Nobody wants to be the best kept secret! Have you ever been out in the community sharing about your pregnancy center and someone says: “I never knew you were here”? You may offer the best services in town, but people need to know that you exist. A blog is one of the most cost-effective and easiest forms of marketing you can use to raise awareness of your services and drive clients to your center.
In this week’s free guide, we will show you that with a little bit of brainstorming and planning, you will be well on your way to creating blog posts that provide valuable information and attract clients to your pregnancy center.
Why your center should have a blog
A blog is a great marketing tool to help spread the word about the services you offer. Through blogging you can connect with potential clients and establish your pregnancy center as a trusted authority to help with the questions and concerns they are facing with their unplanned pregnancy.
Here are three reasons you should incorporate a blog into your marketing mix.
A blog helps you connect with your target audience
Gen Z and Millennials (ages <12- 37) are online and search there first for any information they need. They’re often embarrassed to talk to their friends or parents about their sexuality and health, so they go online. Having a blog filled with helpful information on issues relevant to them is what they need and are searching.
A blog helps your SEO
We write about SEO (search engine optimization) a lot, but that’s because it’s vital to reaching more clients! When you blog it will help make your site more visible to search engines:
Your blog provides more pages on your site for search engines to crawl
This is really important because without fresh content, search engines, such as Google, will write off your website as not valuable or relevant to potential searchers. Fresh content also indicates that you care about your readers and are actively adding valuable content that they find useful. It shows you are an authority in what you do.
Your blog posts keep people on your site longer
This is one of the metrics Google and other search engines use to determine whether your site is worth showing in search results. If people immediately leave your site, it signals that your site isn’t valuable or helpful. But if people are sticking around, that means there’s likely important information there for others to read as well.
Your blog posts create more internal and external links
This is another factor Google looks at when reviewing sites. Links to your website and within your website help establish authority, especially if other websites are linking to your content as well (they’ll be more likely to do this if you offer fresh content!)
A blog establishes authority & trust
To drive more clients through your doors, you need to be relevant and speak with authority, because this builds trust. If your site is full of information your clients are searching for when they need help, they are more likely to book an appointment.
Along those lines, your center can really stand in contrast to abortion clinics and other community health organizations by providing helpful, accurate, and highly-searched-for information on your blog. If you post relevant and helpful information, it builds trust and establishes a lot of authority for your center, making abortion-minded clients much more likely to contact you.
Planning a great blog
Determine who will be in charge of making it happen
40% of people who blog say they spend about three hours per week exclusively on their blog posts. You’ll want to factor in time to plan, research, write, edit, find images, and actually publish your blog. If you have the staffing capabilities, consider having two people help: One to write, the other to edit, find images, and post to social media and your website.
Create an editorial calendar
Decide how frequently you’ll post to your blog, and how you’ll push it out on social media and email. How frequently you post will be determined by how much time you can allocate and how much content you have to work with. You can start with posting one or two times each month and then adjust from there. Consistency is key here, so whatever posting schedule you decide on, commit to sticking to it.
Choose your topics
Spend time thinking about what your clients want and need to know and build from there. Make a list of common questions your clients ask and use that as a starting point. The more topics you can come up with in one sitting, the more time you’ll save later and can dedicate that time to actually writing the blog posts.
Don’t be afraid to use the words and phrases your clients are looking for — abortion, abortion services, how I can get an abortion, etc. You have vital, true information to share with your clients (information they sadly won’t get at an abortion clinic most of the time). You won’t be putting the thought of abortion in their mind by talking about it on your website and blog — it’s already on their mind and they’re looking to you for authoritative, scientific, true information.
Incorporate keywords and core messaging.
Remember to use the highly searched keywords in your area – based on your marketing efforts that you are doing with google ads and other online marketing. You can do keyword research to determine what questions and topics your clients are searching for.
Focus on 1-2 long-tail keywords per blog. “Long-tail” keywords are phrases people search for as opposed to individual words. As search engines become more advanced, they’re able to show more nuanced results, so people are actually typing questions into Google as opposed to isolated words. Examples of long-tail keywords would be: where can I get an abortion, what is the abortion pill, etc. Think about what questions your clients ask and this will give you a pretty good list you can build on!
Make sure your content is really skimmable
Forget everything you learned about writing the perfect 3-5 sentence paragraph and use 1-2 sentence paragraphs instead. Millennials and Gen Z only skim content most of the time and this writing style will help them find the information they need.
Incorporate images into your blog
Images can serve several purposes – just make sure they are sized appropriately! Images that are too big will make your page load slowly and people won’t stick around to see what you have to say. You can use alt tags in your images to increase SEO rankings, and images help break up the text to keep people reading.
Utilize internal links
Think through content on your site that is on the same topic as your blog and link to that content if it would be helpful for your reader. For example, if you’re writing about different types of pregnancy tests, link to your pregnancy test services page. If you’re writing about the importance of ultrasounds and when to get them, link to your ultrasound services page.
Incorporate a call to action
Each post should end with a specific action you want your reader to take. This is called a call to action, or CTA. This could be a link to your contact or appointment page with text that says Schedule An Appointment, or Contact Us to Learn More. Always include a link with your CTA.
Make your blog mobile-friendly
Most of your readers will be accessing your site on their phones so make sure the blogs load well on mobile. If the font is too big or small, misaligned, or covered by images, your readers won’t stick around.
Amplify your content
Plan to post every blog to your Facebook and Google My Business to make it easier for people to find. Include links to your blog posts in emails to your donors so they can help share your content on social media as well.
We hope these tips help take the unknown and apprehension out of blogging! If you are interested in incorporating blogging for your center, contact Choose Life Marketing. We know it can make an impact in the number of clients contacting you for help and support.
Give us a call at 573-445-9295, email us at info@chooselifemarketing.com to learn more about how we can help your center start blogging to reach more abortion-minded women.
