Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

The digital age has not only transformed the way business is done worldwide, it has also created growing challenges and great opportunities for medical or health businesses.

Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Professionals

Today, more than ever, health and medical services providers must work harder and find smarter ways to stand apart from their competition and source new clients. Not only do you have to maintain an active presence in the community your business serves, you must also develop and maintain a strong digital presence. This includes having a dynamic website and learning how to better market your services online.

As well as spending dollars advertising offline on newspapers, ads in industry publications and magazines, radio and tv spots, etc., you will probably find (if you haven’t already) that in order to compete, you will need to assign a greater part of your budget towards developing and maintaining a website that drives new prospective clients, engages visitors, outperforms the competition in search engines and social media, and helps to increase your marketing reach online.

This means that your site not only has to look great, your pages have to load fast, and be easy to navigate, but it’s also important to keep in mind that your site’s needs may change over time and sections will need to be frequently updated. This requires having a well-planned website and content management strategy.

One other difficult challenge that medical or health-related organizations face online, as do most professions for that matter, is that your site has only around thirty seconds to provide users what they are looking for 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 Medical Businesses

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

This article will help you uncover opportunities to generate web traffic and improve your online results.

As well as providing tips and information on cost-effective ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we also recommend that you consider using the WordPress content management system to power your medical-related business website or blog.

To learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress content management system (CMS), go here:

• Learn Why A Poorly Built Website Can Cost You Money And What To Do About It
• The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Using WordPress

Useful Tips To Improve Your Website

In this section we’ll start with the basics and show you how to improve your health website and get better results online. We will look at what pages you need, what type of content works best for medical or health sites, navigation structure, etc.

If you need assistance or help planning your health-related website, go here: The Website Planning Process - A Cost-Saving Primer For Business Owners

How To Improve Your Website Pages

All business websites require a number of essential pages. Let’s review these.

Description Of Services

It’s essential to include a page that explains your services and any products that you offer. Depending on which area you specialize in, your page could list services such as:

• Medical And Surgical – e.g. pain management, pulmonology hematology, reconstructive surgery, geriatric medicine, rheumatology, colon/rectal surgery, optometry operating theaters, etc.
• Dental Services – e.g. cosmetic dentistry, holistic dentistry, cleaning services, teeth whitening, braces, emergency dental, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. cardiac monitoring, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal and Neonatal – e.g. obstetrics, midwifery, etc.
• Child Health services – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic services – breast screening, lung screening, x-ray, women’s health, psychosis, food allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology services – laboratory testing and analysis, emergency pathology testing, clinical trials, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling – mental health services, alcohol, tobacco & other drug counselling, marriage counselling, wellbeing, social work services
• Alternative therapies – Chinese medicine, homeopathy, reiki, massage therapy, osteopathy, hypnotherapy, etc.
• Other medical services/therapies – weight management, podiatry, reproductive services, speech language therapy, medical genetics, prosthetics, hearing aids, home and community care, community health, medical transport, etc.

Make sure to list all of the services you provide. Educate your visitors about what your services do and direct them to your appointment booking page.

About Us Page

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

Remember to also include any awards, accreditations, recognitions, certifications, associations, publications, etc., that can be used to promote your practice and position yourself above your competitors.

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

Your Staff

If you are searching for cost-effective ideas to sell more products online and get people to stay longer on your site, then something you can do, is make it easier for prospective clients to get to know you, your team and your business better.

Prospective clients need to relate to your business. A great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your staff. This page should include a photo and a mini biography. Since most visitors will not tend to be familiar with medical terms it should tell who they are and what they specialize in. You may also want to explain what those specialties mean. It can include social buttons that will allow your prospective clients to follow some of your staff members on their social pages.

On this page, don’t be afraid to humanize your people with personal stories, hobbies, etc., but make sure to highlight each employee’s expertise and qualifications, how their skills and knowledge 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 page that introduces your employees to prospective new clients. Image sourced from: southperthchiro.com.au)

If you need help how to easily add an easy-to-update list directory of employees in your site, go here: Plugin Tutorial: How To Easily Add A Staff Directory

We’re Hiring

List any job opportunities available within the practice. It would include training, benefits, professional development, social aspects of working for your organization, etc. It should include information about new career opportunities in the 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 you on social media, etc.

Case Studies

Reviews from clients and case studies are a great way to attract prospective clients and showcase your services. Adding a web page with case studies and testimonials also helps your medical or health-related site to provide visitors social proof online.

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

We have written a detailed article on using testimonials and reviews get better results online. Go here to learn more about this: How To Create Better Results Online With Knockout Testimonials

Contact Us

Having a contact page is absolutely vital.

It should provide the following information:

• Name
• Location
• Phone
• Facsimile number
• Contact email address
• Map and directions
• Website address
• Contact form
• Contact name
• Links to social media profiles
• Chat/Skype

If your business operates from different areas you want to make this clear when showing your address and contact info.

