Building your digital footprint used to be as simple as updating your Google Business Profile and ensuring every other word on your clinic’s web page was a highly searched keyword in the hopes of search engines recognizing your valiant efforts and rewarding you with a number one spot on the results page.
In today’s digital age, however, it’s slightly more complicated than simple keyword stuffing.
Google’s PageRank algorithm changed the way websites landed on the top of the results page. No longer focusing on the amount of keywords you could stuff into your website’s landing pages, search engines began to look at the value and quality of your content.
In the ever-changing field of search engine optimization (SEO), how does content marketing factor in? Can a blog really hold that much weight in terms of where your GI clinic ranks on search engines and local visibility?
In short? Absolutely.
What is Content Marketing and SEO?
Before we dive into the benefits of blogging for your gastroenterology clinic, it’s essential to understand the basics of digital content marketing and SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of boosting your brand’s visibility by gaining a deeper understanding of what your consumers are searching for online and optimizing content to provide value and authority to increase the flow of organic traffic.
In lamens turns, a higher ranking on Google’s results page means more clicks and impressions, which in turn means more people interacting with and bringing business to your site.
What is Content Marketing?
If SEO is the puzzle, content marketing is that final missing piece to bring the picture together.
Content marketing is the creation and distribution of helpful content with the intent of driving engagement and interest in your site.
Content marketing can take many forms, from email newsletters to video testimonials to podcasts. While our Charleston advertising agency utilizes several formats to garner results, our SEO marketing strategy values high-quality content.
How Does SEO and Content Marketing Work Together?
SEO for your gastroenterology practice is about more than writing about the intricacies of acid reflux or the importance of a colonoscopy (although that does indeed help).
SEO and content marketing can help you learn more about your users and create engaging content for them to enjoy–and boost your ranking and domain authority.
Search Intent
To learn more about your consumers, you must learn why the consumer is conducting a specific search or figure out their search intent.
There are four types:
- Informational intent: a user is looking to gain further understanding of a specific topic
- Navigational intent: a user is looking for a specific brand or page
- Commercial intent: a user is conducting research during the buying process
- Transactional intent: a user is looking to make a purchase or complete a transaction, such as searching “colonoscopy near me”
By understanding search intent, you can create blog posts and web pages based on your users’ intent, whether that be a blog providing information on Crohn’s disease or how to schedule a colonoscopy.
Keywords and Content
Keywords are at the very heart of SEO efforts. Whether you are trying to understand why a competing GI practice ranks higher in search results or developing blog topics that will increase clicks and impressions, keywords play a pivotal role.
Let’s look at the GI condition “viral gastroenteritis,” for example. While writing an informational blog about viral gastroenteritis, you may realize that it is not gaining as many clicks as you had hoped, even though you have had plenty of questions regarding it within your GI practice.
The key to solving the problem is in the keyword.
By conducting keyword research, you discover people are not searching for “viral gastroenteritis,” but its conversational, everyday term “stomach flu.” While both of the words refer to the same GI condition, your blog has no reference to the phrase stomach flu.
Therefore, in Google’s algorithm for consumers searching for “stomach flu,” your blog and, by extension, your GI clinic don’t exist.
Healthcare SEO: The Benefits of Blogging for Your GI Practice
Creating and delivering blog content is more than a critical SEO strategy–it can build trust in your GI practice.
Here are some of the key ways blogging can help your GI practice grow in both online traffic and real-world visits.
Visibility
Knowledge is power, and patients are becoming more proactive regarding their healthcare in an ever-changing digital world.
When you create content designed to educate on the latest gastrointestinal conditions and treatment methods, you’re not only expanding the patient’s knowledge on certain subject areas but improving your practice’s visibility in search engine results.
Trust
For many of us, the idea of their healthcare can be a frightening endeavor. Whether from lack of knowledge or a bad experience that has gained their trust in the system, blogging can be the key to reversing the discourse.
Blogging about issues or conditions that patients are researching proves to them that there is someone out there who cares enough to listen and to offer assistance. In a world of unknowns regarding your health, patients will accept and trust those who take the time to listen to their concerns.
Authority
In a digital world filled with misinformation and half-truths, people will tend to gravitate towards known experts and authorities for information. When you start a blog for your GI practice, it shows customers that you are not only there to help them understand their GI tracts, but you also have the knowledge to back up your claims.
Rise Through the Ranks–and the Results Page–With Motivated Marketing
Understanding the complexities of SEO is difficult in a field that is constantly changing and adjusting to new algorithms and ranking factors.
At Motivated Marketing, we offer a wide range of content marketing services in the digital space, from video advertisements to ongoing content development and optimization. In today’s digital landscape, it’s about more than just existing on the web–you have to stand out amongst the crowd.
As the leading marketing agency near you, our SEO team at Motivated Marketing will help your GI practice rise through the ranks and land at the top of the results page.
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