SEO health blogs and content marketing
A blog post, and the other content a practice, a hospital, a company or a medical writer publishes on its own site, is written so that someone searching for health information arrives at it rather than at somebody else's, trusts what they find and gets their answer. The work runs from settling what the content and the site are for and what a provider buys in content marketing, through the search intent, the keyword, the page and the trust signals a reader and a crawler both look for, to getting the post in front of the right readers, keeping it working after it is published, and being found when a search summary or a chatbot answers in its place.
What content marketing is for
Content marketing promotes a business by giving readers information they will find useful and relevant. People increasingly shop the web for health care and health information, and they want real information rather than advertisements or being sold to. Crafted properly, the content can recruit clients to a service or product, build the business's credibility in public and promote reliable health information to internet users. It can help promote medical practices, hospitals and other health care teams to potential customers as "likable experts".
Its forms include blogs, feature articles, videos, podcasts, newsletters, press releases, special reports, white papers and tweets. Web content should be designed to attract attention, get people to listen, incite them to action and inspire them to recruit others, and ideally it engages people at all four stages and moves them from one to the next. The aim is not always money: the content is also meant to change health behaviours.
Content marketing for medicine is effectively a sales piece, but one that tries to be geared more towards patient education than towards overt selling, written to make medicine more understandable to the average person, and the best way to sell oneself is to be helpful. Such content, blogs and condition papers among it, sits on a hospital's or practice's own website so that patients and potential patients can benefit from it, understand what the practice is about and, it is hoped, choose its practitioners as their own. In 2015 medicine lagged other industries in adopting content marketing, and many practices were not even aware of how to do it, which left an open door with lots of opportunities.
Writers sometimes have to sell the value of content marketing to physicians, but physicians can be won over: a neurosurgery department's website, after a redesign and marketing campaign in 2009, went from about 400 to 1,000 monthly viewers within a month, and by 2014 had more than 100,000 users a month. Content writing will not make a writer famous, but in 2015 the young field offered rewarding work to writers who want to work with health care providers and connect the public to accurate, reliable health information.
Copywriting skills and ethics
Copywriting, persuasive writing to sell a business or its services, takes three skills: knowing how to sell without overselling as an advertisement would; finding a way to benefit the reader by being useful, or at the very least entertaining; and being "journalism-ish", researching and writing somewhat like a journalist, but not from an unbiased perspective.
The ethical issues in health care content marketing include patient privacy law, client vulnerability, and overpromising or sensational language. Content marketing is a way to "battle junk on the Internet", so the content should promote reliable, evidence-based research. Levels of review before publication vary: in some practices physicians approve material before it goes online, and in others fact-checking is left to the writer.
What a health website is for
Reading a health website is a different experience from reading a printed patient brochure or a health book, so writing for websites needs different considerations. A patient with a new diagnosis who receives a handout from their physician, or buys a best-selling book, may be willing to carve out distraction-free time to read it, but an internet user faced with a vast amount of free information available in under a second is not usually invested in any particular post. So for web content to be consumed it must be very easy to find and to scan, and both informative and engaging. Each website also has its own goal, and a target audience that is often much more specific than the general public.
Health websites differ in their goals. Large companies, governments, universities, hospitals and major health organisations often run sites with hundreds or thousands of pages and posts, whose goal is usually to make conventionally accepted information easily accessible to the general public, such as messages on healthy eating, physical activity or how to reduce the risk of disease. A site for a clinic, physician or other health professional may instead use more targeted messaging as a marketing tool for the products, programmes and services it offers, reaching a particular audience with specific pains and goals, attracting new potential clients and converting them into loyal readers, email subscribers and paying clients or patients through specific rather than general health messages; a midwife may target pregnant women in her metropolitan area, and a physiotherapist people interested in a particular sport. Such a site aims not to educate the general public but to present its owners as thought leaders, to educate its targeted audience and to encourage readers to take specified actions. The actions include sharing the post on social media, booking an appointment, giving an email address and permission to keep emailing, for example in exchange for something downloadable and following all legal requirements including the General Data Protection Regulation, and sometimes buying online. Calls to action such as pop-up windows, buttons or requests like "leave a comment below" encourage these actions.
