Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

The digital economy has not only revolutionised businesses worldwide, it has also created a growing number of challenges and opportunities for the medical industry.

Challenges Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online

Now, more than ever, health services professionals must work harder and find smarter ways to stand out from their competition and source new clientele. Not only do you have to be fully involved in the community your business serves, you must also maintain a strong presence online. This includes having an effective web presence and learning how to better promote your services online.

As well as investing dollars in offline marketing, businesses in the health or medical industry are now finding that they need to assign a greater share of their marketing budget to develop and manage a website that attracts new prospective clients, engages users, outranks the competition in search engines and social media, and helps to give them a wider marketing reach online.

This means that your site not only has to look great, your pages have to be fast-loading, and your website layout has to be easy to navigate, but it’s also important to keep in mind that your site’s needs will change over time and some areas will need to be updated frequently. This requires having a well-planned web and content management strategy in place.

Another challenge that health or medical-related businesses (and other businesses) face, is that your site has an average of 30 seconds to provide visitors with what they are searching for or they will leave the site.

“Websites have evolved into central information hubs where service information is still present but enhanced with web portals, hyperlinks to state and federal sites, and a variety of free tools.”

Michael Alter, http://www.accountingweb.com/technology/accounting-software/tips-for-improving-your-website

Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Web Economy

As well as facing a number of significant business and technology changes, there are also many online opportunities available to medical-related businesses that are willing to evolve to meet online economy challenges and who can think outside the box when it comes to marketing themselves better online.

The guide below will help you uncover new ways and opportunities to generate more bookings and create significant improvements in your online results.

As well as providing general website improvement tips, we also focus on the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) to power your medical or health-related website.

To learn more about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress, go here:

• How A Poorly Designed Web Site Can Cost You Business
• Understanding WordPress – A Business Owner’s Guide

Practical Tips For Improving Your Website

This section explains how to improve your medical or health-related website and get better results. We will look at what pages your website needs, what type of content you need, your layout and navigation, etc.

If you need website planning assistance, visit this page: A Practical Guide To Web Site Planning For Business Owners

How To Improve Your Website Pages

All websites need several basic web pages. Let’s discuss these.

Products And Services Page

It’s essential to have a page that explains your products or services. Depending on which area you specialize in, your page could include services like:

• Medical And Surgical – e.g. ear, nose & throat, orthopedics haematology, maxillofacial surgery, neurology, respiratory, urology, eye diseases emergency surgery, etc.
• Dental Services – e.g. preventive dentistry, children’s dentistry, gum disease, veneers, crowns and bridges, dental implants, emergency dentistry services, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. heart surgery, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal and Postnatal – e.g. birth suites, midwifery, etc.
• Child Health – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic – breast screens, lung screening, hearing, pap smears, magnetic resonance imaging, allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology – laboratory testing and analysis, routine pathology testing, insurance and corporate testing, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling – mental health services, alcohol, tobacco & other drug services, marriage counselling, wellness coaching, social development services
• Alternative therapies – Chinese medicine, aromatherapy, natural therapy, massage therapy, osteopathy, hypnosis, etc.
• Other medical services/therapies – diet and nutrition, sports medicine, lymphedema therapy, stomal therapy, neurosciences, artificial limbs, assisted living, home and community care, community health, medical supplies, etc.

List all of the services you provide. Provide your visitors with information that will educate them about what these services do and direct them to your appointment booking page.

About Us

The ‘About Us’ page needs to describe your business and what it stands for, its unique approach, causes that you support, etc.

This page should also list any business awards, accreditations, recognitions, certifications, associations, publications, etc., that can be used to promote your business and to set yourself above the competition.

(List all of your awards recognitions, accreditations, certifications, associations, publications, etc. in your About Us page. Screenshot image sourced from: squaremedical.com.au)

Meet Our Team

Are you looking for ideas to grow your business online? Then one of the things you can do, is help your prospects get to know, like and trust your organization better.

You want potential clients to relate to your business. One great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your employees. This page should include a photo and a brief biography. Since most visitors won’t be well-versed in medical terms it should tell who they are and what they specialize in. It should also explain what those specialized areas mean. It should include social buttons so your prospective clients can follow selected team members on their social pages.

