Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

Health and medical services practitioners today face a number of challenges.

Challenges Health Services Face Online

Now, more than ever, businesses in the health and medical sector must work harder than ever to remain competitive. Not only do you have to participate in the community your business serves, you must also develop and maintain a strong presence online. This includes having a website and learning better ways to promote your medical services online.

In addition to spending dollars advertising offline, you will probably find that in order to compete, you will need to delegate a greater amount of your budget to develop and maintain a website that can drive new prospects, engage users, outperform the competition in search engines and social media, and help to give you wider marketing exposure online.

This means that your website not only has to look professional, load fast, and your website layout has to be easy to navigate, but even more importantly, the needs of the website may change over time and many aspects will need to be updated often. This requires having a sound web and content management strategy in place.

Another difficult challenge that health providers face, as most other professions do for that matter, is that your site has only about 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 Health Services Providers

As well as facing significant challenges, there are also loads of online opportunities available to health-related businesses that can adapt to meet digital economy challenges and can think outside the box about improving their online marketing skills.

This comprehensive article will help you uncover a number of ways to increase web traffic and establish online credibility for your health business.

As well as providing useful website improvement tips, we also recommend that you consider using WordPress to power your health website or blog.

For more information about the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress content management system (CMS), see the articles below:

• How A Poorly Designed Website Can Cost You Business And What To Do About It
• Learn How To Grow Your Business With A WordPress Site

Useful Tips For Improving Your Website

This section covers how to improve your health or medical website and get better results online. We show you what pages your site needs, what type of content works best for health or medical websites, ways of improving your site’s layout and navigation structure, etc.

If you need website planning assistance, read this article we have written: How To Plan Your Website - A Useful Primer For Non-Technical Business Owners

Basic Pages

Professional websites require several basic pages. Let’s review these.

Services And Products Page

You need a page that lists your products and services. Depending on which area of health you specialize in, this page could list services such as:

• Medicine & Surgery – e.g. ear, nose & throat, neurosurgery haematology, cancer, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, renal, infection control, eye diseases surgical outpatients, etc.
• Dental Services – e.g. general dentistry, holistic dentistry, cleaning services, veneers, crowns and bridges, orthodontics, emergency dentistry, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. cardiac monitoring, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal/Postnatal – e.g. obstetrics, maternity services, etc.
• Child Health services – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic services – breast screening, skin cancer, audiology, pap smears, psychosis, food allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology – laboratory testing and analysis, routine pathology testing, occupational and environmental testing, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling – mental health, alcohol, tobacco & other drug services, trauma counselling, wellbeing, social development services
• Alternative therapies – Chinese medicine, reflexology, colloidal silver therapy, tai chi, chiropractic, hypnotherapy, etc.
• Other medical services – diet and nutrition, chiropody, lymphedema therapy, speech therapy, inherited diseases, prosthetics, hearing aids, home and community care, community health, medical transport, etc.

List all of the services you provide, not just the ones you specialize in. Educate your visitors about the benefits of using these services and direct them to your appointment booking page.

About Us Page

This page needs to describe your business and what your business stands for, its unique approach, community events, etc.

This page should also list any awards, recognitions, certifications, accreditations, publications, associations, etc., that you can use to promote your practice and to set yourself above your competitors.

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

Our Team

If you are looking for quicker, simpler and cheaper ideas to sell more products or services online and get people to stay longer on your site, then one of the things you can do, is make it easier for prospects to get to know, like and trust you and your business better.

Your business needs to be relatable. A great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your staff members. This page should include a photo and a brief biography. Since most visitors are probably not familiar with medical or health-related terms your bio descriptions should tell who they are and what they specialize in. You may also want to explain what those specialized areas do. This page should also include social buttons that will allow your prospective clients to follow your staff members on their social networks.

In this page, don’t be afraid to show the human side of your team members with personal stories, hobbies, etc., but make sure to outline each person’s expertise and qualifications, how they add value or contribute to the success of your team, and more importantly, how they can help add value to your clients’ business.

(Make sure to add a team profile page. Screenshot image sourced from: southperthchiro.com.au)

To learn more about how to create and add a simple and easy-to-update list of staff members in a WordPress site using a free plugin, see this tutorial: WordPress Plugin Tutorial: Adding An Employee List Directory

Recruitment Page

This is a listing of job opportunities available within your clinic. This page would include training provided, employee benefits, professional development, social aspects of working for your business, etc. You can include case studies of graduates who have risen within your business and information about upcoming career opportunities in the medical or health-related industry.

Maintain a positions available section in your page. If there are no positions currently available, consider inviting people to return periodically to the page, subscribe to your updates list, follow your social pages, etc.

Testimonials

Case studies and client reviews are a great way to attract potential clients and showcase your services. By adding a page with case studies and client reviews, you will also help to establish social proof online.

(Add a web page with case studies and reviews from clients. Image sourced from: arrowsmiledental.com)

We have created a detailed article on using testimonials and reviews to grow your business online. Learn more about this here: All You Need To Know To Start Getting Better Results Online With Powerful Client Testimonials

Contact Us Page

Having a functional contact page is absolutely necessary.

Your contact page should provide some or all of the following information about your consulting practice:

• Name Of Your Business
• Your address
• Telephone
• Facsimile
• Email address
• Google Map
• Website URL
• Contact form
• Name of person to contact
• Social media web addresses
• Interactive chat

If you operate in different areas you should make this clear when displaying your address and contact info.

Consider also including links pointing to commonly-asked questions page, frequently-visited pages, booking request, helpdesk, newsletter opt-in form, blog, etc.

