Writing engaging content for your practice website is more than just knowing how to speak to your patients. For your site to do well in search engine rankings and bring new patients to your office, you’ll need to use specific strategies that capture the attention of your readers as well as search engines. Use the strategies below to get started writing great clinical web content.
Know your topic.
With medical content, it’s incredibly important to do your research and know your topic inside and out. After all, your audience may be deciding whether or not to visit your practice or seek medical help for a serious health issue based on the information provided by your website. Make sure whoever is writing your content has spent time researching your medical specialty as well as speaking with your team of doctors and staff to fully understand your practice and what makes it unique.
This is incredibly important to search engines as well, because medical websites fall into a category known in the SEO world as your money or your life, abbreviated commonly as YMYL). Google identifies these topics as having the ability to directly and significantly impact people’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society. They take this very seriously in an effort to rid the internet of misinformation that can result in mild inaccuracies or content from less reliable sources which could significantly impact someone’s health, financial stability, or safety, or impact society, for topics like symptoms of a heart attack, how to invest money, what to do if there is an earthquake, who can vote, or needed qualifications for obtaining a driver’s license. So, as you’re writing medical content, be very careful of inaccuracies.
Engage your audience.
Offering your potential patients expert information is great, but if it drones on and on or doesn’t resonate with them enough to bring them into your office, it isn’t as good as it could be. Your content should use a friendly but authoritative tone, quickly get to the point, and have “skimability” — meaning the headlines quickly guide your reader to the information they’re looking for.
Aim for high-quality content rather than a certain length.
Experts debate about the ideal length for web page content. It used to be true that the more words you slapped on a page, the more keywords you could use, but keywords have become less important with the rise of deep learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. These days, having 100% original, well-written, and high-quality content has a better chance of engaging your website visitors regardless of the length. As a general rule, we suggest that web pages be 500-700 words long, but this is just a rule of thumb and will vary depending on the page topic and goals.
Know your target reading level.
The average reading level of an adult in the U.S. is between 8th and 9th grade, according to a study done by Harvard University. This means that your writer should be shooting for content that reads at an 8th-grade level or lower. Good content informs your patients about your medical practice and the treatments you provide in words that every person who visits your website will understand. There are a number of free online readability tools, such as webpagefx.com, that can help ensure that your content matches your target reading level.
We Can Help
Don’t leave your medical website content up to chance. Our team of experts has been building medical websites for over 20 years. Contact one of our marketing experts for your complimentary consultation today.