On this page, don’t be afraid to humanize your team members with personal stories, hobbies, etc., but make sure to outline your employee’s expertise and qualifications, why they are an asset to your team, and more importantly, how they can help add value to your clients’ business.

(Make sure to add an employee page. Screenshot image source: southperthchiro.com.au)

We have written a detailed tutorial about how to create and add an easy-to-manage list directory of employees or team members to your web site here: Plugin Tutorial: How To Easily Add An Employee Directory

We’re Hiring

List any career opportunities within your clinic. It can include type of training provided, benefits, opportunities for advancement, social activities encouraged or sponsored by your business, etc. You should also include case studies of trainees who have risen within your organization and information about upcoming career opportunities in the health industry.

Maintain a positions available section in this page. If there are no positions currently available, consider inviting people to return periodically to the page, subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on social media, etc.

Testimonials And Case Studies

Case studies and testimonials from past clients are a great way to attract potential clients and showcase the services you offer. Adding a page with case studies and reviews from clients also helps to provide potential clients with social proof.

(Add a page with client reviews and case studies. Screenshot image sourced from: arrowsmiledental.com)

We have created a comprehensive article on using testimonials and client reviews get better results online. Go here to learn more: How To Achieve Better Results Online Using Powerful Testimonials

Contact Page

Having a contact page is vitally important.

Your contact page should include the following information:

• Name
• Street address of consulting practice
• Telephone
• Facsimile
• Contact email address
• Map and directions
• Website address
• Contact form
• Name of person to contact
• Social media URLs
• Online chat feature

If your business services several locations you will want to make this clear when showing your address and contact info.

You should also include links to an FAQ page, frequently-visited pages, online booking request, helpdesk, newsletter, blog, etc.

Add A Blog

A blog is a very powerful marketing tool for your business. Blogs are built around a content management system that is simple to use and allows you to easily promote your business using timely content like events, new releases, training articles, opinions and discussions, how-to videos, webinars, etc.

If you already have an existing medical or health-related site, then consider adding a WordPress-driven blog to market your clinic.

If you don’t have a website yet, or if your existing health or medical-related site is hard to add new content to or not giving you the results you want, then WordPress can act as both your website and blog.

You may not know this, but an expertly configured WordPress site can turn into an automated traffic system that can attract new targeted traffic to your site, simply by publishing new content to your website on a consistent basis.

(An expertly configured WordPress site can drive new visitors automatically to your website)

To learn more about this go here:

• Web Site Traffic Blueprint – How To Turn Your WordPress Web Site Into A Traffic Machine

Legal Information Pages

Having a website that complies will all legal requirements online is crucially important. This is not only important for building trust and credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that you are not breaking laws and regulations wherever you provide services.

Adding some or all of the legal pages below to your medical or health-related site will help you stay out of trouble with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers (e.g. Facebook), and other potential sources of legal threats and inconveniences:

• Contact Page
• Privacy Policy
• Terms And Conditions Of Use
• Website Disclaimer
• Affiliate Agreement
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• DMCA Notice
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers
• Refund Policy
• Video/Audio Terms
• and others

We have written a comprehensive article on adding legal pages to your website here: Adding Legal Pages To Your Site

Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website

In today’s highly competitive global business economy, the sooner you begin to publish great content on your site, the sooner you will begin to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Providing great content with information, tips or advice will get your readers sharing it with others and coming back for more content. This is a great way to inform and educate your visitors and prospective clients about using your products and services.

For example, if your business provides services that help people manage their weight, then some of the areas you can cover in your content include:

• Nutrients your body needs on a daily basis (carbs, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals)
• How to identify the bad habits that need to be corrected to ensure permanent weight loss
• How to recover physically and emotionally after weight loss surgery – useful tips and suggestions
• How to make smarter choices choices when eating in restaurants
• And many other content topics

You can also create a series of educational articles that will help your your readers gain a better understanding of your services, by explaining benefits, procedures, terminology, etc.

Include keywords and terminology in your articles that your readers will be searching for online.