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

Blog Section

A blog is a very powerful marketing tool for your business. Blogs typically comprise of a content management system that is simple to use and allows you to easily promote your business using content like announcements, product releases, useful information, informative posts, educational videos, infographics, etc.

If you already have an established health-related 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 website is very hard to add new content to or not giving you the results you want, then WordPress can be used both as your website and blog.

Very few businesses know that an expertly configured WordPress site can turn into an automated traffic system that can begin delivering targeted traffic to your website, simply by adding regular content to your web site.

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

Go here to learn more:

• WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Discover How To Turn Your WordPress Site Into An Automated Web Traffic Machine

Legal Information

As a professional medical or health services practitioner, ensuring that you have a compliant website is really important. This is not only important for building trust with prospective clients, but also to ensure that no local, regional and federal laws or regulations are being broken in whichever location you provide services.

Adding the legal pages below to your site 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 and inconveniences:

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

We have written a detailed article about adding legal pages to your site. Go here to learn more: What You Need To Know About Adding Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Ways To Improve Your Web Content

In today’s globally competitive economy, the sooner you begin to publish good content on your site, the quicker you will begin to see results and differentiate yourself from competing businesses.

Providing useful content with information, tips and advice will get your visitors sharing your web pages and coming back for more. Content marketing is a great way to inform and teach site visitors and prospects about your business and services.

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

• Potential health issues caused by being overweight
• How to set realistic, but achievable weight loss goals
• How you eat your food - just as important as what you eat (eat at table, chew slowly)
• How to make smarter choices choices when eating out at any restaurant
• Etc.

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

Include keywords in your articles that your prospective clients will be searching for.

We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive a comprehensive series of training emails with actionable information that will teach you how to drive more traffic to your site, save money creating useful content for your visitors and grow your website using content marketing strategies. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also completely FREE!

Ways Of Improving Visitor Experience

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

Content Syndication – RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds provide lots of benefits for your website.

If you provide valuable information, other businesses may want to syndicate your content.

Some of the benefits of having other businesses syndicate your content, include:

• All of your content updates are in one place
• Doesn’t rely on email
• Feeds can be shared online
• Users can subscribe to your RSS feed
• A feed provides links back to your content
• Feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
• There are multiple ways your readers can receive your content (e.g. subscribers can view the content on their mobile device using a feed reader)
• RSS is built into WordPress

There are also benefits when it comes 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 health or medical-related government departments and key industry bodies.

Below we have listed a few useful RSS feeds you could add to your website:

• 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 RSS feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Emergency preparedness, Healthy aging, HIV/AIDS, Minority women’s health, Pregnancy, 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. PhysiologicalReviews, Epidemiology – Featured Articles, Neurology India, BMJ Archives of Disease, BMJ Evidence-Based Mental Health, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health - Find various health-related feeds here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• US Food And Drug Administration (FDA) – Get FDA-related news feeds (e.g. consumer health information, food safety reports, tainted products marked as dietary supplements, tobacco news, etc.) and podcasts here: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/RSSFeeds
• UK Department Of Health (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. NSW – http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/pages/rss.aspx
• Centers For Disease Control And Prevention - Get many feeds on health-related news 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. Research: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Research.xml)
• MedicineNet – Weekly Health and Medical News Digest: http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/weeklyhealth.xml. You can also choose specific RSS feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Allergies, Asthma, Cold & Flu, Pregnancy, Digestion, High Blood Pressure, etc.)
• MedicalNewsToday.com – MNT Featured Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• MedicalNewsToday.com – You can also choose individual feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Public Health, Vascular, Lymphology/Lymphedema, Swine Flu, COPD, Medical Innovation, Ear, Nose and Throat, etc.)

You can also search online for general RSS feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific topics, e.g. “muscular dystrophy rss feeds”, “epilepsy rss feeds”, “clinical trials rss feeds”, etc.

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

Provide Downloadable Charts And Checklists

Checklists and educational charts are a fantastic way to increase user engagement, add value to your readers and provide something unique. Forms and checklists can give them step-by-step information and resources to get necessary tasks completed. Charts and checklists can also be great instructional tools.

Forms, charts and checklists could address areas such as:

• Checklists/forms for booking appointments
• Checklists for post-surgery recovery
• Health checklists and charts for specific systems
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, oral hygiene program, general dentistry, etc.
• Fitness and exercise program checklists
• General charts & infographics (e.g. sugar content in different foods, sleep requirements at different ages, etc.)

Adding Online Tools

Providing unique tools and applications on your website is a great way to increase visitor engagement and significantly add value to potential clients. Health-related calculators, for example, are popular tools for your website. Other applications would include things like nutritional tools, or even recipes.

In part 2 of this detailed article, we look at a several WordPress-based tools you can use in your 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.

To continue, click here:

• Your Medical Practice Website – WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors

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