Successful Online Dermatology Content: A Balance of Substance and Length

One thing that dermatology website content creators or bloggers often obsess over is the length of their articles or blog posts. Although you may find plenty of information about an ideal length for an online article, most of the data is conflicting. Good content is vital for your blogs to show up high in search rankings. If you want to take maximum advantage of content marketing, you must do it right. 

Content Length is Not Everything

Length is one of the many factors to consider for web content. There are many other issues to be considered, as well. You must take into consideration how these other factors will influence the length of your blog post.

Substance. One of the most basic factors to consider is the substance that you want to communicate. If you can explain what you need to in 100 words, great; but if accurate discussion requires 2,000 words, it is appropriate to write that way.

Style. Your writing style greatly affects your content length. Writing that is brief and to-the-point requires fewer words and less explanation. On the other hand, a more interactive and conversational style may require more words, thereby increasing the length of your content.

Frequency. How frequently you post your blogs affects the length of your posts. Some bloggers prefer writing only once a week, publishing very thorough blog posts. Others prefer short regular ones every other day. Good content may take your time, unless your content marketing team can handle regular blog posts.

Format. Formatting of an article can massively influence its readability. Best practices involve using many subheadings, writing short paragraphs, and adding a sprinkle of good images. Breaking up your content into comprehensible chunks help readers quickly scan your articles.

Audience. Knowing your audience is the key to successful content creation. Understand what your readers need, their interests, their passions, and their problems. You should focus on creating content that your audience is likely to read.

Medium. It is not all about words. For example, an infographic may require merely 100 words to introduce a topic. The remaining words are part of the infographic and do not specifically translate into accurate words on the word count metric. In other words, when you post a meme, infographic, or video, word count becomes irrelevant.

Needless to say: content length is important. But it is not the only thing you must be apprehensive about.

Longer Content is Usually Better

Some Internet marketing researchers believe that longer posts generally perform better in every aspect. A higher word count usually results in increased search traffic. Over 200 factors determine how your dermatology website content may rank in Search Engine Page Results (SERPs). Evidently, it is observed that pages having more content have a better chance of acquiring a top position in Google results.

According to some researchers:

• The pages taking a higher Google SERP position usually have more content (generally exceeding 2,000 words).
• Googlebot, Google’s famous web crawler, indexes your website. While crawling, it scans every single word, a piece of information, and tag with a few exceptions for dynamic pages and rich media files.
• Different content types get indexed including page title, metadata, headlines (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and alt tags on images.
• The more content your articles have, the more words and linguistic elements get indexed, eventually (leading to a better performance of your web pages in searches and results).

How to Create Content that Generates Leads?

1. Produce an eBook. PricewaterhouseCoopers made an industry forecast according to which eBook sales revenues in 2018 are likely to be about $8.7 billion. This represents an increase of more than 3,000 percent since 2008. To add to that, the US is expected to have more than 112 million eBook readers by 2020.

These findings suggest a potentially huge market that waits to be tapped. For this reason, writing and releasing an eBook is a proven effective strategy to capture leads.

Obviously, you do not necessarily have to charge for your eBook. An eBook provides value up front as a free online resource, increasing the likelihood of capturing leads for dermatology websites. 

2. Create Guides and White Papers. What elements should your white paper have to effectively generate leads? Consider these four points:

Title. Grab the attention of the reader right away, while conveying the subject matter of the paper.

Content. Expound and explicate on the title, focusing on a particular aspect that the customer may find persuading enough to purchase the paper. As a rule of thumb, your content must be helpful even in case the reader won’t buy the service or product.

Promotional plan.Run through the content of your white paper and distribute copies to your team. Include your white paper in the outreach campaign on social media, email marketing campaign, and external advertising events.

Lead strategy.Respond to all leads in a benign manner by offering more information rather than insisting on scheduling a consult or booking a procedure, but provide a call to action while following up. Perhaps you can send an email to ask your readers if they want to attend a future event, download another white paper, or sign up for an upcoming webinar.

Get More Online

As more dermatology practices use videos to educate patients and support marketing, it’s important to optimize video content. Learn how in this video from Ekwa Marketing, Visit: DermTube.com/video/videocontent/

Consider Case Studies

You can tell good stories with well-drafted case studies. Here are some tips to follow:

Abstract or summary. Always start your case study with an overview of the problem followed by a short preview of the solution or the steps to be taken for solving it.

Real people. Let your case studies stand out with genuine interviews. A case study must tell a story. Present the narrative from the patient’s perspective to make it even more effective.

Photos and videos. Make your case studies more engaging and appealing to visual and oral learners by including multimedia assets like photos and videos. Elements like charts prove especially useful. They not only provide additional background to the concept of a case study but also make comparisons between experiences and products more effective.

Solution. Consider your broader audience while talking about the solution. Walk the reader carefully through the steps required to be taken for precisely fixing the problem.

Drive Movement

Your content must drive movement and should have a call to action. Without it, you may have useful and informative content on your dermatology web pages, but that content may not contribute to increasing the flow of patients to your dermatology practice. n