5 Healthcare Blog Topics to Educate Patients

Do you work for a healthcare company looking to expand its current blog or create a new one?

If so, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll discuss healthcare blog topic examples and brainstorming tips to help you educate patients through engaging, expert content.

Why is blogging important for healthcare companies?

Did you know that nearly 80% of internet users have searched for healthcare information online?

That means the majority of people have, at some point, look for reliable, authoritative healthcare sources when they open up their search browser.

You may think blogging is old fashioned, but research suggests nearly 80% of internet users still interact with blogs regularly. Blogs are an ideal healthcare marketing idea to help to educate patients about the changing healthcare industry, new product offerings, or any number of topics.

More than that, though, blogs can help build brand awareness and bring organic traffic to your website. ‘Organic’ traffic is simply search engine web traffic that doesn’t come from paid advertisements.

More organic traffic and brand awareness mean more patients, and that’s important given the competitive environment of healthcare in the US.

5 blog topics for healthcare companies

So we know blogging is important, but what does a healthcare company write about? Well, that probably depends on the specifics of your practice or business, but there are a few general blog topics all healthcare companies can use to get started blogging.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions, or FAQs, are some of the best performing pieces of blog content that any healthcare company can create. They can be FAQs for your particular product or business, or they can answer general healthcare questions.

Some examples might include:

• When should I see a doctor for ‘X’?
• Should I see a doctor for ‘X’?
• Do I have “X” disease/virus?
• What does it mean if I have ‘X’ symptoms?
• Is this a side effect of ‘X’?

FAQ blogs draw in organic traffic and make the perfect natural segway to contacting you for more information on your services.

Expert Interviews

If you can arrange it, expert interviews are excellent content. The name, social media status, and reputation of your interviewee will help boost website traffic and brand awareness.

Even if you can’t find a guest, you can always have an employee interview one of the doctors or highly educated professionals at your company and create an interview blog, dishing out advice to potential clients. It helps position your business as the leading voice.

Industry Insights

Industry insights position your business as experts and draw in organic traffic with unique valuable content.

Here’s an example from Flatiron Health Inc.’s blog. The cancer research and customer care company were acquired for an incredible $1.9 billion back in 2019 by Roche. If you’re looking for the kind of growth that takes you from inception to a billion-dollar company in just five and a half years, mimicking the blogging tactics, this highflying company is a good strategy.

Area of specialty

Creating blogs that go into detail about your particular area of expertise is extremely important. Not only do they educate clients, but they help increase your website’s relevance for important keywords in search engines. That means more organic traffic that is looking for your particular niche services as well, which means they are more likely to convert into paying patients.

For instance, a pediatric gastroenterology clinic would target parents and write content about children’s digestive issues specifically, not just any pediatric health concern.

Debunking healthcare myths

It’s estimated that doctors review only half of the number of medically related sites on the internet. That leaves a constant stream of misinformation, and while that’s bad for patients, it provides some quality blog topics for healthcare companies.

You might write articles debunking anything from serious myths about the safety of vaccines to more lighthearted, but very real, questions about the cracking of knuckles leading to arthritis or carrots giving you night vision.

Brainstorming tip: Finding healthcare blog ideas using Google Trends

Finding healthcare blog topics after you’ve published dozens of blogs is a serious challenge. Thankfully, Google provides free tools like Google Trends to help lead you to the best topic ideas.

For example, in this Google Trends search of the query’ strep throat’, the results reveal a downward trend in interest in recent months.

So it might not be the best idea to target a plain strep throat article right now, but Google Trends has more tricks in store.

Below the graph of search traffic and regional distribution that appear on Trends pages, there is a related topics and queries section. Here we can see that the query ‘how does strep throat spread to others’ has increased in popularity by 3800% in one month.

Producing an article targeting this query could produce solid results. You can see how Google Trends can help you find great topics backed by real data.

Brainstorming tip: Finding healthcare blog ideas using Google Suggest and People Also Ask

The Google Suggest and People Also Ask features are two more free tools that allow you to peer into Google’s search data to find blog topics for your healthcare site.

For example, you might try searching a common query like “when should I see a doctor for…” and then allow Google Suggest to provide you with some common queries that complement your question.

From this list, you might create blog posts like “when to see a doctor for a headache” or “when should you visit your doctor for nagging back pain.”

Then there’s the People Also Ask (PAA) section of Google’s search results. When you type in a question on Google (or sometimes just a keyword), the search engine will produce a section with other commonly asked questions that relate to the original query.

For example, if there are too many articles already that cover when to call a doctor about a fever, you could take things a step further and use PAA to find related questions.

All of these questions could make great blog topics. “How long is too long to have a fever” or “How do you know if your fever broke” are questions real people want answers to, and if your healthcare company can provide that answer, you’ll be able to attract new patients to your site.

Best practices for using healthcare blogs as a marketing tool

After you’ve decided on your healthcare blog topics, there are some important best practices and tips to keep in mind while writing.

• Have professionals review and verify all medical information. While the goal of your content is to increase patient traffic or sales, this shouldn’t compromise the accuracy of the information. The appropriate professional should review each piece with their credentials listed on the content as proof.
• Promote content. After publishing blogs, the marketing process has only started. Patients and customers won’t know about your practice or business through content unless they can find it. Using social media, email marketing, and SEO are all tactics to expand your blog’s reach.
• Target unique keywords in each blog. Search engine optimization (SEO) is what will make your blog content visible to searchers on the web. Make sure to target a unique keyword for each page. It’s also best to plan out both short-term and long-term strategies to see how your SEO will work overtime.

• Have patience with results. Blogging and content marketing won’t work overnight. Creating 4,000-word pillar pages takes a lot of time and research. Even beyond the actual content creation, though, getting your content to rank on Google’s first page can take time. According to Google, it could take anywhere from four months to a year for SEO to take effect, but a lot of times getting content to rank well can take even longer. Patience and persistence are the keys to moving up search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Format the right way to keep your audience’s attention. Block text is boring! Switch it up with pictures, infographics, links, bolded sections, and headings. The goal is to keep people reading your blogs, so give them information in the most digestible way possible.
• You may have to write longer blogs. Blog posts aren’t what they used to be. In the past, a poorly written 500-word article at least had a chance to generate traffic for a blog with some SEO tricks. Those days are long gone. In fact, according to research from HubSpot, the optimal length for a blog that will generate leads is an amazing 2500 words.
• Internal linking is a necessity. Referencing pages within your site on blogs can keep visitors on your site and redirect them to other useful information. More than that, though, internal links help search engines crawl your website and show the relevancy of your content.

Too little time to create your own blog? Call in the experts.

Sometimes there’s just not enough time as the owner or marketing manager of a healthcare company to produce a blog. And hiring the right people to do the job can be a challenge.

If you’re looking for an SEO-focused content creation team with the right experience to attract new patients, feel free to contact us. We’d love to help get you started with content marketing.

Also, check out the next article in our healthcare series titled, How to Use Doctor Directories for Local SEO.

Markitors is an internet marketing agency with a focus on SEO. We help small businesses rank higher on Google to draw more leads to websites and increase revenue. Explore what’s in our SEO toolbox: audits and keyword research, digital PR, technical SEO, and local SEO.