Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

The information economy has not only revolutionised business around the world, it has also created significant challenges and great opportunities for medical and health services practitioners.

Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Practitioners

Now, more than ever, medical or health businesses must find smarter ways to stand out from the crowd and obtain new clientele. Not only do you have to participate in the community your business serves, you must also maintain a strong web presence. This includes having a dynamic website and learning how to better market your services online.

As well as spending dollars in offline marketing activities like advertising on newspapers, ads in industry publications and magazines, radio and tv, etc., businesses in the health-related industry are now finding that they will need to assign a bigger part of their budget towards the development and management of a website that attracts new prospects, engages visitors, outperforms the competition in search engines and social media, and helps them gain wider exposure online.

This means that your site not only has to look professional, your pages have to load fast, and be easy to navigate, but even more importantly, the needs of your website will change over time and sections may need to be updated often. This requires the implementation of a sound web and content management strategy.

One other problem that health-related businesses face online (as other businesses do for that matter), is that your site has around thirty seconds or less to give users what they need or they will leave your 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 Health & Medical Profession In The Digital Economy

As well as facing many challenges, there are also plenty of online opportunities available to businesses in the health or medical sector that can adapt to meet online demands and can think strategically when it comes to marketing themselves better online.

In this comprehensive guide, you will learn about new opportunities to drive more web traffic and improve your online results.

As well as providing useful website improvement tips, we also emphasize the benefits and advantages of using WordPress to power your medical or health website or blog.

For more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress, see the articles below:

• Learn How A Poorly Built Web Site Can Lose You Potential Customers
• The Small Business Owner’s Guide To WordPress

Useful Tips For Improving Your Website

We’ll start first by going over some basic information you need. In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your health-related website and get better results. We will look at what pages you need, what content works best, your layout and navigation, etc.

If you need website planning assistance, see this detailed step-by-step guide: A Comprehensive Guide To Web Site Planning For Non-Technical Business Owners

Improving Your Web Pages

All websites need some essential pages. Let’s take a look at these.

Description Of Services

It’s essential to include a page that describes your products and services. Depending on which area of health or medical services you specialize in, your page could include services such as:

• Medical And Surgical – e.g. acute pain management, neurosurgery diabetes, cosmetic surgery, incontinence, respiratory, weight loss surgery, eye diseases operating theaters, etc.
• Dentistry – e.g. general dentistry, holistic dentistry, gum disease, restorations, implants, emergency dentistry, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. cardiac patient rehabilitation, coronary care
• Prenatal & Postnatal – e.g. birth suites, midwifery, etc.
• Child Health – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic services – breast screening, skin cancer, audiology, pap smears, psychosis, allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology services – lab testing and analysis, emergency pathology testing, clinical trials, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling services – mental health, alcohol, tobacco & other drug services, couples, diet and nutrition counselling, social development services
• Alternative treatments – Chinese medicine, homeopathy, reiki, shiatsu, chiropractic, hypnosis, etc.
• Other medical services – weight management, podiatry, fertility services, occupational therapy, neurosciences, prosthetics, mobility, home and community care, sexual health, medical supplies, etc.

Make sure to list all of the services you provide. Educate your visitors about what these services do and why they should book an appointment with you.

Who We Are

This page should give a description of your business and what it stands for, its unique approach, causes supported, etc.

This page should include any awards, accreditations, certifications, recognitions, associations, publications, etc., that could be used to promote your medical, dental, chiropractic, surgery services, etc. and to position yourself above similar service providers.

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

Your Staff Page

If you are searching for simple ideas to sell more products or services online, then something you can do, is make it easier for your prospective clients to get to know, like and trust you and your organization better.

You want your business to be relatable. A great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your staff or team members. It should include a photo and a brief bio. Since most visitors won’t be that well-versed in health terms your descriptions should tell who they are and what they specialize in. You may also want to explain what those specialized areas mean. It should also include social buttons that will allow your site visitors to follow some of your staff members on their social pages.

On this page, make sure to highlight your team member’s qualifications, why they are an asset to your team, and more importantly, how they will help add value to your clients’ business.

(Make sure to add a page that introduces your team members to prospective new clients. Screenshot source: southperthchiro.com.au)

We have written a detailed tutorial about how to create and add an updatable simple team members directory to your website using a free plugin here: How To Add A Simple Staff List To Your WordPress Site With No Coding Skills

Work With Us

List any job opportunities available within your company. It should include training provided, employee benefits, advancement opportunities, social aspects of working with your business, etc. You can also include stories of trainees who have risen within your organization and information about upcoming career opportunities in the health or medical-related industry.

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

Case Studies & Testimonials

Reviews from clients and case studies are a great way to attract prospective clients and showcase the services you offer. Adding a web page with case studies and testimonials from past clients also provides potential clients with social proof.

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

We have written extensively on using client testimonials and client reviews improve your business online here: How To Improve Your Visitor-To-Lead Conversions With More Effective Testimonials

Contact Us

A clean contact page is absolutely necessary.

Your contact page should include some or all of the following information:

• Name Of Your Business
• Your physical address
• Phone
• Facsimile
• Email address
• Google Map and directions
• Website address
• Contact form
• Contact name
• Social media links
• Live chat feature (optional feature)

If you operate from different locations you want to make this clear when displaying the address and contact info.

You can also include links to an FAQ section, main pages, online booking request, support area, newsletter, blog, etc.

