Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

The digital age has not only revolutionised businesses worldwide, it has also created a number of difficult challenges and opportunities for businesses offering medical services.

Challenges Professional Medical Practitioners 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 you serve, you must also develop a strong web presence. This includes having a website and learning smarter ways to grow your medical or health services online.

As well as spending dollars advertising offline on local newspapers, ads in industry publications and magazines, radio and tv, etc., businesses in the health-related industry are now also finding that increasingly larger amounts of their budget will need to be allocated towards the development and management of a website that can attract prospective clients, engage visitors, outperform the competition in search engines and help increase their reach online.

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

Another problem that health-related businesses (and most other businesses) face with their websites, is that you have around 30 seconds to provide visitors with what they need or they will go elsewhere to find what they need.

“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 & Medical Businesses In The Web Economy

As well as facing significant challenges, there are also many online opportunities available to health businesses that can adapt to meet the challenges of the digital economy and think progressively about marketing their services better online.

The guide below will help you uncover new opportunities to attract and engage new visitors and create significant improvements in your business online.

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

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

• Why A Poorly Constructed Website Can Lose You Customers
• Understanding WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide

Ways To Improve Your Website

This section looks at how to improve your health or medical website and get better results. We will look at what pages you need, what type of content works best for medical or health websites, suggestions for improving navigation structure, etc.

If you need assistance or help planning your website, visit this page: How To Plan Your Business Web Site: A Money-Saving Primer For Non-Technical Business Owners

Your Website Pages

Professional websites require some basic web pages. Let’s take a look at the pages your  should have and how to set up your health-related website for best results.

Services And Products Page

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

• Medical And Surgical – e.g. anaesthetics, neurosurgery hematology, maxillofacial surgery, geriatric medicine, respiratory, infection control, optometry surgical outpatients, etc.
• Dentistry – e.g. cosmetic dentistry, children’s dentistry, cleaning services, veneers, crowns and bridges, implants, emergency dental, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. cardiac patient rehabilitation, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal/Postnatal – e.g. birthing, midwifery, etc.
• Child Health services – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic – breast screens, skin cancer, audiology, gynaecology, MRI scanning, food allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology – laboratory testing and analysis, emergency pathology testing, fine-needle aspiration, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling – mental health, alcohol, tobacco & other drug counselling, trauma counselling, diet and nutrition counselling, social work services
• Alternative therapies – Chinese medicine, reflexology, holistic medicine, massage therapy, osteopathy, hypnosis, etc.
• Other medical services/therapies – weight management, chiropody, fertility services, occupational therapy, inherited diseases, artificial limbs, assisted living, home and community care, community health, medical supplies, etc.

Make sure to 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.

Who We Are

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

It should mention any business awards, recognitions, accreditations, certifications, associations, publications, etc., that can be used to promote your services and set yourself above your competitors.

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

Team

Are you looking for quicker and easier ideas to sell more products online? Then help visitors get to know you and your business better.

Potential clients need to relate to your business. A great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your employees. This page should include a photo and a brief bio. Since most visitors won’t be well-versed in medical or health terms it should tell who they are and what their specialties are. It should also explain what those specialties mean. It should also include social buttons that will allow your prospective clients to follow individual team members on their social networks.

In this page, don’t be afraid to humanize your team members with personal stories, hobbies, etc., but make sure to highlight your staff member’s experience, how their skills contribute to the success of your team, and more importantly, how they will help add value to your clients’ business.

(Make sure to add an employee description page. Image sourced from: southperthchiro.com.au)

To learn more about how to easily add an easy-to-update directory of staff members in WordPress using a free WordPress plugin, go here: Tutorial: How To Add An Employee Directory To Your Site

Job Opportunities

This is a listing of career opportunities available within your business. This page would include training, benefits, professional development, social aspects of working for your organization, etc. It should include case studies of recruits who have worked their way up in your business and information about new career opportunities in the medical or health-related industry.

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

Testimonials

Case studies and client reviews are a great way to attract potential clients and showcase what kind of services you offer. Adding a page with case studies and client reviews also helps your health or medical-related business to provide visitors social proof online.

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

To learn more about using testimonials, case studies and client reviews go here: Turn More Visitors Into Prospects With Compelling User Testimonials

Contact Page

Having a contact page is absolutely necessary.

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

• Business Name
• Physical location
• Phone
• Facsimile
• Email
• Map
• Website URL
• Contact form
• Contact name
• Links to social media pages
• Live chat feature

If your business services multiple locations you want to make this clear when displaying the address and contact info.

