As a dental writer, I’m a great advocate of blogging as a tool to help dental SEO. Sure consistent blogging is tough, but in the long term it definitely pays dividends.
The reason? Because Google values new content, and blogging is a great way to create it. As a result, it can play a significant part in influencing your online rankings.
To put it simply – the more you update your dental website the more pages you have. The more pages you have that are relevant to your target audience, the greater your chance of climbing the search engine rankings.
There are of course numerous ways to add fresh content; So why do I keep doing it? More importantly, why should you keep doing it? After all, surely there are better (read easier) ways to grow traffic and increase your dental SEO rankings.
The truth is that effective blogging can seriously help to ramp up your dental SEO. In fact, I wrote a blog post explaining the whys and the wherefores of dental blogging previously, so I’m not going to go into any detail in this post. Instead, I’m going to tackle it from a different perspective and look at what happens to your online presence if and when you stop blogging.
Firstly I need to point out that I’m not going to quit blogging for the purpose of proving a point. Why? Because for me personally, it would be SEO suicide. That’s not to mention several years of hard work down the drain. However, I do know of a guy who did exactly that and I want to share the results he found right here.
Word press developer and SEO expert Robert Ryan decided to conduct a simple but illuminating experiment. Back in 2015, he refrained from posting any new content anywhere on the web for a grand total of 251 days. That’s eight months and one whole week.
Here are some of his key findings:
- Visitor traffic to his site dropped by 32% during that time
- Traffic to his contact page fell by 15%
- Overall site conversions fell by 28%
- His ranking for his main keyword ‘WordPress developer’ fell from position 1 to Position 6
While this clearly isn’t related to the dental industry, it’s easy to see how blogging and blogging consistency can have a dramatic effect on any business looking to have a better online presence.
Now for the good news…
This particular experiment was carried out over an 8-month period and it’s probably doubtful that you would experience the same drastic results if you stopped for say a few weeks.
In fact, other experiments have suggested that if you stopped blogging for a week or two and picked it up again soon after, there appears to be no drastic downturn. To be entirely honest, not being tied to a blogging schedule can be quite liberating as it frees up time to do other stuff. That said, the power of consistent blogging can’t be underestimated and you should ignore it at your peril.
The bottom line is that if you stop blogging for any serious length of time (say 2 months or more) it will lead to a drop in organic traffic and a drop in dental SEO rankings. That my friends is what’s known as being ‘dead in the water‘!
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at why blogging is so important to maintain a good level of dental SEO.
Every time new content is published you provide the search engine with another chance to crawl your site and index your pages. In turn, this keeps you on the search engine’s radar in a positive way.
In addition, each and every blog post gives you another opportunity to rank for a particular keyword and generate more backlinks. The more keywords you rank for, the more Google sees you as an authority site in your industry and will rank you according to relevancy.
So what do we mean by the word relevancy?
When someone puts in a search for say ‘dental implant treatment in Manchester‘ Google will always want to return the most relevant result. So if you’re ranking for numerous blog posts or content containing keywords based around ‘dental implants Manchester’, then it’s more likely that the search engine will return your site ahead of your competition. This is how dental SEO works.
While no mere mortal can confess to knowing the true ‘ins and outs’ of Google’s Algorithm, there’s no disputing the fact that by continually adding content through blogging, you’ll stand more chance of increasing your rankings.
But that’s not all.
Every time you post a new piece of content, it gives you more useful material to share with your list, social media followers, and existing customers.
The final most alarming part of Robert’s findings is his drop in rankings from position 1 down to position 6.
You might think that dropping only a few places in the search engines isn’t that much of a big deal, and in niches where competition is limited then it might be true. However in competitive niches such as the dental industry then it could cost you dearly.
While in his case there are numerous possibilities for a drop in rankings, ceasing to submit relevant, high-quality content might have been a major reason. As a result, that drop of just 5 positions saw a 32% decrease in traffic in what is an already competitive niche.
While that mightn’t sound like the end of the world, look at it this way. That could also be a third of your organic traffic lost and potentially a third of your income as online patients book consultations and appointments with your competitors instead of you.
Blogs influence purchases – Fact!
I’m a great believer in the fact that blogs influence purchases. Even in the dental world.
You may well be a busy dental practice with a constant flow of customers but in the online world, potential patients won’t know this. Instead, all they see is a blog and a website that hasn’t been updated for months, In some ways this can give the appearance of a lack of attention.
Conversely, if your website is regularly updated with fresh content it sends a message out to potential patients that you’re a dentist who cares in all aspects of your business. As such it may give the perception that this level of care extends wholeheartedly to your patients.
So what’s the takeaway?
If you’re going to start publishing blogs to help your dental SEO, then they really need to be published regularly. Many dentists start blogging with all good intentions and then stop. For reasons noted above this can be significantly worse than not blogging at all. While everyone has their opinion on the optimum level of blogging, the key factor isn’t how often, it’s how consistently!
In other words, if you don’t want your SEO to take a nosedive then once you start blogging, make a commitment to do it regularly and don’t stop.
The bottom line is that consistent dental blogging is one hard slog, but bit by bit, day by day, you’ll be growing your audience, building trust, and reaping the rewards by seeing more and more patients through your doors.
Now what’s more satisfying than that?
If you feel that you want to continue blogging but really don’t have the time, or would like to commence dental blogging but aren’t sure where to start, then we know a dedicated team of affordable professionals who can help.
Call Dale on +34 605 45 73 42 and let’s talk about getting your blogging on track.
