The hardest part of publishing is usually deciding what to write about. The answer is being said out loud at your reception desk about forty times a week.
Key takeaways
- The questions patients ask before booking are almost exactly the questions they type into a search box or an assistant.
- A two-week logging exercise at reception usually produces six months of topics.
- Use the patient's words, not the clinical term, because the patient's words are what gets typed.
Every conversation about content marketing eventually stalls on the same question: what would we even write about? Clinics assume the answer requires a strategist. It does not. It requires a notepad at the front desk.
The exercise
For two weeks, ask whoever answers the phone and greets patients to write down every question they get asked before an appointment is booked. Not clinical questions during treatment — the ones that come before the commitment. One line each, in the words the patient used.
Most clinics end up with somewhere between forty and eighty. After removing duplicates, thirty or so distinct questions. That is six months of publishing, sourced in two weeks, by people who were going to be at the desk anyway.
Why these are the right questions
Because a question someone is willing to ask a stranger on the phone is a question they have already typed into a search box, usually more than once, usually before they called. The phone call is what happened after they failed to find a clear answer.
If they could not find it, neither could the hundred other people that week with the same question who did not call anyone.
The phone call is what happens after someone fails to find the answer. Most people who fail to find it do not call.
Use their words
This is the part clinics get wrong most often, and it is the difference between a page that works and one that does not.
Patients do not search for "temporomandibular joint dysfunction". They search for "jaw clicking when I chew". They do not search for "post-operative sequelae". They search for "how long will my face be swollen after wisdom teeth".
Write the page with the patient's phrasing in the title and the heading, then use the clinical term inside where it belongs. You lose nothing in accuracy and you become findable by people who do not know the word for their problem — which is nearly all of them, because knowing the word is what the appointment is for.
What to do with the list
- Sort roughly by how often each question came up. Frequency at the desk is a decent proxy for search frequency.
- Mark any that touch a service you want more of. Those go first.
- Keep the list somewhere shared, and let the desk keep adding. New questions appear seasonally and after anything changes in your services.
Then publish one at a time, in the patient's language, naming your city, answering it properly rather than teasing an answer and asking them to book.
If you use Riseo, this list is most of the onboarding. The engine generates topics on its own from your services and local search data, but the questions your own front desk hears are the highest-quality input you can give it, and they are free.