A website with no new content is only an online brochure, which is to say an advertisement, because a visitor who comes back the next day and finds nothing new has no reason to visit a third time. The key to content marketing is to stay relevant, and freshness is essential to an effective campaign, since readers do not return to old content. Staying on top of the news is an opportunity to publish up-to-date, relevant information for customers. The more regularly content is updated, the more often search engines crawl and index it and the higher it ranks, and blogs keep a site's content fresh while also building relationships and encouraging social sharing. Publishing posts gives visitors a reason to return, which brings traffic, then visibility, then more business down the road, and this is why blog posts are part of content marketing.
Where a blog post fits
A blog post is one piece of a larger puzzle and by itself will not make a difference to a company, just as a single case report does not change medical practice and the accumulation of several does.
The marketing funnel shows where a blog post sits in that puzzle. Prospects enter the funnel and some come out as clients, although a funnel-shaped colander would be a truer picture, because some prospects get out through holes before they turn into clients. A content marketing strategy creates different content for the top, the middle and the bottom of the funnel, abbreviated as tofu, mofu and bofu; blog posts are top-of-funnel content, which creates awareness and helps an audience find the writer or company in the sea of content that is the internet.
Blog posts are simpler to create than other types of content, though not necessarily easy; a video, for example, needs specific equipment. A finished post is also versatile, since pieces of it can become social media posts, and a post that draws good feedback can become the starting point for a video, a series or an infographic. Blog posts also attract traffic and awareness to the website as a whole, because someone searching for content may come across one post and through it discover the writer or the company.
Blog posts are written both for a medical writer's own site and for clients. In an April 2021 poll of attendees of a European Medical Writers Association webinar on blogging, most wanted both to create a blog of their own and to offer blog writing as a service, and smaller, equal numbers wanted only one or the other.
The objective of a blog should be settled first, because it decides the best type of content and of blog post. An individual medical writer can use a blog to show that they can write and to demonstrate expertise; a company uses it to demonstrate expertise in the services it provides; and either can write to educate, or simply about something they are passionate about. Any of these reasons is valid, and thinking about it before starting the blog helps create content pillars: standing subject areas, such as one for each type of service a medical writing company provides, like regulatory writing or medical communications, or subtopics inside them. The pillars help in finding ideas for new content.
Blog posts and their neighbouring forms
A blog post arguably differs from a feature article in its angle: a blog or opinion piece carries a perspective, the writer's or the company's, while a feature article is an exposition of the topic.
Players in the industry use blog posts even where they do not call them blogs. A scientific publisher's opinion pages are not peer-reviewed articles but opinion pieces that help form a connection with the audience; a language service provider that translates and localises for pharmaceutical and life science companies has well-structured blog posts and well-defined content pillars, visibly uses subheadings and links, and shows how a blog can drive traffic and awareness; and a relatively new UK medical communications company uses its blog to connect with potential clients.
How search ranks content
Search engine optimisation (SEO) affects only a search engine's organic results; sponsored results, where a company pays to appear in a listing, are separate. A search engine ranks content by what it considers most relevant to the user's query, so the way content is created, managed and updated has an important impact on traffic and visibility, which in turn may influence enquiries, leads and conversions. A website keeps a business in touch with customers and prospects at any hour, but an online presence is not enough without the right search strategy for customers to find it. Position matters, not mere presence: in 2014 around three quarters of users never scrolled past the first page of results, so businesses that dominated the first page were much more likely to reach potential customers than those further down. Every business, large or small, should be considering SEO in everything it does online.
What the client is buying
A client who asks for a search-optimised blog wants someone looking for health information online to reach the client's content at the top of the results: on the first page, and ideally among the top three results, because that is where most clicks occur. The optimisation is aimed at Google, which in 2025 still represented 90% of online searches. The client's purpose is marketing: visibility, clicks through to the website, and credibility and brand authority, with topical authority in a niche built by writing a lot of blogs. Writing such a blog for a lay audience means writing accessibly, in plain language, as in patient education materials.
