions, they generally want them right away. So, many search online for answers—and the numbers are considerable.
Google processes roughly 8.5 billion searches per day. Of these, roughly 7% (or about 595 million daily searches) are health-related—and thousands are dental questions. According to Statista, an average of 32,700 people in the U.S. per month search online for answers to “What is a root canal?” and roughly the same number (31,700) search for answers to “How much do braces cost?”
Are you providing answers on your dental blog?
People can find answers to dental questions through dental association websites, medical information sites, and other sources, and that’s certainly a good thing given the importance of oral health and private practice medical billing services. Yet such sources commonly end their dental blogs with general recommendations or assistance, such as “Contact your dentist” for “Find a dentist in your area.”
That doesn’t direct potential patients to your practice.
When you answer common dental questions with quality dental blog content on your website, you boost your dental marketing by providing a direct link to your practice in search results, and the higher your dental blog content appears in search results, the more website traffic you tend to attract.
Per Backlinko, the top three organic Google search results get more than half of all clicks, so quality dental blog content (a.k.a. patient education) plays a significant role in dental marketing to increase appointments and practice revenue.
What Does Quality Dental Blog Content Mean?
Quality dental blog content naturally involves expert oral health knowledge. That will never change. Yet in and of itself, oral health knowledge may not be enough to rank high in search results so that more people see your dental blog content and click through to your website. Dental blog content for optimal dental marketing and visibility in search results involves a balancing act between expert oral health knowledge and what quality content means to search engines.
Google Primarily Defines Quality Content as People-First Content
Though ranking dental blog content higher in search results involves technical elements that fall under search engine optimization (SEO), “Google’s automated ranking systems,” writes Google Search Central, “are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings.”
To help guide content creation, Google advises content creators to ask themselves people-first questions such as:
- “Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?”
- “Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?”
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?”
The Same People-First Questions in Dental Blog Writing Apply to Ranking in Other Search Engines
“To keep up with Google,” writes The Daily Egg, “all search engines have to provide the best possible search results. They’ll continue to refine their ability to find the best, most useful content online. That’s why quality content is your best tactic for showing up in [search engine results pages].”
People-First Questions Are Particularly Important When It Comes to AI-Powered Content Generation Tools like ChatGPT
AI is certainly amazing as a lightning-fast research and information-retrieval tool. Yet AI-generated content typically sounds robotic.
Google can certainly detect AI-generated content but doesn’t inherently penalize AI content. Google rewards quality content “however it is produced” and penalizes poor content, which includes lack of originality and robotic content that sounds like it’s been cut and pasted from another website—and AI-generated content can’t help but sound that way. To create content, AI content tools search the internet and cobble together information from a variety of sources. So, unedited AI content commonly fails to meet one or all of Google’s all-important E-E-A-T guidelines for quality content:
- Experience – the extent to which a content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience required for a topic. (AI can’t have direct life experience.)
- Expertise – the author’s level of knowledge or skill on a topic. (AI can gather knowledge but doesn’t have direct knowledge through practice.)
- Authoritativeness – the extent to which content is known as a well-established go-to source. (AI can gather authoritative information but is not a distinct and unique authority unto itself.)
- Trustworthiness – the level of accuracy, honesty, safety, and reliability of information. (AI can generate incorrect or misleading, so it can’t be called inherently trustworthy and requires fact-checking.)
In other words, AI content tools represent a handy starting point to quickly flesh out the structure of a dental blog or pull together some rough content ideas. Yet to ensure quality dental blog content to rank well in search results (and thereby keep your dental marketing on point), you need to pour yourself into blog content—your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Lastly (and Most Importantly), You Need to Reflect Your Practice Personality
Practice personality may not be a Google ranking factor. Yet practice personality (a.k.a. brand personality, a key part of dental marketing) is what compels patients to choose one practice over another and fosters patient loyalty. Practice personality humanizes your practice, and as Brand Builders Group co-founder and bestselling author Rory Vaden famously said, “People do business with people, not companies.”
Once you’ve fleshed out your dental blog content, fact-checked any AI-generated elements, and added your practice personality, it’s time to add SEO elements to better ensure patients see your dental blog content in search results.
Key SEO Elements to Optimize Your Dental Blogs
Keywords
If you’re new to SEO and don’t know what keywords are, here’s the CliffsNotes explanation.
Keywords are word or phrases that people use when searching for oral health information online. If people are searching for information about oral cancer, for example, they may use phrases like “What does oral cancer look like?” or “What are oral cancer symptoms?”
Relative to this is search volume. Though some people may use the search phrase “oral cancer,” more people may search “oral cancer symptoms,” meaning the latter has a greater search volume.
So, keywords for dental blogs (and dental SEO as a whole) represent a strategy. It’s about identifying key words and phrases (hence the name keywords) that people are popularly using in searches and including these search terms in your dental blog content so search engines view your content as relevant and valuable to user queries and rank your dental blog content higher in search results.
What’s the Best Way to Add Keywords to Your Dental Blog Content?
People generally take one of two approaches:
- Some start with a list of keywords and add them to dental blog content when writing it.
- Some write dental blog content first, then add keywords afterward.
If you don’t know which technique may work best for you, the second one often proves easier.
Writing is a structured flow of thought. The second approach (which many SEO writers follow) enables you to flow your thoughts out in an undistracted, natural-language manner, then add keywords later in relevant spots to preserve content flow.
Adding keywords as you go along distracts focus from natural flow, which can result in dental blog content that sounds clunky and artificial.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Blog writers often stuff content with keywords in a dental-marketing attempt to game search engines and manipulate ranking. Yet Google penalizes keyword stuffing (a.k.a. a Black Hat SEO practice) under its Spam Policy. “We detect policy-violating practices both through automated systems and, as needed, human review,” writes Google Search Central, adding, “Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
So, use keywords appropriately and naturally in places that make sense.
