Boost Visitors and Credibility on Your Medical Practice Website

On March 19, I wrote an article between clinic patients and posted it to my website. The article was 680 words long (a paragraph in a New York Times newspaper story is 60 words long).

This took me about 20 minutes of actual writing time.

Within 30 minutes of being published online, the article ranked fourth on the first page of Google out of 8,000 results for a certain search phrase. Traffic to my website jumped to six times normal for that day, and 1,600 interested people saw the article.

What the article was about is less important than the method I used to write it - I’ll reveal the subject of the article soon enough!

Why generating website traffic is good for your practice

Google’s algorithm is a mystery. Thousands speculate on its inner workings. It’s generally thought that several broad goals are important for high rankings and website authority (or credibility):
• Relevance to what the searcher is looking for
• Freshness of the content
• Numbers of links to the site from other websites
• How widely or frequently the web page is shared by people

In other words, web pages with content that is new, highly relevant, and popular will rank higher in search engines.

More traffic means more credibility, which means higher rankings, which means your medical practice website comes up faster when your potential patients search for you online.

You’ll want to add this technique to your arsenal of online promotional weapons. It will let you ride the wave of a popular online topic to bring more traffic to your site and boost your credibility in the eyes of the search engines.

How to write these types of articles for your website

My article was about University of North Carolina’s Kendall Marshall, a star tournament player who fractured his scaphoid bone during a game. The online popularity of the topic inspired me to quickly put together a highly relevant article I knew UNC fans would be interested in.

Step 1 - Pick a hot current topic

Choose a news story that is new, popular, and discussed in many places at once online.

For ideas, search for relevant popular stories on Yahoo News, Google News, or Sports/Celebrity news sites.

One strange but very helpful site is Celebrity Diagnosis.

Step 2 - Pick main topics for your article

Think about how the average person would search for details about this story. They would use layman’s terms, plus the celebrity’s or sports star’s name for example.

Think of a way to combine commonly searched-for phrases and some aspect of the story you specialize in and create the title for your article.

Mine was: “Kendall Marshall’s Broken Wrist - What Is A Scaphoid Bone?”

Decide what main three or four points you want to quickly cover, plus a short introduction and conclusion. In my example, I wrote about basic anatomy, diagnosis, and treatment. Then I wrapped up with an “elephant in the room” paragraph about whether he would play or not.

Keep it very familiar - the closer the topic is to something you see and treat every day in your practice the faster you can crank out the article.

Step 3 - Add extras if you have time or energy

For extra attention from Google and other search engines, you can add pictures with captions and even link to several outside, relevant websites with suggestions for further reading.

If you have other information on your website that’s even peripherally relevant to your topic, link to a few of those existing pages - this tells Google that your website has even more relevant information people are searching for.

In summary, this technique lets you opportunistically take advantage of a popular online topic to boost your website traffic and educate patients at the same time.

I’m all about teaching techniques that kill multiple birds with the fewest stones possible.

Find out more about C. Noel Henley and our other Practice Notes bloggers.