Ranking at the top of Google cannot be bought, so for a writer SEO means learning to create high-quality, credible content that is as helpful as possible. Google wants to give users a quick, helpful answer so that they come back, so the task is to find out what readers really want and to deliver it. Content also has to be unique, or the search engine has no reason to select it, so it helps to analyse what is already available and find a better way to satisfy the readers. The content should be high-quality and original, written around the terms the site wants to be found for, because search engines list a site only for information closely matching the searcher's query, and irrelevant content that adds no value is far less likely to rank high.
Building topical authority takes a large volume of content, so for a freelance writer SEO work is a regular assignment of at least one blog a month. Quality is hard to scale with quantity, so one such writer caps her own output at four health blogs a month.
The lifecycle of a post
The lifecycle of a blog post usually runs: an idea of the writer's own or a brief from a client; research; writing, with structure, style, SEO and storytelling layered in; revision by the client or editing by the writer; publication; sharing; and asking for feedback, which at least sometimes gives the idea for the next post. A post can be written without all these elements, but layering them in can make a better post.
Content ideas can come from news of the company or practice, recent headlines, new research, timely reminders such as flu shots, health events such as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, patient stories, used with permission or anonymously with proper protection against identifying individuals, and common patient questions.
A blog post may seem simple but takes a while to write properly: preparing one can take four to even eight hours, so the time actually spent should be tracked. The figure matters both for quoting clients and for a writer's own blog.
Consistency is one of the key aspects of keeping a blog alive, so a writer who wants to post consistently should decide the frequency and set aside a number of hours consistent with the rest of the workload, so as not to be overwhelmed when time is short. A single medical writer's own blog usually shows the opposite pattern: in one example, one post in June, four in July, single posts in August and September, then November highlights published in December, and nothing since. The aim is consistency, but life happens, and a writer whose blog has lapsed should simply start again.
Search intent and the keyword
A brief usually names one main keyword per blog post or optimised landing page. A keyword by itself may not mean much, so the writer's first job is to establish the search intent behind it, which is the motivation for the search, the searcher's actual questions and their emotional state. For example, a blog titled "how to get rid of tonsil stones" serves readers who probably already know they have the condition and want solutions, so spending a lot of space on explaining what a tonsil stone is would be a poor choice.
Writers new to SEO can think that optimising a blog means only placing the main keyword in the right spots. Placing the keyword matters, because it tells the search engine what the blog is about, but the focus belongs on understanding the intent behind the query, including the reader's emotional state. It is very hard to build any trust with a reader who is worried, anxious or concerned, so such a reader has to be reassured first, in the hope that they will then listen to any advice; the step is very important for a blog but very rarely taken.
In 2021 keywords were moving away from single words to longer phrases, called long-tail keywords. So much content exists that trying to rank for a broad term such as "medical writer" will fail, while a phrase such as "freelance medical writer based in Cascais" gives better chances. A refined phrase may bring slightly fewer visitors, but those who come are primed for exactly what the writer does.
Key phrases start from the customer: why a potential customer visits the site, what they are trying to find and what terms they would use to find it. Looking through the customer's eyes reveals the phrases that generate traffic, and those phrases then go into page titles, descriptions, URLs and page content.
The skeleton draft and the research
A full first draft is best preceded by a simple bullet-point list of the subtopics the post will cover, called a skeleton draft. For the writer's own blog, the list can show that a topic is too big: readiness for the medical device regulation, for example, may be better covered in separate posts on its subtopics. For a client, the list is a proposal: asked by a language service provider for a post on readiness for the regulation, a writer might propose translation timelines, the importance of translation under the new regulation, and the challenges the regulation poses for companies.
The list itself goes to the client before the first draft, with no need for a separate document. The client may already have content on a subtopic, or want different ones, and agreeing this beforehand saves a lot of work compared with hearing it after a first draft. The agreed list also helps in the revision phase: when the client asks for more to be added, the writer can ask whether to raise the word count or write a separate post. The skeleton draft thus helps manage the client's expectations.
Medical writers bring something special to the research for a blog post: they are used to looking for evidence in primary sources and to navigating complex information, and they do not take their data from other blogs.
A writer should still read what competitors are writing, to see how they cover a topic and find a different angle, which makes a post more distinguishable. Where a competitor has covered a topic adequately, the writer can expand on it, much as research expands on earlier work, and publish a more robust post.
