Will blogging help you get more patients?

What would happen if you published one blog per week for one month? Would it help you get more patients?

In January, one of our favorite clients emailed us with these questions. And it got us thinking.

We emailed her right back and asked if we could run an experiment on her recently published website: for one month, we’d help her write and optimize one blog per week.

We’d track her website data.

And we’d publish the findings.

Here’s what we found:

The number of people who accessed her site every month rose by 97.3%.

 

The number of NEW visitors rose by 90.4%.

The actions that people took on her site—when someone clicked on a link, watched a video, scrolled to the bottom of a page, etc.—rose by nearly 78%.

Most impressively, her session count increased by a whopping 102%. ????

 

Yes, blogging helps you get more patients

However, the most important metric isn’t shown: how many of these site visitors become new patients?

She let us know that, in February, she gained 12 new contacts on her email list and received 4 requests for free discovery calls. Of these, 2 became new patients. 

Stats on reach-to-conversion ratio (the number of people who are exposed to your business versus how many become customers) vary among industries. Many authorities tell us that anywhere from 2 to 5% is a strong rate of conversion, while top converting sites reach above 10%.

We like to compare the business to itself—are you getting more customers than you used to, and is this number steadily rising over a one year period? A five-year period?

For her, 2 new patients fit within the average and was exciting progress.

 

But do the blogs need to be SEO-friendly?

The short answer (from someone who loves and is fascinated by SEO) is no. They don’t.

Does optimization with keywords, readability, appropriate links, images, etc., help you gain more new patients?

Yes. Definitely.

Remember, the foundation of SEO is valuable content.

 

By valuable, I mean content that is useful to your niche audience. People with hair loss from thyroid disease need solutions, answers, and maybe some lightheartedness in a challenging situation…not fancy medical terms they have to look up or serious-sounding diagnostic criteria.

So even if you’re not hip to the newest keyword tricks or forget to include a CTA (even though I’m begging you, please don’t forget the CTA…), blogs that your patients love, optimally optimized or not, will help you get new patients.

>> Click here to learn more about SEO in our free SEO Marketing Masterclass.

 

But blogging takes so much time

That’s true. It does.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that writing an approximately 2000-word essay (the best word count for a blog in the wellness industry) doesn’t take time.

This is my challenge to you: divert one social media post per week to time spent blogging. For example, instead of 3 social posts per week, post twice instead. 

Tempted to scroll?

Blog.

Feel the urge to open Instagram for just one or two reels?

Write a paragraph or two.

Most business owners have been sold the story that social media should be their baseline marketing tool. 

I get it; going viral is pretty alluring.

But the reality is that even though social media is a good tool, it’s not great. BLOGGING, not posting, is more effective for the long-term growth of your business.

 

But I heard blogging is dead

We’ve heard from many of our clients that a business coach or marketing expert told them blogging isn’t as effective as it used to be. It’s one reason we were excited about the one-blog-a-week challenge.

The reality is that I don’t know how effective blogging was 20 years ago. I wasn’t paying attention to marketing analytics in 2004. I was harvesting pineapple and growing a righteous set of dreadlocks on the Big Island.

What we DO know is that blogging is effective today. It is not, in fact, dead. While our experiment was n=1, our outcomes were incredibly impressive. 

In our case study, blogging worked.

And this is backed by every SEO expert worth their salt; blogging (or the publication of any helpful website content) gets your site in front of new patients and makes you an invaluable expert to the people who need your help.

 

Ready to blog like an SEO pro?

Click here to join our free SEO Marketing Masterclass, where you’ll learn specific blogging strategies to up your game.