You should also include a few links point to commonly-asked questions page, main pages, booking request, helpdesk, newsletter, blog, etc.

Blog

A blog can be a very powerful business marketing tool. Many blogging platforms typically include a content management system that allows you to promote your business using timely content like news and announcements, product releases, training information, informative posts, videos, infographics, etc.

If you already have an established site, then consider adding a WordPress blog to market your organization.

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

Something not many people know about, is that WordPress can turn into an automated traffic-generation machine that can help begin driving new visitors to your site, simply by publishing new content to your website on a regular basis.

(WordPress can generate traffic automatically to your site)

Go here to learn more about this:

• Web Site Traffic Blueprint – How To Create A Traffic-Getting Machine

Legal Pages

Having a compliant website is really important. This is not only important for establishing trust and credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that you are not contravening laws or regulations wherever you practice.

Depending on the products and services you provide, adding the legal pages below to your website will help keep you out of trouble with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers (e.g. Google), and other potential legal threats and inconveniences:

• Contact Page
• Privacy Policy
• Terms And Conditions 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 comprehensive article about adding legal pages to your site. Go here to learn more about this: How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Tips For Improving Your Content

In today’s highly competitive online business economy, being generous with information has become one of the key differentiators for businesses.

Provide useful content with great information, tips or advice that will get your visitors sharing it with others and coming back for more content. Content marketing is the most effective way to inform and teach your visitors and prospects about using your services.

For example, if your business provides weight management services, then some of the areas you could publish content about include the following:

• Nutrients your body needs on a daily basis (carbs, proteins, minerals, vitamins, fats)
• How to identify the bad habits that need to be corrected to ensure permanent weight loss
• Comparing different diets, e.g. HCG diet, Mediterranean diet, Weight Watchers diet (what these are, how they can benefit you, are they effective)
• How to make right choices when eating at restaurants
• Etc.

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

Remember to use specific keywords and terms in your content that prospective clients will search for online.

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

Improving Visitor Experience

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

Using RSS Feeds

RSS feeds can help to improve visitor engagement and UX in a number of different ways.

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

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

• All of your updates are in one place
• Content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• Your feed can be shared online
• Feeds allow for subscribing
• An RSS feed provides links back to your content
• Your feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators
• RSS provides a number of ways for your readers to receive your content (e.g. view the content on their mobile device using a feed reader)
• RSS is built into WordPress

There are also 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.

You can find many useful RSS feeds by visiting sites of medical-related government departments and key industry bodies.

Below we have listed some examples of RSS feeds you could consider adding to a medical or health-related 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. Body image, Healthy aging, 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 list of RSS feeds from well-known medical journals, publications and websites (e.g. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, BMJ, BMJ Medical Humanities, Current Psychiatry, Transplantation – Most Popular Articles, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health - Find many health-related RSS feeds here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• FDA – Find RSS feeds on fda-related news like consumer health information, MedWatch safety alerts (human medical products), recalls, foods, 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 (www.cdc.gov) - Find 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 RSS feeds in places like the NYTimes feeds section (e.g. Fitness and nutrition: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Nutrition.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. Allergies, Men’s health, Chronic Pain, Depression, Prevention & Wellness, Thyroid, etc.)
• Medical News Today – Featured Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• Medical News Today – You can also choose specific feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Colorectal Cancer, Pharmacy/Pharmacist, Health Insurance, Regulatory Affairs/Drug Approvals, Primary Care/General Practice, Pediatrics/Children’s Health, Clinical Trials/Drug Trials, etc.)

You can also search online for general feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific areas, e.g. “caregivers rss feeds”, “respiratory rss feeds”, “premature ejaculation rss feeds”, etc.

(Use RSS feeds to provide your visitors with a better UX.)

Checklists And Forms

Adding checklists and charts to your site is a fantastic way to increase visitor engagement, add value to your readers and provide something unique. They can give them useful step-by-step instructions and resources to complete a necessary task. They are great client educational tools.

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

• Checklists/forms for booking appointments
• Checklists for pre or post treatment
• Health checklists for specific systems
• Dental checklists – e.g. first visit, caries prevention program, cosmetic dentistry, etc.
• Weight loss and exercise program checklists
• General charts & infographics (e.g. sugar content in different foods, sleep requirements at different stages of development, etc.)

Adding Online Tools

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

In the next section of this detailed guide, we will be discussing a several WordPress-based tools you can add to your medical or health-related site that improve seo, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic to your business.

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This is the end of part one.

To view the rest of this guide, click here:

• Your Medical Practice Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation

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