Your veterinary blog is a great way to build up your clinic’s online reputation, and optimize your site for SEO. There are several benefits to keeping your practice blog up to date, but let’s face it – even the most experienced writers have trouble writing that perfect blog post.
It’s easy to get caught up in the details of writing a blog post and find yourself overwhelmed, but like many other things in life, there’s a trick to it. These five steps will help you focus on building up the content of your blog post, while making sure that everything is juuuuust right.
Develop your voice
It’s just our human nature; we have to learn to talk before we can write. Your veterinary blog’s voice should match the tone that you use in all of your clinic’s communications. Ultimately, this will come down to preference, but a professional–conversational hybrid style will go a long way toward making your content accessible.
What does this mean?
This means that you should keep things clean and polished, but don’t be afraid to use contractions once in a while – and try to avoid using dense medical terms as much as possible.
And importantly – make sure you keep your voice consistent.
Pick your subject – and make sure it’s relevant
There are a few ways you could do this. One of the easiest ways to find material that will inspire your audience is, well, to ask them. Check with your staff to see if there are any questions that have been coming up a lot lately, or ask your clients about their questions and look for patterns. Failing that, we’ve got a handy list of veterinary blog subjects designed to get your creativity flowing.
Once you’ve got your topic, plan out how you’re going to tackle it – and don’t be afraid to showcase what you know. The Internet is a vast place full of good and bad advice alike, and you want to ensure that your clients are getting their information from a reputable and trusted source.
Break it up
There are certain writing styles (not pointing any fingers) that can be difficult for people to read and digest. Why is that?
It often boils down to paragraph length. Especially on the Internet, readers are looking for the path of least resistance. It’s a good idea to split up your paragraphs when you’re writing for an online audience – think maybe two or three sentences max per paragraph.
This might make your blog look a little sparse in the web browser version of your veterinary website, but it will be worth it when your blog translates to a mobile version and those long paragraphs get condensed horizontally and stretched vertically. No one likes scrolling down that far.
Use subheadings
Smaller paragraphs go a long way toward splitting up content and making it more digestible, but subheadings create differentiation between points and make it easy for you to mark where one idea ends and another begins.
That isn’t all they’re good for, though. Subheadings are also valuable for SEO purposes – as Google scans your post, it will pick up on the heading tags in your website’s code and use them to parse the post more effectively.
This means you’ll need to make the most of your subheadings with well-placed keywords, descriptive language, and a clear tie-in with the subject. This excerpt from CopyPress illustrates some examples of good and bad subheadings to give you an idea of where to start.
And last, but certainly not least…
Share it
Make sure your audience knows you’re speaking out! Share your new post on your social media accounts to get it out there.
Want to get started on your veterinary blog? See how WebDVM websites can help.