Consider Phrasing Dental Blog Titles in the Form of a Question
Some practices phrase dental blog titles in the form of a question:
- Why Do My Teeth Look Yellow in Some Lights?
- Can You Reverse Tooth Sensitivity?
- Is It Normal for Teeth to Break as You Age?
This makes sense for dental blog optimization because (per Backlinko) 14% of Google searches are question-based. “Questions, by their nature of being relatively long and specific,” writes Backlinko, “are typically long-tail terms.” So, long-form dental blog titles phrased as a question serve SEO in that they closely or exactly match dental search terms that people are using.
“How” keywords are the most common type of question keyword, followed by:
- What
- Where
- Why
- Who
- Which
Other On-Page SEO to Optimize Your Blogs and Overall Dental Marketing
Use Effective Meta Descriptions
Think of meta descriptions as teaser or advertising copy. As an HTML element that appears in search results, meta descriptions (which should contain keywords) should concisely tell people what they can expect to find in your blog and (ideally) what makes your blog different from other dental blogs.
Use Internal Linking
Internal linking (links from your dental blog to other pages on your practice website) helps search engines understand the structure of your website and the relationship between different pieces of content, which enhances your website’s overall SEO. Simultaneously, internal linking to related content on your website improves the user experience by helping people find additional information easily.
Use Headers Effectively
Use the H1 tag for your main title. This should be unique, keyword-rich, and clearly convey the subject of your dental blog content. Subsequently, organize your content with H2 and H3 tags for subheadings and sub-subheadings. This helps break down blog content into digestible sections, which improves readability and SEO.
Bullet points are particularly useful for presenting detailed data in dental blogs (or anywhere in dental marketing).
Use Readable Fonts
Ornate fonts can be difficult for some people to read. Readable fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Georgia, combined with appropriate font sizes (generally 16-18 pt. for body text), ensure that text is easy on the eyes. Additionally, sufficient line spacing (1.5 to 2.0) can improve the overall reading experience by preventing text from appearing too cramped.
Adhere to Accessibility Standards
Accessibility standards mean your dental blog content (and entire website) can be easily read and navigated by people with disabilities, including those who use screen readers. Accessibility includes using alt text for images, providing transcripts for audio content, and ensuring that text contrasts sufficiently with the background for readability.
For more, see the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an internationally accepted standard for web accessibility developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks (or inbound links to your dental blog content from reputable third-party websites) serve as endorsements for your website’s credibility and relevance. Search engines like Google view these endorsements as indicators of quality, which boosts your website’s authority and improves ranking in search engines.
Regularly Update Older Content
Dental blog content optimization involves making sure that existing blog content on your website remains relevant, accurate, and valuable to readers.
Updating old content also helps:
- Improve search engine rankings, since search engines favor fresh, updated information.
- Enhances the user experience
- Builds trust and credibility with current and potential clients.
To identify content that needs updating:
- Review your website analytics to spot blogs with declining traffic or outdated information.
- Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor page views and identify which blogs have high potential but low current performance.
- Use SEO tools like Semrush to identify keywords that have gained popularity since a blog was originally published, and update content with new keywords to increase visibility in search engines.
- Update statistics, revise outdated information, and add new research, insights, and/or case studies as needed.
- Revise blog content structure as needed to ensure optimal readability and accessibility.
By monitoring and updating your dental blog content on an ongoing basis, you better ensure your dental blogs remain a go-to source of information for current and potential patients, and your blog content maintains visibility in search results pages.
Double-Check Spelling and Punctuation
Before you publish any type of content connected to dental marketing, double-check spelling and punctuation. Per Forbes, spelling and grammatical mistakes can drive people away by casting doubt on a company’s trustworthiness and attention to detail.
The most famous study belongs to online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe, who found that spelling mistakes (even one) can reduce online sales for companies by 50%.
Dental Blogging Is a Lot Like Flossing
In a recent article for Dental Economics, dental marketing speaker and consultant Adrian Lefler nails it: “Blogging is a lot like flossing—the more you do it, the better the results. Just like flossing is essential for great teeth, blogging is essential for great dental SEO results. Maintaining a consistent dental blog is one of the greatest determining factors of how your practice will rank in search engines.”
Despite the benefits, Lefler also acknowledges that many dental professionals avoid writing blogs (or write them sporadically) because they lack the time or feel “composing original, easy-to-read blog content feels worse than getting a tooth pulled.”
That’s Why Dental Content Comes with ProSites Websites
To save practices time and trouble, practices with a ProSites website have access to an extensive library of customizable, patient-focused core content that can be customized and used as patient-facing content.
Professionally written, ProSites’ patient education content covers a full range of dental practice content needs, including:
- Cleanings and prevention
- Cosmetic dentistry
- Periodontics and endodontics
- Dental anxiety and fear
- Dental emergencies
And much more.
To ensure your practice has the best patient education content available, ProSites periodically adds and updates content. So, you have the most up-to-date and relevant content.
Simply Click Edit to Get It
If you’re currently a ProSites member, simply log in to your ProSites website and click the Edit icon for your Procedures (services) page. You’ll find the full list of content options toward the bottom of the page.
Find Out Why Practices Choose ProSites
If don’t have a ProSites website, find out why more than 7,500 dental practices trust ProSites to help them thrive.
>> Contact us today to see a free website demo.
Already got your website nailed down but need something else to level up your dental marketing?
We’re here for that too with a complete range of dental marketing solutions, including Social Media Management, Reputation Management, and ProSites Elite—all-in-one marketing designed for specialty dental professionals.
We offer flexible dental marketing solutions because practices have different goals, and you know your goals best. We’re here to help you reach them.
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