The headline
The headline, the main title of the post, is usually what makes a reader click through: among search results, the headline that best relates to what the reader is looking for gets the click. Because it matters so much, a writer can write a preliminary title and refine it to the audience's expectations once the post is written.
The best headline is the line already inside the audience's head, and knowing the audience gives a better chance of matching what they are looking for, in the headline and in the keyword. Physicians searching about a growth disorder might look for the clinical term, skeletal dysplasia, while a lay audience will look for normal child height, so the words chosen influence who clicks through.
With the advent of voice search, many people search in questions, such as how to do this or when this is normal. A headline written as a question can therefore improve both the ranking of the content and the curiosity of the reader, because behind the search engine is a person, and people are curious and prefer some writing styles to others.
The introduction
The introduction is akin to the lead of a news piece: background that entices the reader to keep reading, and that can summarise what the post will cover. It matters because the reader reads the headline, clicks through, reads the introduction and only then decides whether to read the rest.
Introductions are tricky to get right, even for a writer who specialises in SEO blogs. There is very little time to hook readers, and they need to trust the piece from the start to keep reading, so the first few lines are the chance to show that the writer understands their concerns, questions and likely misconceptions, in effect "I get you, and I am going to give you the answer you need".
In an example introduction for the keyword "when boys stop growing", the opening acknowledges that a parent would wonder about this and that it is a completely normal and fair question to have, as a reassuring first step, and then gives the answer as quickly as possible, between the ages of 16 and 18, backed by evidence to build trust and authority. The answer could have come even earlier in the sentence. The last part of the introduction tells readers what the blog will cover, so that they know what to expect if they keep reading.
The introduction is the most important part of a blog, and the PAS formula, for problem, agitate, solution, is worth looking into for it. The first paragraph should tell the reader what information they will find and why it is relevant to them: it states the problem, agitates it by showing what follows from it, and promises something worth reading. In a hypothetical migraine example, migraines affect so many millions of people; the medications for them have many secondary effects; and a new therapy that could be commercially available within a year has less than half the secondary effects of current ones.
A reader who is obliged to read can still enjoy a piece, because the same principles of enjoyment apply to forced and voluntary readers. For forced readers, such as medical students reading a health blog, the emotional hook may not be necessary, but the headline should still be obvious about the benefits and show them that the piece holds something relevant to them.
The structure of the page
Structure gives a blog clarity for its readers and for the search engines and AI systems that read it. In one structure template, the main title is the H1 and the subsections are H2s, and there is only one H1 on the page, because more is very confusing to the search engine. The heading levels should be clearly visible in the working document. After the introduction, a long blog can have a key-takeaways box of bullet points for readers who do not have time to read the whole thing. The author has a bio of a couple of lines and an author page.
Subheadings, the smaller titles along the text, separate the subtopics, and they help the many online readers who do not read everything to grasp the main ideas.
Another arrangement of the page runs in order: the headline; the introduction; two, three or perhaps four subheadings, with more not recommended, and the main copy between them; a short summary recapping what was said; and the call to action that the summary leads into. The main copy expands the bullet points of the skeleton draft into paragraphs, with the ideas flowing from one point to the next.
Some writers think a template stifles creativity, but in one experienced blogger's view it does the opposite: knowing where the text is to arrive leaves the writer free to choose the path and confident of the result, whereas working without a shape risks a final product that is not what was expected. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style puts it this way: the more clearly the writer perceives the shape, the better the chances of success.
Writing for readers who scan
Writing for the internet is difficult because few readers, one in five by some accounts, read past the headline. Journalistic style is recommended for it: a catchy headline, an attention-grabbing lead and a "nut paragraph" early on summarising what will be said; and, for skimming readers, bullets, indents, short paragraphs and accessible language, usually at a fourth- to eighth-grade level.
