4 Reasons Blogs Are Essential to Growing Your Practice
A Guide for Integrative Doctors to Grow Their Audience
Your dream to become a doctor probably didn’t have much to do with marketing.
You did the hard work. You studied, took the MCATs, got into medical school – you survived. As if that wasn’t hard enough, you got through your residency. Now you are finally practicing. BUT, you find that attracting patients is something you need to add to your to do list.
Maybe becoming a doctor was a childhood dream. Or you discovered your passion for healing later in life. Regardless of when, you entered the medical field to help people.
Practicing integrative medicine is a dream come true. You are all about medicine that treats the whole person. You’re done with disease management. You’re excited to create a pathway to a healthy life – no more symptoms management.
The problem?
The mainstream still has to catch up. People haven’t fully understood the benefits of integrative and alternative medicine. It sounds *woo woo* to those who haven’t encountered it before. You have to show people the benefits of what you do and how you are the person they should trust to take care of them
This is the exact reason why having a search engine optimized (SEO) blog can help you.
SEO Blogs
Blogs are not used enough amongst medical practitioners. This makes perfect sense – medical school doesn't cover marketing as a required class. Blogs can help you grow your practice in so many different ways. Did you know that 47% of consumers will view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a company?
If that number wasn’t high enough – companies with blogs get 67% more leads than those without.
When done right, blogs can become one of the most effective ways:
To create leads
To build trust
To grow a community
Let’s break down the different ways starting a blog can help your practice today.
1. Blogs Will Boost Your Google Ranking
It’s not only your future clients who love a blog. Google is another place where a blog will help your business. A search engine optimized blog will help you rank in Google. Tanking higher in Google means people are more likely to come across your business when they search for an integrative medicine practitioner. It means that people are more likely to come across your business when searching on google.
Let's say you focus on chronic pain. Imagine someone in your area searches for “holistic treatments for lower back pain”. You want your practice to be the one that shows up on google's first page.
Or maybe you specialize in acupuncture.
You want to rank in google when people are looking for those services in your area. Whatever type of integrative care you provide – you want to be visible online. Search engines like fresh and accurate information. A regular blog can help with this and increase your visibility.
Higher visibility translates to more website traffic – plain and simple!
2. Blogs Will Increase Your Engagement
Blogs aren’t all about increasing your ranking. While higher visibility is a good thing – blogs can do so much more. Blogs will allow you to provide information that is:
Engaging
Accurate
Relevant
It's useful to help guide future patients in the right direction – to you.
Let’s say you specialize in holistic treatments for chronic Lyme disease. You can write an engaging SEO blog talking about natural treatments. This can then guide a google user searching for alternative medicine options to you. They get resources, you get more engagement – it’s a win-win.
3. Blogs Will Increase Your Website Ranking
Blogs will help increase your website ranking. A consistent blog requires you to update your website more often. Google likes information that is fresh and accurate. A blog signals to search engines that you are updating your website often.
This will increase your visibility. And as you know by now, more visibility means more traffic. All this will also help increase the number of people who find your website organically. This means less money spent on advertising and more time spent in your practice.
4. Blogs Will Build Awareness
One of the best ways a blog can help you grow your practice is by building awareness. You can do this by building trust and educating your audience.
Integrative and alternative treatments can be very useful for a lot of people. Especially for people who are dealing with chronic conditions for which there is no cure. Look at COVID-19. Traditional Chinese Medicine is effective in treating the progression of symptoms1.
Alternative treatments are not a substitute for traditional medicine, it can be used side by side to help manage symptoms. Acupuncture and pain management is another example. Acupuncture is safe with very low complication rates2. This can be a great option for someone who has tried all options in traditional medicine.
No matter the issue, blogging is a great way to build trust and educate your audience on their options.
Bring the Conversation to You
Whether it’s to bring in more leads or increase engagement, blogs will only help your practice grow.
Odds are, your ideal clients are already looking for you. Having a consistent blog will help you stand out from your competition. It will show your audience that you can be trusted.
It goes a long way to build your practice into a community for wellness. People are already looking for you – they only need a path to find you. Blogs will remain on your website once they are posted and continue to generate leads over time.
Having a blog will help you spend less time trying to attract patients. And more time spent on the people you’re trying to help. You can spread your knowledge and reach more people than with a website alone.
Ready to start blogging to grow your practice? Let’s talk
