Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress
The digital age has not only transformed the way business is done globally, it has also created many challenges and opportunities for businesses in the medical-related profession.
Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
Now, more than ever, health services providers must work harder and find smarter ways to remain competitive and find new clientele. Not only do you have to actively participate in the community your business serves, you must also develop an active web presence. This includes having a dynamic website and learning how to better market your practice online.
As well as spending money advertising offline, businesses in the health or medical industry are now also finding that they need to assign a more significant portion of their budget towards the development and management of a website that can drive new clients, engage users, outrank the competition in search engines and social media, and give their business a wider amount of marketing exposure online.
This means that your site not only has to look professional, your web pages have to be fast-loading, and your website layout has to be easy to navigate, but even more importantly, your site’s needs may change over time and many aspects may need to be updated frequently. This requires implementing well-developed web and content management strategy.
One other problem that health or medical-related organizations (and other professions) face online, is that your site has only around thirty seconds to provide users with what they are searching for or they will go away.
“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 Medical And Health Services Providers
As well as facing many business and technology changes, there are also many online opportunities available to health or medical businesses that are willing to evolve to meet the demands of the digital economy and can think progressively about improving their online marketing skills.
In this article, you will learn a number of ways to generate more web traffic and establish stronger online credibility for your medical-related business.
As well as providing general website improvement tips, we also focus on the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress Content Management System to power your health-related business website or blog.
For more information about the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress content management system, see these articles:
- Learn How A Poorly Constructed Web Site Can Lose You Money
- WordPress And Small Business – The Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Successful Business With A WordPress Blog
How To Improve Your Website
This section will show you how to improve your website and get better results. We show you what pages a health or medical-related site needs, what type of content you need, layout and navigation structure, etc.
If you need help with website planning, go here: Planning A Web Site: A Comprehensive Blueprint For Business Owners
How To Improve Your Web Pages
All websites require a number of essential pages. Let’s go over these.
Services
You need a page that explains your products or services. Depending on which area you specialize in, your page could include services such as:
- Medical And Surgical – e.g. ear, nose & throat, neurosurgery haematology, maxillofacial surgery, neurology, renal, weight loss surgery, optometry operating theaters, etc.
- Dentistry – e.g. cosmetic dentistry, holistic dentistry, gum disease, restorations, dental braces, emergency dentistry, etc.
- Cardiology – e.g. cardiac patient education, coronary care
- Prenatal & Postnatal – e.g. obstetrics, midwifery, etc.
- Child Health services – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
- Diagnostic services – breast screens, skin cancer, audiology, gynaecology, MRI scanning, allergy testing, etc.
- Pathology services – lab testing and analysis, emergency pathology testing, clinical trials, speech pathology, etc
- Counselling – mental health, alcohol, tobacco & other drug services, domestic abuse, wellness coaching, social work services
- Alternative therapies – Chinese medicine, reflexology, natural therapy, yoga, chiropractic services, hypnotherapy, etc.
- Other medical services – diet and nutrition, sports medicine, reproductive services, optical services, medical genetics, prosthetics, mobility, home and community care, sexual health, medical equipment, etc.
List all of the services you provide, not just the ones you specialize in. Educate your visitors about what these services do and direct them to your contact or appointment booking page.
Who We Are
This page should give a description of your business and explain to visitors what your business stands for, its unique approach, philanthropy, etc.
It’s important to include any awards, certifications, recognitions, accreditations, associations, publications, etc., that you can use to promote your practice and to position yourself above your competitors.
(List all of your professional awards certifications, accreditations, recognitions, publications, associations, etc. in your About Us page. Image sourced from: squaremedical.com.au)
Meet Our Team
If you are searching for quicker, simpler and cost-effective ideas to sell more products or services online and get people to interact more with your site, then one of the things you can do, is make it easier for your visitors to get to know, like and trust your business better.
Your business needs to be relatable. One great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your employees. It should include a photo and a mini bio. Since most visitors won’t be familiar with health or medical terms it should tell who they are and what they specialize in. It should also explain what those specialized areas mean. This page should also include social buttons so your site visitors can follow your staff members on their social networks.
On this page, make sure to outline each team member’s qualifications, why they are an invaluable asset to your team, and more importantly, how they will help add value to your clients’ business.
(Make sure to add a staff description page. Image sourced from: southperthchiro.com.au)
We have created a detailed tutorial about how to easily create and add a simple staff directory in WordPress using free WordPress plugins here: Adding An Employee Directory: Plugin Tutorial
Job Opportunities Page
List any job opportunities available within your clinic. It can include training provided, employee benefits, opportunities for advancement, etc. You can include case studies of recruits who have worked their way up in your company and information such as the job outlook and career opportunities in the medical industry.
Also include a positions available section in this page. If there are no positions currently available, consider inviting people to return periodically to the page, join your newsletter, follow your social pages, etc.
Case Studies & Testimonials
Testimonials from past clients and case studies are a great way to attract prospective clients and showcase what type of services you offer. By adding a page with case studies and client reviews, you are also helping to provide visitors social proof for your business.
(Add a page to your site with case studies and reviews from clients. Screenshot source: arrowsmiledental.com)
We have written extensively about using case studies, testimonials and reviews to grow your business online. For more info, see this article: Turn More Visitors Into Qualified Prospects With Sales Boosting Client Testimonials
Contact Us
A clean contact page is crucial.
It should provide visitors with some or all of the following:
- Company Name
- Street address of premises
- Telephone number
- Fax
- Email address
- Google Map
- Web URL
- Contact form
- Name of person to contact
- Social media URLs
- Live chat
If you have several areas you will want to make that clear when displaying the address and contact info.
You can also include links pointing to commonly-asked questions page, frequently-visited pages, booking form, support page, newsletter, blog, etc.