We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive a comprehensive series of training emails with actionable information and practical tips that will show you how to drive more traffic to your website or blog, save money creating useful content for your site visitors and grow your website using content. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also 100% FREE!

Ways Of Improving Visitor Engagement And User Experience

Improving your user experience (known as UX) will help to keep visitors coming back and using your site. This section will show you different ways to improve visitor engagement and user experience.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds can help to improve your visitor engagement and user experience in several ways.

If you provide information that adds value to others, other businesses may want to syndicate your content to their visitors.

Some of the benefits of having other businesses syndicate your content, include:

• All of your updates are in one place
• your content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• Your feed can be shared
• RSS feeds allow users to subscribe
• A feed provides links back to your site
• Your feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
• There are various ways readers can receive your content (e.g. view the content on their mobile device using different applications)
• RSS is built into WordPress

There are also a number of benefits to adding syndicated content to your website from other websites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.

You can find RSS feeds with useful content for your website by searching online for health and medical-related government departments and respected industry bodies.

Below we have listed examples of feeds you could consider adding to a health-related website:

• US Department Of Health And Human Services – e.g. Blog posts feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SelectedHhsBlogPosts, etc. You can also select individual RSS feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Breastfeeding, Fitness and nutrition, Illnesses and disabilities, Mental health, Pregnancy, etc.) here: http://womenshealth.gov/news/rss/rss-feeds.html
• US National Libraries Of Medicine – For a list of feeds from well-known medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. Journal of Applied Physiology, American Association of Neurological Surgeons, Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery, Current Psychiatry, Pediatrics, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health - Get many health-related RSS feeds here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• US Food And Drug Administration (FDA) – Find RSS feeds on fda-related news like enforcement reports, health fraud, product recalls, foods, etc. and podcasts here: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/RSSFeeds
• Department of Health UK (www.gov.uk) – Latest news: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-of-health.atom
• The Department Of Health (Australian Government): http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/xml/rssLatestNews.xml
• Department Of Public Health (Australia – State Level): e.g. Western Australia – http://www.public.health.wa.gov.au/feed/?types=news
• Centers For Disease Control And Prevention - Get many health-related news feeds and podcasts here: http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/rss.asp
• Medical News: You can search medical news RSS feeds by going to publications like the NYTimes RSS feeds section (e.g. Fitness and nutrition: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Nutrition.xml)
• MedicineNet.com – MedTerms Medical Word of the Day: http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/dailyword.xml. You can also choose specific feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease, Menopause, Cholesterol, Diet & Weight Management, Exercise & Fitness, Travel Health, etc.)
• MedicalNewsToday.com – Featured Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• MedicalNewsToday.com – You can also choose specific feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Cardiovascular/Cardiology, Pulmonary System, Surgery, Aid/Disasters, Water – Air Quality/Agriculture, Biology/Biochemistry, Genetics, etc.)

You can also just search online for general feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific subjects, e.g. “rheumatology rss feeds”, “cold rss feeds”, “erectile dysfunction rss feeds”, etc.

(RSS feeds can help to improve your website’s UX.)

Checklists And Charts

Checklists and explanatory charts are a great way to increase user engagement and add value to your visitors. Checklists and charts can provide users with useful step-by-step information and resources to complete steps. Checklists and charts can also be great instructional tools.

You can provide a range of online or downloadable checklists, charts and forms (or links to these) covering subjects such as:

• Booking appointments
• Checklists for post-surgery recovery
• Health checklists and charts for specific systems
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, active maintenance program, general dentistry, etc.
• Fitness and exercise program checklists and charts
• General charts & infographics (e.g. caloric level of different foods, the importance of sleep at different ages, etc.)

Other Tools

Providing useful online tools and applications on your site can help increase visitor engagement and add significant value to your visitors. Calculators, for example are useful tools to add to your website. Others can include things like nutritional tools, and even recipes.

In the next section of this detailed guide, we discuss a several online tools you can use in your website using WordPress plugins and themes that can also help to improve your seo, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.

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This is the end of part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence.

Click here to continue reading:

• How To Grow Your Health Clinic Services Business Online Using WordPress – Part 2

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