People used to being entertained online scan a post for instant clues that it is relevant to them, and if they do not find them they hit the back button and look for another website. Because people do not invest in reading word for word unless their first scan of a post looks promising, the main points belong upfront, perhaps with a hook in the introduction, the reverse of forms that lead up to a conclusion. Screens can be hard to read, so a "wall of text" is best avoided wherever possible: the more skimmable the important content, the more easily it is seen and remembered, which is why many popular sites use abundant whitespace, bullets, boxes, graphs and several images to break up the text and keep the reader engaged. Headings and subheadings let readers scan an overview of a post's contents. Descriptive headings and subheadings break the text into its main sections; the content under each can be summarised in its first or last paragraph, and in a post optimised for search the keyword goes into some of the headings wherever it fits naturally. The body should be narrative, with subheadings, bullets and visuals wherever possible to break up the monotony of the text.
Images
A blog post should include at least one image to break up the text, because readers might not read a solid block of text and images are among the things readers look at; the image should be somewhat related to what is being said, and an infographic carrying the same information as the post is a further option. Visuals and videos can be recommended to the client too, since they aid understanding and complement the explanation.
Images should be used strategically, avoiding the stereotypical "guy in a suit at a whiteboard", and illustrations can highlight colourful ideas or metaphors.
The close and the call to action
A strong implications and conclusions section translates the findings into real-world impact, what the reader can actually do with the information, and a very long blog benefits from a conclusion that summarises the whole.
The closing section is better called "final thoughts" than "conclusion", which sounds academic for a blog, and it should carry value of its own rather than give a high-level recap: read apart from the blog, it should still be helpful, so if the blog offers a list of tips, at least some of them should be obtainable from it. Three to five FAQs at the bottom can summarise the questions covered or answer related questions the audience has on the topic.
The blog can then point the reader somewhere next, such as another free resource, the company's page or a prompt to ask their healthcare provider, so that it does not simply end and leave the reader disconnected and unable to use what they have read. A blog typically has one or two calls to action, chosen according to the intent. A reader already seeking a solution can be directed to buy a product, contact a clinic or book an appointment, and a reader still at the stage of gathering awareness and information is sent to another blog on the same site.
A call to action should never be left out, because readers are distracted, and a writer who wants them to do something has to tell them exactly what: to comment, to share, or, after a post explaining how the company is overcoming the challenges of the medical device regulation, to contact the company through a link to its contact page. Even without a particular action in mind, the post should still ask for one, if only to read another post, because the time readers spend on the site benefits the SEO of the whole site.
Links
Links are usually requested, and they should sit naturally in the text, since the flow always has priority. Internal links to related pages and posts on the same site, with topic-specific anchor text rather than "click here", keep readers on the site and help them get more information. Linking to related posts is also a trust signal for Google. The longer readers stay, the more valuable the site is deemed to be, so search engines may show it to more people; the aim is a web of content that makes the site a trusted information hub for its target audience. Internal links can usually sit in the body of the text, or else serve as references at the bottom. External links point to the studies and guidelines used as references, but because they can invite readers to leave the site, links to other sites, including PubMed, may be discouraged in the body of the text though they may be acceptable in the references at the bottom, and how links are handled should be confirmed with the client.
Keyword placement and metadata
The main keyword usually appears only three or four times in a blog. Over-inserting the same key phrases, which is called keyword stuffing, can go against the ranking: a blog that uses its main keyword more often is penalised by Google because the optimisation is too obvious, so the keyword should be included naturally in the text. SEO is important to consider, but "We write for human beings!", and the text should not be overfilled with keywords just to appear first in search results.
In a worked example, the assigned keyword "postnasal drip tonsil stones" was deliberately ungrammatical. It first had to be repaired, since it needed at least one more word to make sense and "post-nasal" needed a hyphen, and the main query people had turned out to be about the relationship between the two conditions, which the content then addressed. The keyword went into the URL, the H1, the introduction, the first H2, because the relationship was the key focus, and the metadata, and the infographics were created to align with the same intent.
Metadata is the title and description supplied on top of the blog copy and displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). It is the one place with a length restriction, because over-long text is cut off in the listing: the target is 60 characters, not words, for the title and at most 160 characters for the description. The description should be engaging enough to earn the click and should summarise what the blog contains, although the search engine may display a different passage of the blog instead.
Language, tone and storytelling
Terminology should suit the target audience's reading level, because although the reading score may not directly affect search ranking, it does affect readability and the user experience. In one SEO editor's work, simplifying the language accounts for about 80% of edits.
