The Importance of Writing Blog Articles for Your Veterinary Website
Updated: Nov 25, 2023
Blog articles play a critical role in carving out a piece of online real estate for your veterinary practice. Yet many busy veterinarians forgo this task because of time restraints and scheduling conflicts. The challenge is to be consistent, but not overwhelmed and the good news is you can achieve a dynamic, regularly updated blog with engaging content that is optimized for the search engines without having to devote hours of your busy day.
How Often do I Have to Blog?
Each month, all you need to do is set up 2 veterinary blog articles. If you can write more, that’s great, but 2 per month add up to 24 veterinary blog articles by the end of the year. So in 5 years, you’ll have over 100 dynamic online avenues that lead straight to your clinic. That is all valuable, virtual real estate working behind the scenes to fuel the growth of your practice. In between the 2 main blog posts you will be publishing each month, you can also insert short, supplemental news or announcement articles. The more active your veterinary blog, the better!
What Should I Write About?
With the goal above of writing 24 blog articles per year, the most important and challenging step of the blogging process is coming up with topics on which to write. Topics should be interesting, relevant and pet related. Think about questions that your clients have asked you, or topics that are brought up on a regular basis that might make an interesting or informative blog post. Once you have your list of topics, you’ve conquered the most difficult part of the process! Avoid writing content that is too medical in nature, but rather stick to light, fun and entertaining topics.
Who Should Write the Blog?
It is actually recommended that the veterinarians of the practice not be the ones managing the veterinary blog. It’s simply too overwhelming, and the risk of falling behind and dropping the ball on frequent posts becomes too great. Instead, the work should be divvied out amongst other staff members within the practice, with one person acting as the editor. The editor will assign topics to each contributing writer, for which drafts are due on a specified date. Once blog post drafts are received, the editor then reviews them for any grammatical or spelling errors, formats them and schedules them for publication.
How Should Veterinary Blog Posts be Scheduled?
The beauty of technology today is that it allows you to schedule your veterinary blog posts well in advance to be published at a specified date in the future. (If you don’t currently have this functionality, talk to your web developer.) Once blog posts have been edited, formatted and enhanced with interactive elements like links, pictures or videos, the editor then loads them into the veterinary website’s blog interface and schedules when they should be published live. Any number of posts can be added at the same time, and simply scheduled to go live at future intervals.
Don’t Forget to Share!
Once your veterinary blog articles are live, don’t forget the all-important step of sharing them on your various social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter. This helps to quickly spread the word about your new content and encourages your fans and followers to read and share your content with their own networks, thereby increasing the visibility and reach of your practice exponentially.
Not sure where to begin with your veterinary blog? Our Practice Growth Academy includes tools that will assist with your blog article scheduling. You’ll be set up to write and release 1 article during the first 2 weeks, 1 during the next 2 weeks, and all of your topics can be prearranged. Click here to learn more about how the Practice Growth Academy can help you claim your piece of online real estate.
