Blogs are an important element of healthcare digital marketing and indeed marketing in all fields of business. In fact, blogs and social media optimization are the best ways to get to the heart of your target audience.
Blogging was once just a pastime, but now it’s a vital element of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s how you connect with your target audience, because ultimately you need to connect with them. And you need the search engine to notice you as well. So you need to blog with an SEO perspective while also creating content that is useful and simultaneously engaging, drawing your target audience from your geographic target locations. So your blogs need to reverberate with their interests while also being relevant to what your business deals with.
Start with Research into Your Target Audience
You need creativity for blogs, but more than that you need a great deal of research. Primarily, you need to approach blogging thinking of how a client would search for your business. Remember, not always would you have potential clients who are actually aware of your business. It’s just a search query related to what your business offers that they’d be typing in the search box. So you need to attract that kind of a potential client.
For that you need to regularly create blogs on various aspects of that search query. That wouldn’t be the only query, since people will be searching in many different ways, entering many different kinds of search terms or keyword phrases. So you need keyword research too, which can help you plan various blog topics.
Planning Your Blog Post
So once you’ve done all that research, and you’ve picked the keywords around which you can create your blogs, you actually need to go ahead and write one. But you must plan for that as well. The planning stage is quite important here, since you have specific objectives from blogging – you want to attract potential customers, bring them in either to your physical store or your website, and boost your conversions and earnings. Sometimes you may be blogging to keep your existing customers interested in you. Whatever be your objectives, you need to plan your blog accordingly.
Get an Outline Done and Stick to It
After the planning, you need to start by creating an outline for your blog post. The outline ensures that you stay true to your topic without digressing too much. Make sure you have an introduction and conclusion. The introduction warms up the readers to the main topic of your blog. But don’t make it too long. Get to the point right away because you want to keep your readers hooked to your blog. People have very short attention spans so you need to ensure they stay interested. A great introduction that directly addresses your readers’ concerns would be great, but you need to get to the main body of the blog soon.
Research Your Topic Extensively
But before you get to write the blog, you need specific research into what you’re writing. You need to spend as much time on this as you spent on researching your target audience, the keywords they search with and the topics to choose. You may be well versed with this topic since it is related to the products or services your organization offers, but you still need to research. Some topics could be unknown to you, though they are related with your business in some way.
So there really is no escaping from research. That’s because you don’t want any factual or conceptual errors in your blog. That could affect your credibility as an authority on the topic. It could seriously turn off your followers. Also, try to find out interesting aspects of your topic that could engage your readers. You can include anecdotes, stories and relevant metaphors.
Divide Blog Content to Topical Sections
Ensure that you divide the main body of your blog into different sections, each of them starting with a subheading. Within each section, you need to incorporate bullet points. Subheadings and bullet points help break the monotony for the reader. Large blocks of text are never attractive. Readers usually just skim through the content to just focus on details. So if you could avoid unnecessary content and long sentences, you can do your part in ensuring that readers actually read your entire blog. Otherwise, your efforts would get wasted if people don’t actually read all, or at least most of, what you’ve written just because it contains too large text blocks.
Make Blogs Interactive With Images, Infographics & Video
Another way you can cut the monotony of large blocks of text is by getting images and videos into the content. An interesting image that is also relevant to your content can grip the audience. Sometimes there are concepts or points you present that are quite hard to understand. An appropriate image could simplify them, while also entertaining the audience, making them think and sit up and take notice. Perhaps you need infographics rather than images in some parts of the blog. A well done infographic can make difficult concepts easily understandable.
If you can photograph images or digitally create appropriate pictures to be added to your blog, it would be ideal. Digital marketing companies have a team just for situations like these. If your company has a team for interactive marketing, they could create great images or pictures to add. Alternatively, you can turn to stock photo sites. The only challenge with stock photos is that you would really need to dig around to find an appropriate image that ticks all the right boxes. Make sure you also have attractive and attention-grabbing captions for your images.
Add Videos to Your Blogs While Also Posting Vlogs
Let’s not forget the ultimate medium for engagement – video. While you specifically have video blogs, called vlogs, adding short videos explaining a particular point in your textual blog posts can help increase your readership and followers. Videos are probably the first thing readers would actually want to check out when they see your blog post. A short video explaining a very important point could make readers think that the rest of the blog post will contain such important information. That could make them read the rest of your blog. Videos provide the appeal.
Of course, posting video blog posts is also essential. Why? Just look at how popular YouTube has become. Videos bring in the audiences. They can depict someone explaining a concept interestingly, or they could show the visuals with an invisible narrator. Sometimes you don’t even need a narrator. Subtitles can do that.
Add Links to the Source
Add reference links, when you quote research material or information from blog posts or articles by others. You may argue that this would actually help the blog or article you’re linking to, but remember that readers must know that you’ve been researching a lot. Linking gives that impression. It shows that you aren’t just sounding authoritative but are actually presenting research-based information. Besides, linking to other blog posts could also present the possibility of those bloggers linking back to you. That’s valuable, and can help massively in the search rankings. Also, link to other blogs or other pages in your website.
Now that you’ve got your blog post done, it’s time to popularize it and get it to your readers because it isn’t just enough to post the blog and expect Google’s algorithms to pick it up. That will take time, and there are tons of competitors out there. You need to share in the social networks. Research will tell you which networks are frequented by your target audience. It’s time to share your post in these networks.
Keep Posting and Updating
The more the blogs you post and keep updating, the greater are the chances for Google’s algorithms to spot you and rank you high when users search for relevant products or services. There must be consistency in the frequency of the blogs you post, since that indicates to Google that your blog and business are active.
With the services of companies offering SEO services in Long Island, blog marketing is more research-based and follows all the required steps to deliver results in terms of increased traffic and conversions to your site eventually.
