Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

Medical and health services practitioners today are facing many challenges thanks to the web economy.

Challenges Medical Businesses Face Online

Today, more than ever, businesses in the medical sector must work harder than ever to remain competitive. Not only do you have to become more involved in the community your business serves, you must also develop and maintain an active web presence. This includes having an effective web presence and learning how to better promote your medical services online.

As well as investing dollars marketing offline, businesses in the health industry are now finding that they will need to allocate a larger amount of their budget towards the development and management of a website that can attract prospective clients, engage users, outperform the competition in search engines and social media, and give them wider marketing exposure online.

This means that your website not only has to look great, your pages have to be fast-loading, and be easy to navigate, but it’s also important to keep in mind that the needs of your website may change over time and some aspects will need to be frequently updated. This requires the implementation of a sound web and content management strategy.

Another challenge that health businesses face, as all other professions do for that matter, is that you have an average of 30 seconds to help users find 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

Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners

As well as facing a number of significant challenges, there are also loads of online opportunities available to businesses in the health or medical-related industry that are willing to adapt to meet the challenges of the online economy and who can think progressively in terms of marketing their services better online.

In this detailed guide, you will learn ways to generate more traffic and notice significant improvements in your health or medical-related business presence online.

As well as providing practical tips and information on cost-effective ways to improve your business online, we also place special emphasis on the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress content management system to power your health or medical website.

To learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS), go here:

• Discover Why A Poorly Designed Website Can Lose You Potential Buyers
• WordPress In Business – An Online Guide To Growing Your Successful Small Business Using WordPress

Useful Tips For Improving Your Medical Clinic Site

We’ll start first by covering the basic stuff. In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your health or medical website and get better results online. We will look at what pages a health-related website needs, what type of content works best, navigation structure, etc.

If you need website planning assistance, read this detailed step-by-step guide: A Basic Guide To Web Site Planning For Business Owners

Essential Website Pages

Professional websites need several essential pages. Let’s take a look at the pages your  need and how to structure your health or medical website for best results.

Products And Services

You need a page that lists your services or products. Depending on which area you specialize in, your page can list services like:

• Medical And Surgical – e.g. pain management, orthopedics hematology, oral surgery, gerontology, rheumatology, urology, optometry day surgery, etc.
• Dentistry – e.g. general dentistry, children’s dentistry, cleaning services, veneers, crowns and bridges, braces, emergency dental, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. heart monitoring, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal and Postnatal – e.g. obstetrics, midwifery, etc.
• Child Health – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic services – mammography, lung screening, medical imaging, women’s health, psychosis, allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology services – laboratory testing and analysis, routine pathology testing, fine-needle aspiration cytology, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling – mental health services, alcohol, tobacco & other drug services, marriage counselling, wellbeing, social development services
• Alternative treatments – Chinese medicine, reflexology, hydrotherapy, shiatsu, chiropractic services, hypnotherapy, etc.
• Other medical services/therapies – weight management, podiatry, lymphedema therapy, optical services, neurosciences, prosthetics, assisted living, home care, sexual health, medical supplies, etc.

List all of the services you provide. Provide your visitors with information that will educate them about the benefits of using these services and why they should book an appointment with you.

Who We Are

The ‘About Us’ page should give a description of your business and explain to visitors what it stands for, its unique approach, community participation, etc.

Remember to include any business awards, certifications, recognitions, accreditations, associations, publications, etc., that you can use to promote your business and to set yourself above similar service providers.

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

Your Staff

If you are looking for quicker, simpler and cost-effective ideas to sell more products or services online, then something you can do, is make it easier for your prospects to get to know you and your organization better.

Potential clients need to relate to your business. One great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your staff. It should include a photo and a brief biography. Since most visitors will not tend to be familiar with health terms your bio descriptions should tell who they are and what their specialties are. You may also want to explain what those specialized areas mean. It can include social buttons that will allow your site visitors to follow individual team members on their social networks.

On this page, make sure to outline each staff member’s expertise, how their skills and knowledge 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 staff description page. Image source: southperthchiro.com.au)

To learn more about how to add an easy-to-manage simple employee directory to your website with no coding skills required, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Easily Add An Employee List Directory To Your Site: Step-By-Step Tutorial

Recruitment Page

List any job opportunities available within the business. This page can include training provided, employee benefits, opportunities for advancement, etc. You can include stories of trainees who have risen within your business and information about new career opportunities in the 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 the page, subscribe to your newsletter, follow your social pages, etc.

Case Studies

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

(Add a page to your site with case studies and client reviews. Image source: arrowsmiledental.com)

We have created a comprehensive article about using testimonials, case studies and reviews to grow your business online here: Learn How To Turn More Visitors Into Qualified Prospects Using Meaningful Testimonials

Contact Us Page

A contact page is essential.

It should include the following information about your clinic:

• Business Name
• Physical address
• Phone number
• Fax number
• Contact email
• Google Map and directions
• Web URL
• Contact form
• Request for more information – contact details
• Links to social media profiles
• Interactive chat (optional)

If your business operates in multiple locations you should make this clear when showing the address and contact info.