Add A Blog Section

A blog can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. Most blogging platforms typically include a content management system that is easy to use and allows you to promote your business by publishing timely content such as events, updates, training articles, opinions and discussions, videos, webinars, etc.

If you already have an established medical website, then consider adding a WordPress blog to promote your medical company.

If you don’t have a website yet, or if your existing site is hard to manage or not giving you the results you want, then WordPress can be used both as your business website and business blog.

Something few people know about, is that an expertly configured WordPress site can become an automated traffic-generation machine that can begin to drive new targeted traffic to your site, simply by adding content on a consistent basis to your website.

(An expertly configured WordPress site can generate traffic automatically to your website)

For more details, go here:

• Web Site Traffic Blueprint – A Complete Guide To Attracting More Web Visitors For Your Business Automatically

Legal Information

Having a website that complies will all legal requirements online is important. This is not only important for building credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that you are not contravening local, regional or federal laws or regulations wherever you provide services.

Depending on what services and products you provide, adding some or all of the legal pages below to your health website will help keep you 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 Statement
• Terms And Conditions
• Website Disclaimer
• Affiliate Agreement
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• DMCA Notice
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers
• Refund Policy
• Video/Audio Terms
• etc.

We have written a comprehensive article about adding legal pages to your site. For more info, see this article: Why You Need To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Improve The Content On Your Site

In today’s highly competitive global business economy, the sooner you begin to engage in the practice of content marketing, the quicker you will begin to see results and differentiate yourself from other competitors.

You want to provide great content with useful information, advice or tips that will get your readers sharing it with others and coming back for more content. This is a great way to inform and teach site visitors and prospective clients about your services.

For example, if your business provides weight loss services, then some of the topics you can cover in your web content include:

• Emotional causes for weight issues (possible causes, identifying yours)
• How to identify the bad habits that need to be corrected to ensure lifetime weight loss
• Is hypnosis and effective weight loss treatment?
• Smartphone apps for tracking calories and exercise
• And endless other content topics

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

Remember to use relevant keywords in your content that your readers will search for.

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

Ways Of Improving Visitor Engagement And User Experience

Improving your user experience (known as UX) helps to keep visitors coming back and engaging with your site. This section will show you ways you can improve visitor engagement and UX.

Syndicate Content Using RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can help to improve visitor engagement and user experience in many ways.

If you provide content that adds value to others, other sites 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 kept in one place
• Content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• RSS feeds can be shared and picked up by other sites online
• Allows users to subscribe
• An RSS feed provides links back to your content
• RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
• There are several 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 site from other websites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.

To find RSS feeds with useful content just visit sites of relevant government departments and respected industry bodies.

Below we have listed examples of RSS feeds you could consider adding to your site:

• US Department Of Health And Human Services – e.g. Latest news feed: http://www.hhs.gov/rss/news/hhsnews.xml, etc. You can search by departments and choose specific feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Breast cancer, Environmental health, HIV/AIDS, 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 various medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. Journal of Applied Physiology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, BMJ Sexually Transmitted Infections, The AAPS Journal (American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists), BMJ British Journal of Ophthalmology, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health - Get various feeds on health-related topics here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• US Food And Drug Administration (FDA) – Get RSS feeds on fda-related news like consumer health information, FDA drug shortages, product recalls, foods, etc. and podcasts here: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/RSSFeeds
• UK Department Of Health (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. NSW – http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/pages/rss.aspx
• Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (www.cdc.gov) - Get many RSS feeds on health-related news and podcasts here: http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/rss.asp
• Medical News Feeds: You can search medical news feeds in major news publications like the NYTimes RSS feeds section (e.g. Health news: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Health.xml)
• MedicineNet.com – Daily Health and Medical News: http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/dailyhealth.xml. You can also select individual feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Lung Conditions, Menopause, Chronic Pain, Pediatrics / Healthy Kids, Senior Health, HIV, etc.)
• MedicalNewsToday.com – Featured Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• MedicalNewsToday.com – You can also select individual RSS feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Cardiovascular/Cardiology, Pain/Anesthetics, Sexual Health/STDs, Pancreatic Cancer, Endocrinology, Medical Innovation, Crohn’s/IBD, etc.)

You can also just search online for general RSS feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific subjects, e.g. “bird flu rss feeds”, “allergy rss feeds”, “psychiatry rss feeds”, etc.

(RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can help to improve your health-related site’s UX.)

Provide Checklists

Checklists and charts are a fantastic way to increase visitor engagement, add value to your audience and set yourself apart from the competition. They can provide useful instructions and resources to perform necessary steps. Checklists and charts are also great instructional tools.

You can provide a range of online or downloadable forms and checklists covering topics such as:

• Booking appointments
• Checklists for pre or post surgery
• Health checklists and charts for specific medical conditions
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, oral maintenance program, cosmetic dentistry, etc.
• Fitness and nutrition program checklists
• General charts & infographics (e.g. caloric level of different foods, the importance of sleep at different ages, etc.)

Add Unique Tools

Providing useful online tools and applications on your website is a great way to increase visitor engagement and significantly add value to your visitors. Calculators, for example are popular tools for your website. Others could include things like nutritional tools, or even recipes.

In part two, we take a look at a several WordPress-based tools you can use in your website that can also help to improve seo, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic to your business.

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This is the end of section 1.

To keep reading, click this link:

• Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation

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