Writing for a company usually calls for a more formal tone, which shows in the way the text is written, while a single medical writer's own blog can perfectly well take a relaxed tone. Humour is tricky: unless the client specifically asks for it, it is best avoided, because humour is mainly cultural and what is funny for some people may not be funny for others.
Storytelling elements can be incorporated in a technical blog post too, and they improve its readability.
Trust signals
Search engines and AI systems do not read a whole blog post; they look for trust signals instead, and human readers of a health blog look for them too. So optimising for readers is the best way to optimise for everything else. Google's concept of EEAT, for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, is about how trust is built.
In a side-by-side comparison of two blogs with the same title on ADHD in children, most of a webinar audience trusted the second after a one-second look. The first was typical AI-generated text: the information was there, but the language was complicated and hard to read, which does not build trust. The second had a named author with a clickable author page whose credentials matched the subject, a statistic linked to its source, the source named in the text as well as in the reference list beneath, and US data from the CDC for a US article.
Experience means practical or personal experience made visible: hands-on clinical work, anecdotes, case studies, practical tips and best practices, or attendance at a conference related to the health topic. These are not boxes to check but options to choose from according to what the piece needs.
Expertise comes largely from the author. Credentials in the field should be apparent on the site, with a dedicated author page, and the grammar should be perfect, as part of building trust. A writer without credentials can bring expertise in by asking experts for opinions and pulling their quotes into the content.
Authority is mostly a property of the brand and outside the writer's control, but citing well-known bodies such as the CDC in the US or the NHS in the UK brings some of it. A blog for an already-trusted brand such as Healthline, which is itself a trust signal, has a better chance of ranking.
Trustworthiness comes from transparency about the evidence and the process. Sources should be chosen carefully, preferring primary sources such as studies and avoiding other blogs, which are already digested information. A numbered reference list that shows how each source was used adds trustworthiness, although a client will not always ask for one. The publication date should be shown, and a recent date is an added trust signal, because people tend to trust what is more recent; likewise, a writer can aim for at least a couple of sources from the last three to five years. A medical disclaimer should state that the content is not medical advice and that readers should consult a healthcare professional, and a full editorial process should say who wrote the piece, who reviewed it and when it was updated.
In a Healthline article that was recent in June 2025, the title tells the story of a cardiologist applying his own advice to his own heart health, blending expertise with personal experience. A medical reviewer from the American College of Cardiology adds qualified expertise although the health writer has no credentials, the publication month and year are given precisely, the sources are linked, and expert quotes from the cardiologist run throughout. Its one weakness is that the sources are not numbered, so a reader cannot see which study supports which statement without clicking each hyperlink.
Length and on-page tools
The question to ask of a blog is not its length but whether each sentence or section helps the audience and satisfies the intent, though concision still matters. A real-life example, an expert quote or an anecdote can justify extra length, and health blogs are sometimes very comprehensive and long. Because the length a blog needs is hard to estimate, one writer gives no word count but looks at the top-ranking blogs for an idea and then decides what is best for the audience.
On-page SEO tools such as the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress evaluate whether an article is competitive and highlight what is missing or not well optimised, usually with a red, yellow and green traffic-light system; the Jetpack facility for WordPress may be similar. Their grades are recommendations: a writer whose audience is other medical writers, and who therefore does not write in lay language, almost never reaches green.
Such software can be used, but the writer knows the audience best, and nothing in SEO is set in stone: some SEO software asks for more than 800 words, but a post that answers a specific question in 300 words can be 300 words long. The tools are useful for pointing out mechanical omissions, such as an unoptimised image name or an image over a megabyte.
Optimising the site
SEO has on-page and off-page parts and technical elements, such as the robots file, meta tags and canonical URLs, which are not part of the writing and which a writer may not be able to reach even on their own site, although there are things a writer can do within a blog post that improve it.
Images are often overlooked in SEO, yet they are increasingly important to the customer experience and give a business another opportunity to be found, so an image should have a relevant file name and caption and use ALT and title tags. The ALT tag is a text description added to the HTML tag that displays an image, and the title tag is the HTML tag that defines the title of the web page. Images can also be made pinnable with Pinterest's "Pin It" button: in January 2014 Pinterest had more than 70 million users and was one of the fastest-growing social networks and one of the top social media sources of referral traffic to websites.
