A beautiful, well-designed, functional website is completely useless without content. People don’t visit a website just to admire its design or click through your links for fun. They visit a website for information. They want to know more about something that intrigued or interested them. That is why a practice website needs to be chock-full of diverse, quality content.
Defining Creative Content
It’s hard to know how to create content if you’re not sure what it is. “Content” is any sort of media that contains information that someone visiting your website finds valuable. The information can be presented many different ways. Webpages, blogs, and frequently asked questions are the most common types of content and should be the bulk of your site. However, videos, pictures, newsletters, infographics, and audio recordings are all content as well. They all allow you to present information in different ways to potential patients.
Having lots of high-quality, creative content is a necessary part of any internet marketing strategy, you simply can’t have a couple dozen pages simply sitting there, unchanging, on your website. You need to regularly add new content for people to engage with and help search engines see your site as valuable. The real challenge, then, becomes how to choose content topics that will enhance your site.
The Practical Things to Consider when Choosing Content Topics
Of course, you can’t put just anything up on your website. Topics and information that are interesting but unrelated to your practice isn’t the least bit helpful for you. But how do you choose topics that benefit your office, especially if you already have a number of webpages and videos online? There are three important steps:
1. Choose goals for your content.
Content, whether it’s a blog or an infographic, doesn’t serve any purpose if it doesn’t work toward your goals. Goals help you reach out to the people and patients you want to see. Remember, people are busy and concerned with the problems that directly affect their own or their family’s health. They don’t care so much about the latest diagnostic tool you acquired or what special procedures you offer. They care about whether or not you can help them.
That’s why you need to know your goals for the kinds of patients you want to see, so you can speak directly to those people. Looking for more teen athletes? Your content should be about the injuries or equipment needs or training tips that concern them. Want to connect with middle-aged diabetic patients? Tailor your videos, articles, and more to be about the issues that concern them. Searching for more bunion surgeries? Publish information about why surgery is a treatment option and how to decide if someone needs it. The more your videos, pictures, and articles target your goals, the more you’ll be noticed by those patients.
2. Figure out what already interests your audience.
You have to know your audience to come up with relevant content topics. Most seniors with arthritis don’t care about fitting cleats for soccer, so that topic wouldn’t touch the interests and concerns of your potential patients. Knowing that can help you come up with ideas that might actually interest them—but the truth is, you don’t have to guess. You can use information directly from patients and the people who use your website to find out what content they find interesting.
You can do this by asking directly and using your analytics. Ask your patients what questions they have. If certain ones come up repeatedly—especially if you don’t already have that information on your site—you have insight into what information would interest people. Using analytics to see what webpages, videos, and other content is popular can help as well. You can then choose to either build on what’s already there, or try to connect that popular topic to other related ones.
3. Refine and repurpose.
There’s an old saying: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Eventually you may feel like you’ve run out of interesting topics and you don’t know how to keep adding more content to your website. The good news is that you don’t have to always come up with something totally new and unheard of. Sometimes revamping or repurposing old content is just what you need.
What search engines look for in content to help them pull it up in search results changes frequently. What Google liked last year, or even six months ago, isn’t necessarily what it’s looking for anymore. This doesn’t mean that old content is now worthless. It means you have an opportunity to go back and rework it to fit current SEO standards. Old, popular content is great for repurposing as well. See if you can convert the old articles that people found useful into new blogs, or a video, or an infographic.
One Final Tip
The last, but certainly not least, thing to consider when you choose content topics is to enjoy the subject. No one wants to read a boring article or watch a boring video. And if you’re bored, you can be sure your audience is, too. Your passion for people’s foot and ankle health should be obvious in the content you create.