How To Make Your Website’s Content Valuable For Patients [Guest Post]

Special thanks to Guest Author Dr. Cory Fortson, DDS!

Nearly every dental practice has gone through the process of creating a website. It’s always exciting to see your new design come to life. However, once the website has launched, it’s vital to continue adding fresh content regularly to show Google and other search engines your site is relevant and should rank.

If you’re not an experienced writer, it can be difficult to figure out what to include on new pages and in blog posts. Thankfully, there are several free content tools that can help you take the guesswork out of the process.

Let Google show you the way

It turns out that if you want your pages to rank well in Google you need to have high quality, comprehensive content. So, writing three sentences explaining that you offer teeth whitening and have been doing it for ten years isn’t going to be enough to satisfy Google nor a prospective patient.

Fortunately, Google itself can tell you the types of questions that prospective patients have about all of your services, giving you the seeds to create truly valuable content.

In the past couple of years, Google has made a big push to include the “People also ask” box in their search results which displays popular questions around a topic. So, if you need content for your teeth whitening page, you should do a search for “teeth whitening” and see what Google offers up as questions users ask.

Just like that you’ve got a list of questions that your prospective patients likely want answers to. Including these questions along with your answers will really help to flesh out the content of your service pages while also educating your patients about the services you provide.

Tools to help prioritize content ideas

If you begin clicking any of the “People also ask” results, or try a few different variations of searches, you can quickly find yourself going down a wormhole of endless questions. At some point, you’ll need to draw the line or every one of your service pages will go on for miles.

Fortunately, there are some additional tools you can use to sort questions by popularity.

If you have a Google AdWords account set up, you can use their Keyword PlannerOpens in a new window to a content tool” tool to view the estimated search volume for specific questions and then rank them in order of popularity.

In the absence of an AdWords account, you still have options. Perhaps the best tool is this database of dental questions, which is a simple, searchable table developed by Netvantage MarketingOpens in a new window to a content tool”, where you can type in a search phrase and sort by the estimated monthly search volume. Doing a search for “teeth whitening” on this page yields the following result.

This tool basically takes the thought out of the process of prioritizing your content for a given subject. From here, you can see that people are very interested in the cost of teeth whitening, so you should address that. Other popular questions revolve around the safety and efficacy of teeth whitening, so taking the time to address those issues would be valuable for your website visitors as well.

Additional content tools to assist you

There are tools for creating bigger and better content and a surprising number of them are free to use. In addition to the tools above, the following resources can also prove to be helpful in your content generation journey. Each of the tools listed below is free, so if you need more ideas for your content, it’s definitely worth giving these a try.

UbersuggestOpens in a new window to a content tool”. This tool is built around Google’s automated suggestions that autocomplete your searches as you start typing them. This tool aggregates suggestions from whatever seed keyword you provide and offers keyword ideas in the form of suggestions and related keywords. While this won’t produce results as straight forward as the questions in the database above, it can still sprout some interesting related topics that you may want to write about on your service pages or blog.

Answer the PublicOpens in a new window to a content tool”. This is another tool that works off of Google’s automated suggestions but takes the additional step of categorizing the suggestions into questions, prepositions, comparisons, and alphabeticals. Basically, they add common questions, prepositions, comparisons, and letters to the end of your seed keyword and then aggregate all of Google’s suggestions. While this tool doesn’t natively add the estimated search volumes for its results, it is still a really easy way to pull together some content ideas that you know people are searching for, otherwise, Google wouldn’t be automatically suggesting it as a result.

Keywords EverywhereOpens in a new window to a content plugin”. You’ll notice I mentioned that Answer the Public doesn’t “natively support” search volumes. Fortunately, if you’re a Google Chrome user, there’s a free plugin that will append search volumes to the results of a tool like Answer the Public and make the results infinitely more useful. Download and activate the free extension in Google Chrome, and then when you use the tool you’ll see the volumes included in your results as you can see below.

There’s no time like the present

Yes, creating content can be a daunting and sometimes tedious task for a new dental website. However, with the free content tools available to you, and armed with a little knowledge of how to use them, you can create a clear content plan for each page of your site targeting the types of content you know patients want to learn about. From there, you just need to use your knowledge to answer the questions and cover the topics thoroughly and you’ll have a website that will also generate smiles.

About the author

Dr. Cory Fortson, DDS began his educational journey by earning a BS in Nutritional Science from Michigan State University. He is a 2014 graduate of The University of Detroit Dental School and a third-generation dentist who is proud to provide excellent dental care to the Lathrup Village community from his practice at Fortson DentistryOpens in a new window to the author’s website”.