Practical Content Writing Tips for Health Related Businesses

Writing copy in the healthcare space comes with its challenges. In this article we share 3 practical tips to improve your content as a health business or website.

Content creation in healthcare can be tough. Perhaps more than any other industry, factual accuracy is potentially life or death. And at the same time, it can be challenging to make complex subject matters easy to comprehend. Over recent years, it’s been widely discussed how algorithm updates appear to affect healthcare businesses driving traffic to their sites from Google.

With that in mind, here are 3 tips for your content marketing efforts if you’re working in a healthcare related business.

Work with Qualified Experts

Google isn’t checking the educational history of the people writing for your website. So don’t make qualified experts a Google thing. Instead, the main reason to work with qualified healthcare professionals is to ensure the accuracy of your information.

If you’re using copywriters who don’t have medical backgrounds, then why not have them fact checked by someone who does? This all has a positive influence on the quality of your content. You can specify (like many of the big health related websites do) who fact checked it and their background, which adds credibility for readers and helps them to trust what you’re writing.

Commission Credible Research

One of the benefits of working in the healthcare space is the sheer volume of data available to us from all kind of credible organizations. But when everyone is using the same data, content becomes very samey and standing out becomes tougher.

If there’s a topic you’re particularly passionate about or work in, then consider commissioning your own research. This doesn’t have to be a medical study (those have probably already been done and you can use that data in your writing). But maybe consider a poll or survey to gather unique information on attitudes towards something.

Bodytrak did this recently with a study on the prevalence of symptoms associated with tinnitus. There was already plenty of information out there about how many people are diagnosed, but they asked people about symptoms associated to find a unique angle about the number of people who’ve experienced symptoms without a diagnosis.

Simple polls can be cost effective and quick to run.

Start every piece of content with the “why”

It’s easy to pour resource into content and this is particularly the case in healthcare, where there’s a seemingly endless list of topics you could talk about.

But before putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) make sure you know why you’re writing this content.

• Is it to drive traffic from search?
• Is it to engage a social media audience?
• Is it to attract links?

We’ve never been big fans of content schedules that centre on a certain volume of content. Instead, worry less about the amount of content you’re writing and more about the objectives, how effectively it is meeting those objectives and ultimately the quality.

Good luck!