Add A Medical Or Health Blog

A blog is a powerful business marketing tool. Many blogging platforms typically comprise of a content management system that is simple to use and allows you to promote your business using content like announcements, updates, training articles, informative posts, videos, webinars, etc.

If you already have an established medical-related website, then consider adding a WordPress-driven blog to promote your medical clinic.

If you don’t have a website yet, or if your existing website is very hard to keep updated with new content or not giving you the results you want, then WordPress can become both your business website and business blog.

Very few businesses know that WordPress can turn into an automated traffic-generation system that can begin to deliver targeted traffic to your website, simply by publishing regular content to your website.

(WordPress can drive new traffic automatically to your website)

Go here to learn more about this:

• WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Discover How To Create An Automated Traffic Generation Machine

Legal Pages

It’s vital for professional companies to make sure they have a compliant website. This is not only important for building trust and credibility with visitors, but also to ensure that no local, regional or federal laws and regulations are being contravened wherever you provide services.

Depending on what services and products you provide, adding 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, and other potential sources of legal threats and inconveniences:

• Contact Page
• Privacy Statement
• Terms And Conditions
• Website Disclaimer
• Affiliate Agreement
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• DMCA Notice
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Health and Financial Disclaimers
• Refund Policy
• Video/Audio Terms
• etc.

To learn more about adding legal pages to your website, refer to this article: How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site

In today’s fiercely competitive global business economy, the sooner you start engaging in the practice of content marketing, the quicker you will begin to see results and differentiate yourself from competing businesses.

Providing useful content with information and tips will get your visitors sharing it with others and coming back for more content. Publishing content is a great way to inform and educate your visitors and prospective clients about using your services.

For example, if your business provides solutions that help people manage their weight, then some of the areas you could write content about include:

• Overweight vs. Obese – what are the differences?
• How to identify the bad habits you need to correct to ensure sustainable weight loss
• How you eat your food - just as important as what you eat (eat at table, chew slowly)
• A guide to making the smarter choices choices when eating out at any restaurant
• Etc.

You can also create a series of informative articles that will help your your readers understand your services, by explaining benefits, procedures, costs (including payment plans, insurance coverage, etc).

Remember to include the same keywords and terms in your articles that your prospective clients will search for online.

We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive regular training emails with actionable information and practical tips that will show exactly how to drive more traffic to your website, save money creating useful content that will add value to your site visitors and grow your business online using content marketing strategies. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also completely FREE!

Improving User Experience

Improving website user experience (known as UX) helps you 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 (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can help to improve visitor engagement and user experience in a number of different ways.

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

Some of the benefits of syndicating your content to other businesses using RSS feeds, include:

• All of your content updates are in one place
• Content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• Can be shared online
• RSS feeds allow for subscribing
• A feed provides a way for external links to point back to your content
• RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
• There are various ways your readers can receive your content (e.g. subscribers can view your content on their mobile device using a feed reader)
• It’s built into WordPress

There are also benefits when it comes to adding syndicated content to your website from other sites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.

To find useful RSS feeds for your website, search online for relevant government departments or key industry bodies.

Below we have listed examples of feeds you could add to your website:

• US Department Of Health And Human Services – e.g. Blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SelectedHhsBlogPosts, etc. You can also select specific feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Body image, Healthy aging, Heart health and stroke, Mental health, Smoking and how to quit, etc.) here: http://womenshealth.gov/news/rss/rss-feeds.html
• US National Libraries Of Medicine – For a directory of feeds from well-known medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. AHA Journals (American Heart Association Journals), PsychiatryOnline Journals, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, BMJ Tobacco Control, Infectious Agents and Cancer, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health (www.nih.gov) - Find various health-related RSS feeds here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• FDA – Get RSS feeds on fda-related news and topics like criminal investigations press releases, food safety reports, product recalls, radiological health, etc. and podcasts here: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/RSSFeeds
• Department of Health UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-of-health) – 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 - Get various RSS feeds on health-related news and topics 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 feeds section (e.g. Health news: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Health.xml)
• MedicineNet – MedTerms Medical Word of the Day: http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/dailyword.xml. You can also select specific RSS feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Medications, Men’s health, Migraine Headaches, Diabetes, Exercise & Fitness, Hearing, etc.)
• Medical News Today – Medical News Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• MedicalNewsToday.com – You can also select individual feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Eye Health/Blindness, Headache/Migraine, Infectious Diseases/Bacteria/Viruses, Sleep/Sleep Disorders/Insomnia, Men’s Health, Women’s Health/Gynecology, Tuberculosis, etc.)

You can also just search online for general feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific subjects, e.g. “obstetrics rss feeds”, “menopause rss feeds”, “hepatitis rss feeds”, etc.

(Add RSS feeds to provide your visitors with a better user experience.)

Adding Online Checklists

Adding checklists and educational charts to your site is a great way to increase user engagement and add value to your readers. Forms and checklists can give them step-by-step information and resources to perform necessary steps. They can also be great client educational tools.

Checklists, charts and medical forms could cover subjects such as:

• Booking appointments
• Checklists for pre or post treatment
• Health checklists for specific systems
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, oral maintenance program, cosmetic dentistry, etc.
• Weight loss and nutrition program checklists
• General charts & infographics (e.g. acidity level of different foods, sleep requirements at different stages of development, etc.)

Add Unique Tools

Providing useful tools, gadgets and applications on your website is a great way to increase visitor engagement and add significant value to your potential clients. Calculators, for example are great tools you can add to your website. Other tools can include things like nutritional tools, and even recipes.

In part 2, we will be discussing a number of WordPress-based tools you can use in your health or medical-related site that can help improve seo, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic to your business.

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This is the end of part one of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your medical business web presence.

Click here to keep reading:

• How To Grow A Medical Center Business Online – Part 2

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