When you sell health and wellness related goods and services, it makes sense to have a health and wellness blog. Your blog, news, or article section — or whatever you decide the call the steady flow of new content to your site — provides value for your patients, clients, or customers, and value to your website.
But even though blogging is a valuable marketing tactic, it’s also one that often fails. Up to 95% of all blogs have been abandoned. One of the main reasons that blogs fail is due to a lack of planning.
Most people tackle blogging with stars in their eyes, wind in their sails, and delusions of grandeur. They lose steam a few months into it, and the regular blogging peters out shortly after.
Planning a health and wellness blog is a lot like planning any other type of blog, although there are a few things that make writing for health related goods and services different from other fields.
One thing remains constant: you must start with a thorough and well-thought strategy.
Identify your blog’s purpose
Do you want to gain new patients, clients, or customers? Are you trying to sell a product or service through your blog? Do you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field? Maybe you want to provide a reliable source for health information, or create a community for people to share and discuss their experiences.
Your health and wellness blog can do all of these things, but identifying the main purpose of your blog can help keep you from spreading yourself too thin.
Identify your audience
You can’t reach everyone, so you shouldn’t try to reach everyone. Who are you actually trying to reach? Who is your target audience?
Think about the type of person who seeks your services or buys your products. What motivates them and what type of content are they looking for?
Focus on providing the best possible content and experience for your specific target audience.
Set the right tone
It’s acceptable for a fitness blogger to have a breezy and conversational tone; the same might not be true for your medical clinic’s health and wellness blog.
“We’ll fix you right up!” basically means the same thing as “We provide quality healthcare”, but the two phrases communicate different information to the reader.
If your patients expect a certain level of compassion and professionalism, make sure that your blog reflects that.
Dial in your content
You don’t want to choose the keywords that get the most hits on Google; there’s high competition for head keywords. You want to choose keywords that give you the most visibility with your target audience. Be as specific as possible, as long as it brings in your target audience.
This typically means choosing the right long tail keywords.
It’s OK to include the high-volume head keywords, but focusing on good long tail keywords will be your bread and butter.
People usually start with generic searches and hone in on the thing that they are actually interested in as they learn more about it.
For example a typical search progression might look something like this:
shoulder pain -> what are common causes of shoulder pain -> ways to relieve shoulder pain at home -> exercises to strengthen shoulder muscles -> scapular stabilization exercises
Create content every step of the way, but make a point to own the most relevant and specific long tail keywords for your health and wellness blog.
Check out our Content Clusters strategy for more details on planning content for your keywords.
Make your content accessible
Health information can be difficult to understand. There’s a good reason why it takes a decade to become a doctor. The specialized terminology, academic language, and foundational knowledge required to understand health information can make medical content inaccessible to the average reader (which in the United States is an 8th grade reading level).
People need to be able to understand the information you’re presenting even it it’s not technically the most accurate way of describing things. They will go find the information somewhere else if the information at your blog is too difficult to understand.
In addition to being understandable, your health and wellness blog needs to be useful. Have the answers to questions that people are actually asking. Provide clear, useful information, and make sure that you help the people who find their way to your health and wellness blog.
Develop a blog strategy
Figuring out what your health, wellness, or medical blog is all about is just the beginning. Once you know what your blog will provide, you must develop a strategy to make sure that your blog delivers.
This is where most people trip up.
Establishing a blog schedule, creating a content calendar, and implementing a system to share your content is a good place to start. If you’re looking to start a health and wellness blog for your business, you probably don’t have time to write content three to five times a week — you have a business to run.
This is where a professional medical copywriter comes in. Working with a healthcare blogger gives you the option to collaborate with a professional writer who specializes in HIPAA-compliant medical content, or giving them full control of your blog.
Contact Haden Interactive to discuss health and wellness blog strategy with a medical blogger.
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