Blogs! Why bother?

By Opticommerce | February 18, 2020

When it comes to marketing your optical practice, blogging provides an enduring channel to build your reputation and generate leads. Here’s how…

Why should you bother with blogs?

 

Business blogging isn’t the online equivalent to standing on a soapbox, it’s about showcasing your optical industry expertise in a way that provides genuinely helpful and valuable content to your potential customers. This is just one of 4 reasons why it’s worth investing in optical blogs. Let’s dive into them now:

 

 

 

1) Expertise

Got a question? What’s the first thing you do? Ask Google? You’re not alone, billions of searches are popped into Google every day1. Of these, around one billion are about health2. Narrow that down to eye health, and that is still a lot of questions being asked by people who want answers from an expert. Blogging gives you the chance to be that authority. Answering questions around the most common eye-related issues gives readers something (your expertise) for nothing (just the few seconds it takes to ask Google). This builds trust making it more likely that your reader will turn into a customer.

2) Visibility

The biggest part of your online presence is your website. But there are 200 million active websites3 out there. How can you get yours seen? By ranking on Google. Ranking refers to getting your webpages as high up as possible in the search results when someone asks Google about anything relating to your expertise.

Google trawls the internet, cataloguing all the websites out there. It judges almost every aspect of a website: how quickly it loads up, the quality of the content, how easy it is to navigate and how active it is. That last one can be tricky to score well in without blogs. Your ‘Services’ and ‘About Us’ pages won’t change often. Regular blogs, however, provide a clear sign to Google that your website is active and that your content is current. Make sure that content is high quality, relevant and reliable and you will rank higher and be more easily found by potential customers.

3) Reachdesk laid out with laptop

Blogging is only one part of your marketing content. Opticians can get their name out there through social media too. But social media, like Google, also demands regular, well-written content. Promoting your blogs via your different social media channels keeps these channels active and expands your reach to new audiences, ultimately driving more traffic to your website.

4) Endurance

Blogging can be the gift that keeps on giving. Blogs which are based around evergreen content (content that remains relevant and helpful) can see a steady growth in traffic. These are called ‘compounding’ blogs. They account for just one in 10 blogs, but bring in over a third of blog traffic4. It’s an great investment in your optician marketing that will pay off for many months to come.

 

So, why should you bother with blogs? Simply put, they’ll raise your profile so you’ll get more customers through your doors.

 

If you’d like to get started with regular, relevant and engaging optical blogs, get in touch with OptiCommerce, your digital marketing experts for the optics industry.

 

1https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

2https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/03/10/google-sifting-one-billion-health-questions-day/

3https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

4https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/compounding-blog-posts-what-they-are-and-why-they-matter