You can also include links to an FAQ page, useful pages, booking form, support page, newsletter opt-in form, blog, etc.

Add A Blog

A blog is a powerful business marketing tool. Many blogging platforms typically include a content management system that allows you to easily promote your business using content like events, updates, useful information, opinions on current topics, how-to videos, media presentations, etc.

If you already have an existing site, then consider adding a WordPress-powered blog to create more exposure for your medical organization.

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

You may not know this, but an expertly configured WordPress site can turn into an automated traffic machine that can help begin delivering an ongoing stream of targeted traffic to your business, simply by adding regular content to your web site.

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

Go here to learn more:

• Website Traffic Blueprint – Discover How To Create A Web Traffic Generation Machine With WordPress

Legal Information

As a professional medical practitioner, ensuring that you have a website that complies will all legal requirements online is really important. This is not only important for building credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that no laws or regulations are being contravened wherever you provide services.

Depending on the services and products you provide, adding the legal pages below to your health-related website will help keep you out of trouble with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers, 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
• and others

Go here to learn more about adding legal pages to your website: Why You Need To Add Legal Pages To Your Site

Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website

In today’s globally competitive economy, the sooner you begin to publish great content on your site, the sooner you will begin to differentiate yourself from other competing businesses.

Providing great content with useful information, advice or tips will get your visitors to share your web pages online and come back for more content. Publishing content is a great way to inform and teach site visitors and prospective clients about your services.

For example, if your business provides products or services that help people lose weight, then some of the areas you could write content about include:

• How does fiber help you with weight loss?
• How small efforts in portion control can help achieve weight loss results
• Why using a measuring tape is better than a scale when it comes to weight loss progress
• What salad dressings can derail your diet (and healthier choices)
• Etc.

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

Use the same keywords and terms in your content that prospective clients would search for.

We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive regular training emails with easy-to-digest information that will teach exactly how to drive more traffic to your website, save money creating useful content for your site visitors and grow your business online using content. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also 100% FREE!

Tips For Improving Visitor Engagement And User Experience

Improving your site’s user experience (generally referred to as UX) will help to keep visitors coming back and using your site. This section will show you ways you can improve visitor engagement and UX.

RSS Feeds

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

If you provide useful content, other sites may want to syndicate your content.

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

• All of your updates are in one place
• Content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• Your feeds can be shared
• Users can subscribe to your feed
• It provides a way for external links to point back to your site
• Feeds can be submitted to RSS directories
• RSS provides multiple ways for your readers to receive your content (e.g. read your content on their mobile device using feed readers)
• RSS is built into WordPress

There are also a number of benefits to providing valuable information on your website from other sites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.

You can find RSS feeds with useful content by visiting sites of medical-related government departments and well-known industry bodies.

For example, here are some examples of RSS feeds you could add 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. Emergency preparedness, Healthy aging, HIV/AIDS, Menopause, Pregnancy, etc.) here: http://womenshealth.gov/news/rss/rss-feeds.html
• US National Libraries Of Medicine – For a list of feeds from leading medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. PhysiologicalReviews, The Psychiatrist, Stem Cells, The AAPS Journal (American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists), Cambridge Journals Online, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health - Get various RSS feeds on health-related news here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• FDA – Get FDA-related news feeds (e.g. criminal investigations press releases, food allergies, tainted products marked as dietary supplements, tobacco news, 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. Victoria – http://www.health.vic.gov.au/rss/newsfeed.xml
• Centers For Disease Control And Prevention - Get various health-related RSS 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. 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 individual RSS feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Allergies, Asthma, Nutrition, Food, & Recipes, Depression, Senior Health, Heart, etc.)
• MedicalNewsToday.com – MNT Featured Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• Medical News Today – You can also select specific feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Pharma Industry/Biotech Industry, Caregivers/Homecare, Health Insurance, Irritable-Bowel Syndrome, Nursing/Midwifery, Litigation/Medical Malpractice, Medical Practice Management, etc.)

You can also just search online for general feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific subjects, e.g. “eye health rss feeds”, “aid rss feeds”, “drug trials rss feeds”, etc.

(RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can help to improve your medical or health website’s user experience.)

Checklists And Charts

Adding checklists and explanatory charts to your site is a fantastic way to help increase user engagement and add value to your audience. Forms and checklists can provide visitors with useful information and resources to get necessary steps performed. They are also great client educational tools.

Checklists, charts and medical forms could address areas such as:

• Checklists and forms for booking appointments
• Checklists for pre or post treatment
• Health checklists for specific conditions
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, oral maintenance program, cosmetic dentistry, etc.
• Fitness and nutrition program checklists and charts
• General charts & infographics (e.g. sugar content in different foods, the importance of sleep at different stages of development, etc.)

Add Unique Tools

Providing unique online tools, gadgets and applications on your website can help increase visitor engagement and significantly add value to your visitors. Health-related calculators are great tools to add to your website. Other tools would include things like nutritional tools, or even recipes.

In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at a number of WordPress plugins and themes you can use in your site that can help to improve your search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

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This is the end of part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical web presence.

Click on this link to keep reading:

• How To Grow A Health-Related Web Presence – Part Two

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