TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
Marketing Toolbox
Susan Giurleo
Many experts in online marketing proclaim that blogging is the secret to success. Over the past 12 months I have done a personal experiment of sorts with my online marketing for my therapy practice: I have stopped blogging. My website has a blog with several relevant articles to my specialty, but I have not updated those in over a year. What I have found is that those articles are still a great marketing tool. People who didn’t know of my work previously, find the website, read the articles and call my office to make an appointment. The supposedly stagnant blog is still client attractive. This outcome is reassuring that those of us who don’t have the time or inclination to write new blog content on a regular basis can still get a great return on several blog entries that have relevance and value for our ideal clients. However, those who do enjoy writing can still blog regularly and attract clients as well. Should you blog? The appropriate answer to this question is, “It depends.” When we start our website and are establishing our expertise online, it makes sense to have 60
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relevant, regular new content on your blog for search engines and to demonstrate your professional expertise. After you have clients and some reputation in your niche, I think it is perfectly ok to dial back your blogging efforts. If you decide to discontinue blogging, it will be important to place your BEST articles and posts at the top of your blog, so new visitors will see those first. I actually took down all of my weaker, less powerful content and just left 10 solid posts in my blog for new visitors to read. These articles were highly relevant to my ideal client, offered a great deal of valuable information and were optimized for search engine optimization. What About Future SEO? Many people suggest that blogging is good for search engine optimization, so that people who search online for your type of business can find you in search more easily. For most therapists the truth is that we won’t be found easily in search no matter how much we blog. Optimizing for your name, town your practice is located or specialty is worthwhile, but most often therapists’ online directories trump all small business SEO efforts because they are so big and spend significant money on optimizing