Why your medical practice needs a blog, and how to get it right

Somewhere in your service area tonight, a person is typing a question into a phone: what a certain test involves, whether a symptom can wait until Monday, which doctor near them takes their insurance. The page that answers them clearly, and shows who wrote it, earns a piece of trust a brochure never will. For most practices, that page does not exist yet.

This article is about that gap. It covers how patients actually look for health information, how Google decides which health pages to show, what a blog does for a practice beyond “content”, and the rules a medical blog has to respect that a restaurant blog does not: accuracy, authorship, readability, privacy and advertising law. It closes with a realistic way to start.

How patients look for health information

The pattern has been stable for more than a decade. In the Pew Research Center’s Health Online survey, about seven in ten adult internet users said they had looked online for health information in the previous year, and most of those searches began at a search engine rather than at a hospital or practice website. The device has changed since then, from a desktop to a phone in a pocket, but the sequence has not: a symptom or a question, a search, a few results opened, a judgment formed.

That judgment is what matters to a practice. A patient reading a clear answer on your site, signed by a physician, with a date and a source list, has met you before calling. A patient who found the same answer on a national health portal has met the portal. The blog is where a practice enters that sequence before the appointment is decided.

Two details of the pattern are easy to miss. The first is that most of these searches are questions, not names: patients search for the problem long before they search for a doctor. The second is that the reader is usually on a phone, often outside office hours, which is exactly when the website is the only member of staff on duty.

How Google judges health content

Google publishes the guidelines its human quality raters use, and health is one of the categories they treat most strictly. Pages that can affect a person’s health, safety or finances are labeled “Your Money or Your Life”, or YMYL, and raters are told to hold them to the highest standards of accuracy and trust. The framework they apply is E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, with trust described as the most important of the four.

The practical translation for a practice is short. Content about medical topics is expected to be written or reviewed by people with medical expertise, to say who those people are, and to be maintained rather than published once and forgotten. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks the same questions in plainer words: is it clear who wrote this, is it written for people rather than for search engines, and would a reader leave feeling they got what they came for.

None of this is a ranking trick. It is a description of what a careful reader would want anyway, applied at scale. A practice whose physicians sign what they publish, cite where the information came from and update it when guidance changes is already doing most of it.

What a blog actually does for a practice

A practice website has a limited number of pages a patient will ever look for: the physicians, the services, the location, the insurance list, how to book. Those pages compete for a handful of searches, mostly your name and “specialty near me”. Everything else a patient types, the thousands of questions that come before those searches, has nowhere to land. That is the job of the blog.

• Local search: an article on a specific question, written for your area, can rank for searches your service pages never will, and every such visit is a person who already lives near you. It also supports your service pages through internal links, which is how those pages gain strength over time. Our guide to SEO for doctors explains the mechanics.
• Trust before the first visit: a physician who has explained a condition in writing, plainly and without selling anything, is easier to book than a name on a directory. Patients who read first arrive with better questions and fewer fears.
• Fewer repeated calls: the questions the front desk answers ten times a week, what to bring, how to prepare, what a result means, become links the staff can send instead of paragraphs they recite.
• Material for everything else: each article feeds the Google Business Profile, the newsletter and the social accounts for weeks, instead of leaving them empty or filled with stock graphics.

What a blog does not do is work quickly. A new article typically needs weeks to be indexed and months to settle into its position, and it keeps earning visits for years afterward. That timeline is why the practices that benefit are the ones that publish steadily, not the ones that publish twelve posts in January.

Accuracy, authorship and dates

The first rule of a medical blog is the one physicians already live by: do not publish what you would not say to a patient in the room. In practice that means every clinical statement is reviewed by a physician before it goes live, even when a writer or a staff member drafted it, and that the review is visible to the reader.

• A named author with credentials: full name, degree, specialty and a link to the physician’s bio page. Google’s guidelines and your readers both look for it. How to write a physician bio covers the page it should link to.
• A publication date and a review date, both visible. Medical guidance changes; a page reviewed last year reads as maintained, a page with no date reads as abandoned.
• A “medically reviewed by” line when the author is not the physician, naming who reviewed it and when.
• Sources for anything a patient could act on: guidelines from specialty societies, government health agencies, peer-reviewed journals. List them at the end and link where a link exists.
• A process for updates: someone owns the blog, checks the older articles once or twice a year, and fixes or retires the ones that have aged.

Write for a sixth to eighth grade reading level

This is where most medical content fails, including content written by physicians with the best intentions. The American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health have long recommended that materials for patients be written at about a sixth to eighth grade reading level. The reason is not that patients are unintelligent. It is that a person reading about their own health, on a phone, while worried, has less attention to spend than a person reading at a desk.

The gap between that recommendation and reality is well documented. A 2013 study in JAMA Internal Medicine assessed patient education materials from professional society websites across sixteen medical specialties and found them written, on average, well above the recommended level, at roughly a tenth grade level or higher. Studies in other journals since then, covering individual specialties and hospital websites, have reached the same conclusion again and again. The national literacy assessment that most health literacy work builds on found that only about one adult in eight has proficient health literacy.

