To enable comments or not to enable comments, that is the question. If you are like many business owners, you fear that by adding a comment section to your blog or website, you are inadvertently inviting negative feedback. Negative feedback, especially when shared in such a public way, can adversely affect visitors’ perceptions of your practice or brand. Add to this the fact that enabling comments is time-consuming, as commenters often expect responses, and that it requires moderation to deter junk commenters, you may feel that the answer is obvious: Keep the comments off. However, at Doctor Genius, we encourage you to do the opposite.
Reasons to incorporate a comment section into your site design
The marketing world has long been in debate over the whys and why-nots of a comments section on a blog. You can check out the for- and against- arguments on Optinmonster, but we want to share our thoughts with you below.
Build a network
Content marketing serves three major purposes:
- To help your site gain rankings
- To establish your practice as an authoritative presence
- To build relationships with current and potential patients
Allowing feedback enables you to do the third by giving you a way to connect with your followers, to develop relationships based on mutual interests and respect, and to turn an otherwise static piece of content in a living conversation. In short, it allows you to build a network.
Encourage constructive criticism
You create content for your audience members, so allow them to make suggestions. Turn the comments section on to encourage feedback regarding an article’s content and to invite ideas for improvement and future topics. This type of constructive criticism gives you a tangible sense of how your audience responds to your content, as well as ways you can improve it so that it resonates positively with the intended recipients.
Contribute to your SEO
Many website owners who turn off the comments section fail to take into consideration the SEO value it offers. While a handful of comments is unlikely to make a difference for any given page’s rankings, dozens to hundreds of comments can. How? The reason is two-fold.
First, comments contribute to page length. Second, more words on a page gives it an opportunity to rank for more keywords. To determine whether this contributed to increased search traffic, Neil Patel conducted an in-depth study. He found two things to be true.
The first was that, on a comments section that added nearly 4,000 words to a page, approximately 26% of keywords that ranked in Google came from the comments section. The second was that the section garnered approximately 16% of the article’s traffic. Though incorporating feedback into your site design may make more work for you, the results can be well worth it.
The smart way to enable comments
A section that encourages feedback can help in multiple other ways, such as keeping your site live, encouraging customer loyalty, and serving as social proof. Of course, there are the drawbacks to consider, but those become a moot point when you have a dedicated account manager moderating comments, responding to feedback, and, of course, dealing with the back-end issues. To partner with such an account manager, call Doctor Genius at 1-877-477-2311 today.
Doctor Genius, located at 2 S Pointe Dr #200, Lake Forest, CA 92630, provides a range of services for practice success. We seek to meet our clients’ needs by providing a variety of marketing, SEO, practice optimization tools, and coaching to transform the healthcare experience. Though we work to provide the most accurate information, the content found on this website is solely intended for entertainment purposes. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that the information provided is entirely correct. You may not use the information on this site to cure, prevent, or diagnose a perceived medical issue. If you have healthcare-related needs, please speak directly to a healthcare professional. Never self-perform medical treatments discussed on this website. All images displayed are also for entertainment purposes only, and personal experiences may differ. Please note that the business tactics mentioned on this site might not be applicable to your industry or practice.
