Healthcare Blogging a Losing Proposition?

An interesting blog article from the folks at Compete came to my attention recently. Compete for those who don't know is a fantastic analytics site to see how ANY website is doing in terms of popularity (number of visitors in a given time period). The basic data is free. For more in depth information, there's a charge.

For example, for our practice's website, here is the Compete data I pulled which is "relatively" accurate based on my own analytics information:

My nearest local competitor in terms of website popularity is the hospital, Fauquier Health System:

Though I may smile that my solo private practice website is getting nearly 30X the number of visitors as a community hospital, such numbers PALE in comparison to what truly is driving website searches by the lay-population... celebrity, entertainment, and political topics which collectively garner more than 80X the search volume compared to searches related to healthcare. Here is the graph by Compete.

Healthcare is the purple line WAY down at the bottom.

Assuming people ARE searching for healthcare topics, what might those topics be?

They are pregnancy and cancer related by a vast margin (chart taken from here).

What is the take-home message?

Healthcare blogging is truly a niche market... and a small one at that...

BUT, if one wants to become a successful healthcare blogger, it should be slanted towards pregnancy and cancer topics.

"Thyroid" made the top 20 list, but beyond that, ENT healthcare topics are left out in the dust... perhaps  even smaller than dust.

Take a look at the stats for perezhilton.com, a website dedicated to celebrity and entertainment news: