7 best practices for creating a practice-building chiropractic blog

For a practice-building chiropractic blog to be effective, the person reading it has to feel as if you are speaking directly to them

Blogging is a great way to demonstrate your expertise as a chiropractic provider while also building trust with current and prospective patients. Engaging in certain practices can help make your blog more effective. Here are seven best practices for creating a practice-building blog.

Define your blog’s goals

What is the purpose of your chiropractic blog? Do you want to increase your patient list, for example, or are you looking to boost the sales of your dietary supplements or other health-based products, or your brand?

Defining your blog’s goals is important because it helps you decide what to write about. It also tells you which metrics to monitor when analyzing its effectiveness.

Develop a patient persona

For a practice-building chiropractic blog to be effective, the person reading it has to feel as if you are speaking directly to them. One way to create this type of effect is by developing a persona of your ideal patient.

Think about your target patient’s demographics — their gender, age, occupation, level of education, marital status, and more. Use this information to develop a patient persona. Then write your blog posts as if you’re speaking to that persona.

Create keyword-focused content

Keywords help search engines better connect you with the people who are looking for your services. The words and phrases you use are also important because they bring people to your blog organically versus drawing them in with paid advertising. Research indicates that organic search is the most dominant, accounting for 53.3% of all website traffic.

Several online keyword search tools exist, making it easier to identify the ones that are searched most often. Some of the best-known platforms include Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.

Use the words and phrases you find in your research within your blog posts. For example, if your office is in Tampa, Fla., one of your keywords is likely “chiropractor in Tampa.” If you specialize in a specific area or modality, your best keyword phrase may be “sports chiropractor in Tampa” or “myofascial release in Tampa.”

Put quality first

Although keywords are important, they’re not more important than writing quality. If your blogs don’t supply valuable information or answer your patient’s most compelling questions, they’re not likely to visit your website again. Content quality always comes first.

One way to improve the quality of your blog is to avoid keyword stuffing. Using the same keywords over and over in an attempt to increase search rank can make your blog difficult to read. Also, remember that the reader’s number one question is, “What’s in it for me?” If your content doesn’t answer this and help them improve their life in some way, a practice-building chiropractic blog is not going to be as effective.

Include a call to action

If you write a blog about the best dietary supplements for better health and you mention that you sell the same supplements, don’t assume that your blog reader is going to make the connection, leading them to make a purchase. Instead, you have to tell them exactly what you want them to do with a clear call to action at the end of each blog post.

If this call to action involves making a purchase or scheduling an appointment and this is something they can do on your website, include a link to that page versus forcing them to search for it. If your call to action involves calling your office, restate the phone number they are to call, even if it is listed in several other places on your website. Make it as easy as possible for your blog reader to take the action you want.

Publish your practice-building chiropractic blog consistently

You can’t just publish one post a month (or year) and expect your blog to gain any traction. Posting consistently keeps people coming back to your website for more, increasing your site’s rank while further promoting your expertise.

Marketing expert Neil Patel suggests that publishing two posts per week can dramatically improve your blog’s results. Once you get quite a few blog posts online, you can also go back and update old blogs, refreshing their content. This helps you generate more traffic without having to write all new blogs.

Keep track of your metrics

As mentioned, defining the goal of your blog is important because it tells you which metrics to track to determine its effectiveness. Some metrics to consider watching are how many new patients you get as a result of your blogs, whether your product sales have increased, or if there’s been an increase in website engagement.

Check these metrics regularly to make sure you’re on the right track. If you’re making the progress you’d like, keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, make small changes to your strategy and check your metrics again. Sometimes a small tweak can make a huge difference.