Site speed is one of the main factors in SEO, so large images, which many writers like to include, should always be compressed so that they do not slow down the whole site. Compressing images is a task for those in charge of their own websites. Many readers who wait too long for a page to load go back to the search results and look for other content, which is called the bounce back, and this too affects the ranking.
Inbound links from other sites remain one of the most important indicators of a site's relevance and importance. A link-building strategy should be planned carefully, choosing a handful of relevant trusted sites rather than many links on poor-quality sites, which work against the site, and unique and compelling content encourages others to link to it naturally. Marketing applications such as Group High can help identify influential bloggers, to generate more word of mouth, increase trust and empower a business's biggest advocates. Sharing on social media tells visitors and the search engine that the content is valuable, especially when it is shared a lot, so every page, news item and blog article should be easy to share through a sharing plugin, such as ShareThis, most of which are free and easy to set up.
A business listing on Google greatly improves visibility in searches, connecting a business with customers looking for it on Google Maps, search or Google+, and in 2014 local search was becoming more important because more and more people searched locally from their phones. The listing should include a phone number that users can click to call, and since in 2014 three out of four mobile searches triggered a follow-up action, whether further research, a store visit, a phone call, a purchase or word-of-mouth sharing, it is vital that the business is featured. In 2014 Google authorship let a writer link blog content to a Google+ profile and stand out more in search results.
Google Analytics, a free tool, shows which search queries generate traffic, which sites refer visitors and what visitors do once they arrive, and monitoring traffic regularly shows how the content can be optimised for search. The site's HTML should be kept clean, correctly formatted, readable and as simple as possible, because anything requiring a lot of code makes it harder for search engine crawlers to find the valuable content, and the keyword-rich copy should sit as high up the page as possible. In 2014 an SEO guide published by Google, covering the basics, site structure and optimising content, was recommended as a starting point for a search strategy, and a business that would rather leave SEO to experts could find reputable agencies in the Recommended Agencies Register.
A free blogging site, such as the free version of WordPress or Blogspot, is a good place to start for a writer who cannot spend money, at the cost of control: the writer cannot control the SEO elements, on most such sites cannot control whether or what advertising appears, and cannot control the look of the site. Paid hosting gives control over the design and keeps advertising off the site, and the choice depends on what the writer wants.
Sharing and promoting the post
Publication does not end the lifecycle. The post should be shared on all the writer's channels, and more than once, because people do not visit social media every day and many will see any one share only once: in 2021, about once a week on LinkedIn, and as often as daily on Twitter, where people post constantly, as well as in a company's newsletter. Fear of seeming annoying is no reason to hold back.
On the internet, "if you build it, they will come" no longer holds: with an estimated 1.88 billion websites online as of 6 August 2021, publishing content is not enough, and strategies that pull readers to it are needed. Those strategies should attract the right people, the client's target audience, rather than traffic in general. Health internet users face many distractions enticing them to other content, so they need to know why they should click, and once they do they need to feel they are in the right place for the right information, or they leave right away. For readers to feel they are in the right place, the writer needs to take into account the audience's socioeconomic status, demographics, psychographics, trust in science and government, altruism and risk perception, and can ask the client to describe the audience in detail or to share anonymised quotes or intake forms.
Four ways get a post in front of as much of the target audience as possible:
- SEO. Find a candidate keyword with an acceptable volume of monthly searches, such as over 1,000 or even 10,000, that is not too difficult to rank for. Review the top 10 or 20 posts currently ranking for it, so that the content is at least as comprehensive and high-quality. Optimise the post for that keyword. Software exists for each step.
- Social media. Different platforms suit different audiences, so post where the client has the largest and most engaged following, with an image or video, an enticing headline and hook, and the direct link. For evergreen content, still relevant 6 to 12 months later or more, schedule several unique posts over the following 6 to 12 months.
- Paid advertising. Boost posts that have already drawn some engagement, or turn them into advertisements, after testing a few options before spending significant amounts.
- Backlinks. Ask the owners of high-volume sites that serve the same audience to link to the content, with personalised outreach even where software finds the sites.