Writing plainly is a skill, and it is teachable. The habits that move a page from a twelfth grade level to an eighth grade level are mechanical:

• Short sentences, one idea each. If a sentence needs a semicolon, it is two sentences.
• Everyday words where they exist: “high blood pressure” before “hypertension”, with the medical term in parentheses the first time, so patients learn it.
• Short paragraphs, two to four lines on a phone, with a subheading every few paragraphs so the page can be scanned.
• The answer first, then the explanation. A reader asking whether a symptom is urgent should not have to read the anatomy lesson to find out.
• A readability check before publishing. Free tools estimate the grade level of a draft; treat anything above ninth grade as a draft that needs another pass.

Privacy, testimonials and advertising rules

A medical blog sits inside three sets of rules that other blogs do not. None of them is complicated, but each one has ended careers when ignored.

Patient stories and HIPAA

The federal privacy rule protects any information that could identify a patient, including the fact that someone was a patient at all. A blog post that describes a real case, even without a name, can identify the person to their family, employer or neighbors. Using a patient’s story or image in marketing material requires the patient’s written authorization, and “we changed the name” is not a substitute. Composite or clearly hypothetical examples are the safe way to illustrate a point. The same principle governs replying to reviews and what your contact form collects.

Testimonials and the FTC

The Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides apply to testimonials on a practice website as they do anywhere else: they must reflect a genuine experience, results that are not typical must say so, and any incentive given for a testimonial must be disclosed. In 2024 the FTC also adopted a rule that prohibits fake or purchased reviews and testimonials outright, with civil penalties. A blog that quotes a patient needs the written authorization discussed above, plus a claim that is true as written.

State medical board advertising rules

Every state medical board regulates how physicians advertise, and a blog is advertising whenever it promotes the practice. Florida law, for example, lists false, deceptive or misleading advertising among the grounds for discipline of a physician, and the Board of Medicine can act on a website as readily as on a billboard. The practical rules are the ones you would expect: no claims of superiority you cannot substantiate, no guaranteed results, no “painless” or “permanent” without evidence, and board certification stated exactly as it was issued.

The individual advice point deserves its own sentence. A blog can explain what a symptom usually means; it cannot tell a specific reader what their symptom means. Keep comments closed or moderated, route questions to the phone, and let a short disclaimer say what the article is for.

Accessibility and Spanish

Two audiences are easy to leave out. The first is patients who use a screen reader, magnify text or navigate with a keyboard. An accessible article has real headings, descriptive link text, images with alternative text and enough contrast to read in daylight, and for a medical practice the requirement is not optional. Our guide to ADA accessibility for medical websites covers what that means in practice.

The second is Spanish-speaking patients. More than forty million people in the United States speak Spanish at home, and in Florida the share is far above the national average. An article that exists only in English does not exist for them. Writing the Spanish version by hand, in the register your patients use, is part of what makes a bilingual medical website work; machine translation of medical content introduces exactly the errors this whole article is about avoiding.

The anatomy of a good medical blog post

Put together, the rules above describe a page that looks like this. Use it as a checklist before anything is published.

None of the seven is expensive. Most are a template decision made once: where the author box goes, where the dates go, where the sources list goes, and a review step nobody skips.

How to start without a content team

Practices stall on blogs for one reason: they imagine a weekly schedule and a writer they do not have. The realistic version is smaller and works better.

Search Console is free, needs no cookie banner and takes minutes to connect. It is the only measurement a practice blog needs in its first year: which questions bring readers, from where, and whether the number is growing.

The bottom line

A blog is not a marketing extra for a medical practice. It is the part of the website that meets patients where they actually start, with a question, and it is judged by Google and by readers on the same things medicine is judged on: who is speaking, whether they know what they are talking about, and whether they can be trusted. A practice that publishes one careful, physician-reviewed, plainly written article a month will, in a year, have twelve pages that keep answering questions at two in the morning.

If your website has no place for that yet, or the place it has is a template nobody has touched since launch, the free scan shows how the site reads to a patient today, and our medical web platforms are built with a blog that follows every rule above, in English and in Spanish. Tell us what you need and a person replies within one business day.

References

• Pew Research Center. Fox S, Duggan M. Health Online 2013. January 2013. pewresearch.org
• Google. Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, sections on Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics and E-E-A-T. Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, PDF
• Google Search Central. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. developers.google.com
• Weiss BD. Health Literacy and Patient Safety: Help Patients Understand. Manual for Clinicians, 2nd edition. American Medical Association Foundation, 2007.
• National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine (MedlinePlus). How to Write Easy-to-Read Health Materials.
• Agarwal N, Hansberry DR, Sabourin V, Tomei KL, Prestigiacomo CJ. A comparative analysis of the quality of patient education materials from medical specialties. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013;173(13):1257-1259.
• Kutner M, Greenberg E, Jin Y, Paulsen C. The Health Literacy of America’s Adults: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006.
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. The HIPAA Privacy Rule, 45 CFR Part 164, including the authorization requirements of section 164.508. hhs.gov
• Federal Trade Commission. Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 16 CFR Part 255 (revised 2023), and the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465 (2024). ftc.gov
• Florida Statutes, section 458.331, Grounds for disciplinary action, including false, deceptive or misleading advertising. Florida Board of Medicine.
• U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey, Language Spoken at Home. census.gov
• Google. Search Console. search.google.com/search-console

Article written by

Roger de Oca

Web designer, developer, and founder of DEOCAs. Roger builds and maintains web platforms for physicians and medical organizations, including the 2025-2026 president of a national medical society, and writes about what actually works for practices online.

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This article is general information for physicians and practice managers, not legal, medical or financial advice. Rules and prices change; confirm anything that affects your practice with your own advisors.