An increasingly aging population is leading to a growth in demand for doctors and dentists, but the competition is also growing at a rapid pace. Private medical practitioners, urgent care providers, hospital systems and other healthcare service providers are competing for a slice of the market with a greater intensity than ever before.

As a result, healthcare providers have to be more proactive and adopt new approaches to reach out to potential patients in such a competitive market. Patients are well informed today, and highly discerning about their choice of medical practitioners. A large number of potential patients review information available on the Internet before they decide on visiting a doctor or dentist. This is where a medical blog comes in.

If a doctor or a dentist is ready to invest a few precious minutes per week in writing an authoritative blog post, it can be one of the smartest marketing strategies for their medical practice. A medical blog that informs patients about the latest innovations in medicine, new treatments and procedures available for various ailments, and other updates in the area of medical science and technology, it can prove to be a hit among the readers.

The medical or dental blog does not really have to care about marketing the practice consciously. The focus of the healthcare blog can be exclusively on providing useful information to potential patients. Many of the readers may tend to visit the blog regularly, and become loyal to the space. Some may subscribe to the RSS feed to receive each blog post directly into their mail box. Whenever a reader finds a blog post very compelling, he or she may spread it through social media networks, resulting in a wider exposure for the doctor’s blog.

Google and other search engines are likely to attach higher weight to such informative and authoritative medical blog posts, and the page rankings of the blog will improve over a period of time. The most direct benefit to the doctor or dentist will be that the local readers of the blog are more likely to visit the blogging doctor’s website, and eventually the doctor’s office.