Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

Medical professionals face many challenges in today’s online economy, especially when it comes to growing a business online.

Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Practitioners

Today, more than ever, businesses in the medical sector must work harder than ever to remain competitive. Not only do you have to actively participate in the community you serve, you must also develop and maintain a strong presence online. This includes having a website and searching for smarter ways to market your health services online.

In addition to investing money in offline marketing activities, you will probably find that in order to compete, you will need to assign a greater amount of your marketing budget to develop and maintain a website that brings in prospective clients, engages users, outranks the competition in search engines and helps to give your business a wider degree of marketing reach online.

This means that your site not only has to look professional, your web pages have to be fast-loading, and your site 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 sections will need to be updated frequently. This requires having a well-planned website and content management strategy in place.

Another challenge that medical or health organizations face with their websites, and most other businesses for that matter, is that your site has an average of thirty seconds to help users find the information they need or they will find what they are looking for elsewhere.

“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 Profession In The Digital Economy

As well as facing many challenges, there are also loads of online opportunities available to businesses in the medical-related industry that can adapt to meet online challenges and think outside the box in terms of marketing their business better online.

This guide will help you uncover new ways to attract more visitors and establish online credibility for your medical-related business.

As well as providing useful website improvement tips, we also place special emphasis on the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform to power your health or medical-related website.

To learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress content management system (CMS), see these articles:

• How A Poorly Built Website Can Cost You Business And What To Do About It
• Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Business Online With A WordPress Site

Useful Tips For Improving Your Website

Let’s start by covering the basic information you need. In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your medical-related website and get better results. We show you what web pages you need, what type of content works best for medical websites, layout and navigation, etc.

If you need website planning assistance, check out the article we have written here: A Practical Guide To Web Site Planning For Business Owners

Your Web Pages

All business websites need some essential web pages. Let’s discuss these.

Services And Products

You need to include a page that explains your services and any products that you offer. Depending on which area of health you specialize in, your page can include services such as:

• Medicine & Surgery – e.g. acute pain management, neurosurgery haematology, cosmetic surgery, hyperbaric medicine, respiratory, gastroenterology, optometry operating theaters, etc.
• Dental Services – e.g. preventive dentistry, children’s dentistry, bad breath treatment, teeth whitening, implants, emergency dentistry, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. cardiac patient education, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal/Neonatal – e.g. obstetrics, maternity services, etc.
• Child Health services – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic services – mammography, skin cancer, audiology, women’s health, magnetic resonance imaging, food allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology – laboratory testing and analysis, routine pathology testing, fine-needle aspiration cytology, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling – mental health, alcohol, tobacco & other drug counselling, marriage counselling, diet and nutrition counselling, social development services
• Alternative treatments – Chinese medicine, homeopathy, colloidal silver therapy, massage therapy, osteopathy, hypnosis, etc.
• Other medical services – weight management, othopedics, lymphedema therapy, occupational therapy, inherited diseases, artificial limbs, hearing aids, home and community care, clinical information, medical supplies, etc.

List all of the services you provide. Educate your visitors about what your services do and direct them to your contact or appointment booking page.

About Us Page

The ‘About Us’ page needs to describe your business and what it stands for, its unique approach, supported community services, etc.

It’s important to mention any awards, recognitions, accreditations, certifications, publications, associations, etc., that can be used to promote your medical services and to set yourself above other competitors.

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

Core Team

Are you looking for quicker, easier and cost-effective ideas to sell more products or services online? Then make it easier for prospects to get to know your organization better.

You want prospects to relate to your business. One great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your team. This page should include a photo and a brief bio. Since most visitors won’t be well-versed in health terms it should tell who they are and what their specialties are. You may also want to explain what those specialized areas mean. This page can include social buttons so your prospective clients can follow individual team members on their social networks.

On this page, make sure to outline your team member’s expertise, 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 staff to prospective new clients. Screenshot source: southperthchiro.com.au)

To learn more about how to add an easy-to-maintain list of staff or team members to your site using a free WP plugin, see this tutorial: How To Easily Create A Simple Employee Directory In Your WordPress Site Without Editing Code

We’re Hiring

This is a listing of job or career opportunities within the company. It should include training provided, benefits, professional development, social aspects of working for your organization, etc. You can also include 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 this page, subscribe to your announcements list, follow your social pages, etc.

Testimonials

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

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

We have written extensively about using client case studies and client reviews get better results online here: Discover How To Turn More Visitors Into Qualified Prospects With More Effective User Testimonials

Contact Us

A functional contact page is absolutely necessary.

Your contact page should include the following information about your company:

• Company Name
• Location
• Phone
• Fax number
• Contact email address
• Map and directions
• Website URL
• Contact form
• Name of person to contact
• Social media web addresses
• Chat (optional feature)

If your business services several areas you want to make that clear when showing your address and contact information.

