If your goal is to grow your pediatric DPC practice, there are many ways to go about it. One of the ways that works well with consistent effort is content creation and search engine optimization. While those words can often strike fear in the hearts of many small business owners, especially physicians, you don’t have to fear. You can apply some simple techniques that with time and consistency will produce great results. Remember, the goal of your SEO strategy is not to get on the front page of the Google listing for a particular topic. Your goal is to grow your business and position yourself as an expert.
Choose Relevant Topics
The hardest part about content creation is to think of new things to say all of the time. There are many tools that you can use to help you to brainstorm different content topics. Keep a running list of topics somewhere that you can easily find.
- Answer parent/patient questions: Your patient’s parents are a great source of content. Keep track of the questions that they ask you and record your answers to use for content. Be sure to either ask their permission to use their question/personal details or change the details enough that no one knows where that question came from. For example, I would constantly get questions about constipation in kids, so I did a whole content series on the topic from diagnosis to treatment and prevention.
- Discuss health topics that are in the news: A great source of ideas are health topics that are currently in the news. You can apply your expertise to the topic and explain it in a way that parents can understand it. During the pandemic, I did a series of posts about COVID and the ways (as we understood it at the time) that it affected children and how to keep them well.
- Use Google to find questions to answer: When you “google” a subject or a topic, if you scroll down to the middle of the page, it has a section called “people also ask.” Using some of these questions as topics for your content is helpful to increase your SEO rankings and visibility. For example, if I google “measles,” I can scroll down to the middle of the first page and find the questions, “How long does measles last?” “What happens if you are exposed to measles?” and “Can you get measles if you had the vaccine?” These questions would make excellent topics for your content if you were doing a series on measles.
- Holidays/seasons: Using holidays or seasons as a sub-topic for your content is also helpful. For example, each year for Halloween, I did a post about trick or treating safety. For summer vacation, I did posts about sunburns and drowning prevention.
Simplify Complex Subjects
Many times medical topics are very complex and often the nuances of the information go unappreciated when these topics are presented in the media. As a pediatrician, you are used to breaking down complex topics to explain them to parents. When you are creating content, you should take these same principles and apply them to how you present your topic. You don’t want to use medical jargon and complex words to convey your point. Simplify your language and make it easy for parents to understand what you are teaching them.
Storytelling and analogies are a great way to explain complicated subjects. You can use de-identified patient stories or get permission to share their real stories. If you don’t have a specific story for a certain topic, you can make one up. For example, choose a character name and tell a story about how a child came home from school complaining of headache and then you can launch into how you think about headaches in children as a pediatrician. People relate well to stories and can better understand and remember what you are trying to teach.
Pick A Platform
There are so many ways to connect with your audience these days. In the past, you would need to buy commercials or get invited onto TV shows in order to be able to promote yourself. Now, you can just pick a platform and start promoting your business for little to no cost. While that may seem simple, it can feel overwhelming to know which platform to choose or how to post on all of the platforms at once.
My advice is to start with one platform that you can (mostly) own for yourself and also add in one platform that is owned by someone else. The platforms that, for the most part, are ones that you can own yourself are a YouTube channel, your own podcast or writing a blog on your own website. Choose one of these platforms to make your “headquarters” for your content. There are subtle SEO tricks for each of these platforms that are beyond the scope of this article, but really consistently posting high quality content will go a long way to boosting your visibility. In addition to your headquarters, I recommend choosing one other platform where you can take the content that you have already done and repurpose it to reach a wider audience. For example, you can take clips of your YouTube content and repurpose them for Instagram or take snippets of your blog articles and repurpose them for Facebook and LinkedIn. When you are first getting started, don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by trying to post on all of the platforms. Find the one where your audience is most consistently and be there for them. With time and tools, you can expand into other platforms.
Post Consistently and Call Your Audience to Action
Haphazardly posting content does not really help your SEO or your visibility at all. You need to have a plan for consistent content creation and execute on that plan. When I was creating content for my practice, I would do a quarterly content calendar of topics. I would write one blog post per week and I planned out all of the topics at the beginning of each quarter. This gave me a topic for each week so that I didn’t have to think of it on the fly. A content calendar also helped me to be consistent when things got busy. Often, I would batch content by sitting down and writing a month’s worth of blog posts in a day. Then, I scheduled them to post weekly.
Another thing to remember is if you don’t give people the ability to buy from you, then all of your content creation is in vain. In each of my blog posts, I put a button with a link to my meet and greet scheduling. Since I required a meet and greet before I enrolled a patient in the practice, this is what I did. If you don’t require a meet and greet, you could link to your enrollment form as your call to action. Just do something that gives the person consuming your content the ability to buy what you are selling.
Speaking of call to action, I did a webinar for SEO for small medical practices that you can find by enrolling the DPC Pediatrician Academy.
Dr. Andrea Wadley is a retired pediatrician who owned a pediatric direct primary care practice from 2018-2024. She is still a cheerleader for direct care practices and pediatricians.
