Writing a Dental Blog for Your Practice? Start Here

Being a first-time dental practice owner can feel like a lonely place to be. Between providing excellent care to your patients, trying to attract new patients, and striving to become a staple in your community, there’s a never-ending list of to-dos.

You need to market your business to establish yourself as a trusted partner in the community, but where do you even start? While there are a number of marketing activities that could spur your digital footprint, starting a dental blog for your practice is a great first step.

Why Create a Dental Blog?

Here's how a dental blog helps you achieve trust and leads to the growth of your business. 

1. An Avenue for Passive Marketing 

People dislike ads and salesy content. Your role should be to help them recognize their need for dental services, not bombard them with advertisements for your services.

Blog marketing is an effective marketing strategy that allows you to create expert educational content, build trust in your community, and convince patients to schedule an appointment. 

2. Builds Relationships With Your Potential Patients

Great customer service is one of the main reasons why people may choose your services. Blog content helps you build those interactions with your customers through Q&A and education content.

Consistently publishing educational and informative blogs that help your patients work through a problem shows them that you’re here to help them, not necessarily take their money. This trust is ultimately what fuels patient relationships, leading to more scheduled appointments! 

3. Giving More Information About Your Practice 

People like to know who they are working with. 

Who you are, your location, qualifications, credentials, knowledge, and expertise are a big part of inspiring trust in your patients.

You can even share nuggets of your personal life and history. A little human touch goes a long way in appealing to human emotions and getting people to relate to you and choose your service.  

Testimonials of past successes from patients can further cement that trust. 

4. Increase Web Visits

More people will head straight to your website to look for answers to their questions when they consider you a trusted authority in the dental practice. Your audience will also refer others, causing your web visits and customer base to grow.

Two Main Types of Dental Blogs You Can Build

You can either blog for patients or dentists and other stakeholders in the dental field. Here are the two main types of dental blog sites explained:

1. Patient-Based Dental Blog

As you might guess, this blog is all about creating relationships with existing and potential dental patients. Think about everything related to oral health and dental treatments that a patient would be interested in learning more about. 

Should I opt for Invisalign or braces? How can I make my cleaning last longer? What foods and drinks should I avoid for great dental health? What are the common signs of XYZ oral condition? 

You get to educate them!

The benefit of the patient dental blog is to connect with patients and create organic followers through SEO content as your audience finds the answers they need. 

2. Dentist-Based Dental Blog

Establishing authority and thought leadership in your practice through content is a sure way to skyrocket your practice, especially as a young, emerging dentist.

A dentist-based blog is all about thought-leadership content such as basics of dental business and how to attract patients, leadership and advocacy, best marketing practices, technological developments and discoveries in dentistry, new study areas, and the latest dentistry news and their implications on the practice. 

White papers, surveys, studies, guides, and long-form articles will make up the bulk of your content marketing as other dentists are seeking this in-depth, intuitive content.

Rather than relying on other websites for dental insights, you become the trusted source for content and trends in your industry, which ultimately increases your organic traffic through link building. 

How to Start a Dental Blog

Dental blogging success requires a strategic process. Here's how to go about it:

1. Decide What Blog Type You Want to Create

You can either build a dental-based blog or a patient-based blog. 

Creating a patient-based blog is great when you want to attract many patients as a new business. As your business grows and you have more money to spend on further research and thought-leadership content, you can consider starting a dentist-focused blog. Who said you can't do it all? 

2. Trust Your Expertise

Be the expert in your field — because you are!

Share your experiences, knowledge, and discoveries with your audience. The more authentic you are, the more credibility points you will earn with your audience. 

3. Create a Content Roadmap

In order to create consistent content for your blog, spend the time to build a content roadmap that follows a set publishing calendar. 

Research the topics that your patients or fellow professionals care about and blog on these while providing solutions. You might need to use keyword research tools and other keyword research methods to figure out what your target audience is actually searching for. 

4. Optimize for SEO 

People will find your services organically on search engines when you employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO acts as a passive marketing strategy in the long run and includes practices such as keyword optimization, image optimization, and conversational writing. 

You'll also need to perform technical SEO on your website, which involves aspects such as page load speed, image optimization, and mobile optimization. 

5. Share Your Content

Content promotion is a crucial step in your marketing efforts. A promotion strategy will help to get your content in front of as many relevant eyeballs as possible.

Find out where your audience hangs out and take the content to them. Start by posting content on your social channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Other marketing ideas include engaging in dentistry forums on Quora and Reddit by answering member questions while linking back to your dental blog. 

Partner With Professionals to Build a Winning Dental Blog

As a business owner, you are probably too busy to find time to market your practice and grow your business to your desired levels. Maybe you are not very experienced in marketing either — and here’s the good news: you don’t have to be!

Partner with dental marketing professionals to do all the work for you while you focus on your practice. Great Dental Websites has helped more than 900 dental practices build unique dental platforms and develop winning marketing strategies that bring in new patients. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help you build a successful dental blog.