Consider also including links to an FAQ page, frequently-visited pages, online booking form, support area, newsletter, blog, etc.

Blog Section

A blog can be a very powerful marketing tool for your business. Many blogging platforms are built around a content management system that is simple to use and allows you to promote your business using content such as news, updates, useful articles and tutorials, opinions and discussions, promotional videos, media presentations, etc.

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

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

Not many people know this, but WordPress can turn into an automated traffic-generation system that can attract targeted traffic to your website, simply by adding new content on a regular basis to your website.

(An expertly configured WordPress site can automate your traffic generation)

Go here to learn more:

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

Legal Info Pages

It’s extremely important to ensure they have a compliant website. This is not only important for building credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that no laws and regulations are being contravened wherever your practice is located.

Adding the following legal pages to your medical or health-related website will help keep you out of trouble with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers, and other potential sources of threats and legal inconveniences:

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

If you want to learn more about adding legal pages to your site, refer to this article: What You Need To Know About Adding Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website

In today’s globally competitive economy, the willingness to deliver valuable content at no cost has become one of the key success factors for businesses.

You will want to provide great content with useful information, tips and advice that will get your visitors sharing it with others and coming back for more content. Using content is the most effective way to inform and educate your visitors and prospective clients about using your services.

For example, if you provide weight management services, then some of the topics you could cover as content on your site:

• Emotional causes for weight issues (possible causes, identifying yours)
• How to set realistic, but challenging weight loss goals
• Tips for developing a better eating and exercise regime
• Vitamins and minerals that help with weight loss (chromium, calcium, magnesium, etc.)
• And many other content topics

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

Use the same keywords and terminology in your articles that your readers would 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 you how to drive more traffic to your web site, save money creating high-quality content for your site visitors and grow your presence online using content marketing strategies. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also 100% FREE!

Improve Visitor Experience

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

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds provide many benefits for your website.

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 content updates are in one place
• Content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• RSS feeds can be shared
• Users can subscribe to your feed
• A feed provides links to your site
• Feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
• There are a number of ways your readers can receive your content (e.g. subscribers can read your content on their mobile device using different applications)
• It’s built into WordPress

There are also 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 many useful RSS feeds for your website by visiting sites of medical and health-related government departments or industry bodies.

Below we have listed examples of RSS feeds you could add to a medical or health website:

• US Department Of Health And Human Services – e.g. Blog posts feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SelectedHhsBlogPosts, etc. You can search by departments and choose specific RSS feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Body image, Fitness and nutrition, HIV/AIDS, Menopause, Pregnancy, etc.) here: http://womenshealth.gov/news/rss/rss-feeds.html
• US National Libraries Of Medicine – For a directory of RSS feeds from well-known medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. PhysiologicalReviews, ADA DiabetesCare , Stem Cells, Medscape, Respiratory Research, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health - Get many feeds on health-related news here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• US Food And Drug Administration (FDA) – Get FDA-related news feeds (e.g. criminal investigations press releases, food allergy reports, recalls, drugs, 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. Western Australia – http://www.public.health.wa.gov.au/feed/?types=news
• Centers For Disease Control And Prevention - Get various feeds on health-related news and topics and podcasts here: http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/rss.asp
• Medical News Feeds: You can search medical news RSS feeds by going to publications like the NYTimes RSS feeds section (e.g. Medical research: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Research.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. Lung Conditions, Arthritis, Migraine Headaches, Diet & Weight Management, Eyesight, Skin, etc.)
• MedicalNewsToday.com – MNT Medical News Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• Medical News Today – You can also choose specific RSS feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Cystic Fibrosis, Bird Flu/Avian Flu, Lymphology/Lymphedema, Aid/Disasters, Diabetes, Nutrition/Diet, Erectile Dysfunction/Premature Ejaculation, etc.)

You can also search online for general RSS feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific subjects, e.g. “obstetrics rss feeds”, “emergency medicine rss feeds”, “dementia rss feeds”, etc.

(Adding RSS feeds can help to improve your health or medical website’s UX.)

Checklists & Forms

Checklists and educational charts are a great way to help increase visitor engagement and add value to your visitors. They can give them step-by-step information and resources to complete necessary tasks. Charts and checklists are also great instructional tools.

You can provide forms and checklists covering a range of areas such as:

• Booking appointments
• Checklists for post-surgery recovery
• Health checklists and charts for specific conditions
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, oral maintenance program, general dentistry, etc.
• Weight loss and nutrition program checklists and charts
• General charts & infographics (e.g. sugar content in different foods, sleep requirements at different ages, etc.)

Other Tools

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

In part two of this detailed guide, we will be discussing a several WordPress plugins you can use in your medical-related website that improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more traffic to your business.

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This is the end of section one of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical web presence.

To view Part Two, click this link:

• How To Grow Your Medical-Related Website – Part Two

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