Whether a reader then clicks depends largely on the headline, description and image, which should appeal to the audience's pain points or health goals. In one writer's test of two headlines on the same article, one ending "(the truth)" and the other "(an honest look)", the first drew 18 percent more engagement, showing the difference made by terminology that resonates with the target market. None of these strategies guarantees a result, but the more of them a writer applies, the higher the chance of a post being found and clicked on.
Content writers should know how to use social media to distribute content, while recognising that managing social media can be a full-time job. Content should not be published directly on social media sites; the sites are used to direct readers back to the writer's or client's own website, which keeps control of the content and of clients' access to it. Many managers of health blogs disable page comments when nobody is available to respond to posts with a negative tone or incorrect information.
Keeping a post working
Feedback should then be asked for and comments read, favourable and unfavourable alike, because they give ideas for the next content, which closes the cycle.
Once a site has several blog posts, they should be updated with new content where the topic has developed. For a client, a new development is a reason to propose an update, which may become a new project.
References in a blog post are usually text links rather than a list at the end, and links break, so they should be checked every once in a while; broken links are something many people forget.
Generative AI in content writing
In December 2023, AI use in marketing communications was much more advanced than in scientific and academic writing, and writing a blog post had become very easy. Content marketing had long since embraced generative AI tools for blogs, website content, social media posts, podcast production and ad copywriting.
The drawback is uniformity: the tools give much the same information and much the same blog post. A human still has to hold the strategy and have the concept before anything is prompted.
In marketing, where no confidential information is shared and the aim is promotional, the tools do a really good job, because they have learned which messages best get through the noise.
Being found when AI answers
In 2025 a search could return an AI summary that answers the query, so the user may not click through at all. The goal then shifts from traffic and clicks to visibility, which means getting the client mentioned as a source in that summary. These systems pull the relevant parts of existing content rather than whole pieces, and most of what they summarise comes from health blogs, so a summary is only as good as the blogs it draws on.
Some people skip search engines and hold a whole conversation with a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, getting a lot of information without visiting any website. The objective there is the same: that the client's brand appears in the process, as a cited source or a named brand. AI evaluates trustworthy content somewhat as Google does, because any such tool wants to find the answer that will satisfy readers, so the principles of EEAT and search intent still apply and matter even more than before. Writers who want to do SEO well therefore need to upskill.
One writer for patients finds that clients mostly want nothing AI-generated, yet people get more information from AI-generated content than from content written for them, because it is easier and quicker. Writers cannot stop patients from using AI, but they can influence whether patients find the writer's information instead, and what information the AI gives them. Telling readers that AI is bad is a losing battle, because people have fears and are emotional, and AI is always on.
Anyone can publish something false online and have it be findable, and in one writer's view blogs optimised for search are the way to fight it, so that a person who types "chest pain" at 2 a.m. finds the writer's blog rather than fake data. A paper or a plain-language summary is very hard to optimise this way, but blog content about it can be optimised, so that scientifically and medically validated facts are what people find first. The AI equivalent, which goes by more than one name, such as generative engine optimisation (GEO) or AI optimisation (AIO), aims to structure digital content so that AI retrieves it and cites the article first, so that the information it gives patients is accurate.
Medical and scientific writers start with an advantage: under Google's "Your Money or Your Life" rule, health and financial content is checked very strictly before it is displayed, so that most of the answers a searcher receives are scientifically validated. A medical or scientific writer who cites peer-reviewed studies and other validated information can therefore rank very well, in search results and in AI answers alike.
Tools and resources
Web tools help match a marketing strategy to a company's budget and the content writer's skill level. One such toolkit covers content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal, with the Yoast plugin; word processing in Microsoft Word or Google Docs; editing apps such as the Hemingway App and Grammarly; image editors such as Skitch, Photoshop, Pictionator and PicMonkey; and collaboration software such as Trello, Asana, Google's suite and Skype.
Resources on SEO include the website of the Australian specialist Kate Toon, which carries many resources, and her course, which focuses on SEO and is a bit expensive; in 2021 there seemed to be no book on the subject, only a large quantity of online content. Suggested reading on the marketing and writing side covers content marketing, storytelling and writing in general rather than medical writing specifically.