Are you starting up a med spa? Looking to scale an established practice? Trying to solidify your presence in your particular market? If these are your goals (and you haven’t already) we suggest focusing on writing a consistent blog for your med spa. 

We know the medical aesthetics market is extremely competitive. Delivering excellent treatments and keeping up the day-to-day operations is time-consuming enough, but those who have built a successful practice realize how much more goes on behind the scenes: training, website development, social media interaction, marketing campaigns…The list goes on and on! 

You might be wondering: Do we need to write a blog too? The answer is YES—your practice and patients need it!

But just how important is producing a blog really? Let's look at three reasons why your practice needs a blog.

• Bring traffic (AKA potential patients) to your Website
  ‍New patients rarely just appear at your med spa. To gain new patients, you need to meet potential patients where they are: the INTERNET! The truth is, would-be-patients are Google searching their questions about medical aesthetics long before they ever book an appointment.  Bring them in contact with your website by providing the online answers they need!
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• Provide Value to your Patients
  ‍Medical Aesthetics is a relatively new and developing field. Your current and prospective patients likely have many questions about treatment options. Provide online resources to supply needed information, overcome reservations, and seamlessly guide patients to booking options. Patients are more inclined to look into your practice if they have already benefited from your online resources!
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• Establish your Authority
  ‍Lastly, use your online content to stand apart from a saturated med spa market. Well-researched content, chock-full of valuable patient resources, can position you as an industry authority! Patients are more likely to book with a med spa that is knowledgeable and well versed in medical aesthetics.

Patients that come to your blog are not looking to read a medical journal. Patients want complex treatments broken down into digestible snippets they can easily understand.

How is this done?  By writing to your audience! Pull up a figurative chair and discuss commonly asked questions that are on your patient’s minds.  Address your patient's experiences by talking about reservations and emotions they might hold about medical aesthetic treatments. Keep the tone light and conversational.

Remember, patients need to know more about the treatment experience, expectations, and results than they need to understand the fine details of the treatment’s science.

You also need to break up your content. Many viewers will immediately exit and choose a different article if a solid wall of text is the first thing they see. Clearly outline your content with clear headers. While headers should be catchy, they also should include the keywords your patients are looking for that represent their commonly asked questions. Add images and videos to add variety and showcase your treatment results. 

Lastly, make sure your writing and overall presentation match your med spa’s brand. Your page’s style should coordinate with your home page, whether it's through a uniform banner or color palette. The topics you address also should be tailored to your brand. A high-end exclusive med spa might cover different topics than a med spa that focuses on quicker, more affordable options for a millennial working class. 

Write to your patients, and you will begin to see more traction and traffic to your site!  
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It doesn't matter how well-written a page is if it remains unread in a forgotten janitor’s closet of the internet. Write articles on topics that your existing and potential patients want to read!

As a start, it's valuable to create individual subpages for each of your treatments on your med spa’s website. While the home page is a great place to briefly list or touch on different topics, linking to specific treatment pages will help your patients get the detailed information they need. (Plus it helps your Google ranking!) 

Besides detailing your treatments, you should also directly address patients' questions. 

‍But how can you know what patients are searching for on the internet? Do your research! There are many tools to help you see what patients are typing into the Google search box. For example, the Google search console can offer insight into top queries. Additionally, sites like Answer the Public can pull up user data when given a few keywords. 

Keep in mind that the most common queries on Google will likely have the longest lists of articles trying to appear on the first page. While you should cover the main topics within your site, seek to become the front page on more niche searches as well. You can do this by focusing on a specific approach, location, or question. 

Take BOTOX. The internet is full of articles on BOTOX. Instead of writing a general page, you could write on a commonly asked question surrounding BOTOX. For example: What type of BOTOX should I get for crow's feet? When should I start getting BOTOX? Where should I get BOTOX in LA? 

The more tailored you make your topics to your patients' needs, the higher likelihood you have of ranking well and gaining a substantial following.  
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Think about your blog as building a “resource empire.” Posts should not exist as separate islands.  Your pages should include helpful links that direct patients to other resources from your med spa and build a structured web throughout your blog/website.

As you write on common queries and topics, add links to related articles as they make sense.

For example, if you were writing a page on “CoolSculpting” you might link to a page answering a common query: “what are the different kinds of body sculpting treatments?” This link would be valuable for prospective patients who are in the discovery phase trying to learn their options.

If the reader is not interested, they can easily skip over the link and continue reading the original article. No harm done.

Not only do patients appreciate relevant, user-friendly links, but Google will also reward you too! Google sees links as reputation points.  The more links that point to a certain page, the higher it will rank that page on their search engine. As more traffic comes to that page, again, the higher it will rise in the ranking. It’s an upward cycle you want for your pages. 

However, there can be too much of a good thing.  Be careful not to overstuff your content with links. While Google rewards pages that lead patients to other quality articles, too many links can also be off-putting. It can be confusing and annoying for readers to try to understand a page’s information if they're constantly directed in different directions. 

Keep your links natural in the context of your article and you will begin to see your rankings rise!
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While writing quality content is crucial, it's not necessarily enough to earn you a seat on Google’s front rows. There are a series of additional technical actions you can do to  “optimize” your pages to help improve their rankings.  Search engine optimization is all about improving your website’s visibility through simple improvements. 

We’ve already talked about one of the most important optimizations: adding internal links throughout your content. In addition, you want to make sure your outbound links are only linking you to the highest quality websites. If you link to spam-like pages or clickbait, Google will begin to view you similarly. Instead, link only to your pages and other reliable resources such as scientific journals, news articles, etc. 

There are other simple SEO practices worth implementing. Here are three examples. 1: Compressing your image sizes helps your website load faster. 2: Including an “alternate text” description for your images can help the visually impaired and Google better understand your photos. 3: Mentioning your location helps you appear in local searches. 

Though often simple adjustments, proven SEO practices help Google and your patients better understand and navigate your site. Regularly revisit your SEO efforts and see the traffic increase to your pages!  
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Google rewards websites that consistently produce new content. Whether it's weekly, monthly, etc. aim to update your blog regularly. 

The more you build your med spa’s “cluster” the better. Google will assign you authority status as you cover subtopics in the individual pages (instead of just one that goes over everything) with internall links.

Worried you will run out of topics? As new treatments hit the market, patients will have new questions. Searches on this year's industry trends or explaining a new treatment will likely generate a lot of clicks. 

In addition, the industry itself is continually changing and giving you plenty of topics to write on. For example, virtual consultations exploded with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Med spas were smart to quickly offer training pages for physicians,  and how-to guides for patients to make the most of their virtual experience. 

The more you build your “cluster” the more often your pages will appear in your patient searches!
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Your med spa's blog can become a keystone resource and marketing tool for your practice. Though you might not see the results overnight, within six-twelve months you should begin to see increased traffic and bookings as a result of your content creation efforts.

Take the opportunity to establish yourself as an authority in your market, provide valuable resources to answer the questions your patients are asking, and bring new traffic to your site. Your med spa's blog can become a key foundation for your practice.
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