Add A Blog
A blog can be a very powerful marketing tool for your business. Blogs typically include a content management system that is easy to use and allows you to easily promote your business by publishing content such as announcements, updates, useful articles, informative posts, how-to videos, media presentations, etc.
If you already have an established site, then consider adding a WordPress-driven blog to market your medical business.
If you don’t have a website yet, or if your existing site is hard to manage or not delivering you the results you want, then WordPress can serve as both your business website and your blog.
Not many people know this, but an expertly configured WordPress site can turn your web presence into an automated traffic-generation system that will help begin delivering web traffic to your business, simply by publishing regular content to your site.
(An expertly configured WordPress site can drive new traffic automatically to your site)
Go here to learn more about this:
Legal Pages
As a professional medical provider, having a website that complies will all legal requirements online is extremely important. This is not only important for establishing credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that no laws and regulations are being contravened wherever you practice.
Depending on what services and products you provide, adding the following legal pages to your health or medical-related website will help you stay out of legal hot water with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers (e.g. Facebook), and other potential legal threats or 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
- etc.
If you want to learn more about adding legal pages to your site, refer to this article: Adding Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site
Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In today’s globally competitive economy, the sooner you begin to publish great content on your site, the quicker you will begin to see results and differentiate yourself from other competitors.
Provide great content with useful information, tips or advice that will get your visitors sharing it with others and coming back for more. This is a great way to educate your visitors and prospective clients about your services.
For example, if you provide products or services that help people lose weight, then some of the areas you can write about include the following:
- Common medical conditions that can cause weight gain
- How to identify the bad habits that need to be corrected to ensure permanent weight loss
- Characteristics of different diets, e.g. Atkins diet, South Beach diet, Nutrisystem diet (what these are, how they work, how effective they are)
- How to avoid late night snacking (e.g. sleep earlier)
- And many other content topics
You can also create a series of educational articles that will help your your prospective clients understand your medical or health services, by explaining benefits, procedures, terminology, etc.
Use keywords in your articles that prospective clients will search for.
We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive regular training emails with actionable information that will show exactly how to drive more traffic to your website or blog, save money creating high-quality content that will add value to your site visitors and grow your website using content marketing. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also completely FREE!
Tips For Improving Visitor Engagement And User Experience
Improving your site’s user experience (known as UX) helps keep visitors coming back and engaging with your site. This section will show you different ways to improve visitor engagement and user experience.
Adding RSS Feeds
RSS feeds can help to improve visitor engagement and UX in many 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
- RSS feeds can be shared
- Users can subscribe to your feed
- An RSS feed provides links to your content
- Your feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
- RSS provides a number of ways for your readers to receive your content (e.g. view your content on their mobile device using a feed reader)
- It’s built into WordPress
There are also a number of benefits to providing valuable information on your website from other websites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.
To find RSS feeds with loads of useful content just visit sites of relevant government departments or well-known industry bodies.
Below we have listed some examples of feeds you could add to a medical or health-related site:
- US Department Of Health And Human Services – e.g. Latest news feed: http://www.hhs.gov/rss/news/hhsnews.xml, etc. You can also choose specific feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Breast cancer, Fitness and nutrition, Heart health and stroke, Minority women’s health, Screening tests and vaccines, etc.) here: http://womenshealth.gov/news/rss/rss-feeds.html
- US National Libraries Of Medicine – For a list of feeds from various medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. ACS Publications, BMJ Disease in Childhood – Fetal and Neonatal Edition, BMJ Emergency Medicine Journal, BMJ Tobacco Control, ADA DOC News, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
- National Institutes Of Health - Find many health-related feeds here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
- FDA – Find FDA-related RSS feeds (e.g. enforcement reports, FDA drug shortages, recalls, radiological health, 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. Victoria – http://www.health.vic.gov.au/rss/newsfeed.xml
- Centers For Disease Control And Prevention - Find various feeds on health-related news and podcasts here: http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/rss.asp
- Medical News: You can search medical news feeds in major news publications like the NYTimes feeds section (e.g. Fitness & nutrition: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Nutrition.xml)
- MedicineNet.com – Daily Health and Medical News: http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/dailyhealth.xml. You can also select specific feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease, Menopause, Neurology, Pediatrics / Healthy Kids, Exercise & Fitness, Hearing, etc.)
- MedicalNewsToday.com – Featured Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
- Medical News Today – You can also choose specific feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Cardiovascular/Cardiology, Seniors/Aging, Pregnancy/Obstetrics, Sleep/Sleep Disorders/Insomnia, Medical Devices/Diagnostics, Dyslexia, Psychology/Psychiatry, etc.)
You can also search online for general RSS feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific topics, e.g. “stem cell research rss feeds”, “cold rss feeds”, “alzheimer’s rss feeds”, etc.
(RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can help to improve your health-related website’s user experience.)
Add Online Checklists & Forms
Checklists and educational charts are a great way to increase user engagement and add value to your audience. They can provide useful information and resources to complete necessary steps. Checklists and forms are great educational tools.
You can provide online or downloadable forms, charts and checklists covering a range of subjects such as:
- Checklists and forms for booking appointments
- Checklists for post-surgery recovery
- Health checklists and charts for specific conditions
- Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, active maintenance program, general dentistry, etc.
- Fitness and nutrition program checklists and charts
- General charts & infographics (e.g. acidity level of different foods, the importance of sleep at different stages of development, etc.)
Unique Tools
Providing unique tools, gadgets and applications on your site is a great way to increase visitor engagement and add value to your visitors. Calculators, for example are popular tools for your website. Other applications can include things like diagnostic tools, and even recipes.
In the next section, we will be discussing a number of online tools you can add to your medical website using WordPress plugins and themes that can also help improve your search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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This is the end of section 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence.
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