Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

The information economy has not only transformed business worldwide, it has also created increasingly difficult challenges and opportunities for the health-related profession.

Challenges Health & Medical Firms Face Online

Now, more than ever, medical services practitioners must find smarter ways to remain competitive and obtain new clientele. Not only do you have to participate in the community your business serves, you must also develop and maintain a strong presence online. This includes having a dynamic website and learning how to better market your practice online.

In addition to investing money in offline marketing activities like advertising 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 with other health businesses, increasingly larger amounts of their budget will need to be directed to develop and maintain a website that can attract new clients, engage visitors, outperform the competition in search engines and help increase your marketing reach online.

This means that your website not only has to look professional, your pages have to load fast, and be easy to navigate, but it’s also important to keep in mind that the needs of your website will change in time and sections will need to be updated often. This requires implementing sound website and content management strategy.

One other difficult challenge that medical or health businesses face with their websites (as most professions do for that matter), is that they have an average of thirty seconds or less to give visitors the information they are looking for or they will go elsewhere to get their needs met.

“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 Businesses In The Online Economy

As well as facing a number of challenges, there are also plenty of online opportunities available to medical or health businesses that can adapt to meet online economy demands and think outside the box in terms of improving their online business marketing skills.

In this guide, you will learn new opportunities to drive more web traffic and establish online credibility for your business.

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

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

• Learn How A Poorly Designed Website Can Cost You Business And What To Do About It
• Everything You Need To Know To Grow A Successful Small Business Using A WordPress Site

Practical Tips For Improving Your Website

This section looks at ways to improve your medical website and get better results online. We show you what pages your website needs, what type of content you need, navigation structure, etc.

If you need any help with website planning, read this article we have written: The Website Planning Process: A Useful Blueprint For Non-Technical Business Owners

How To Improve Your Website Pages

All business websites need a number of essential pages. Let’s go over these.

Your Services And Products

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

• Medicine & Surgery – e.g. anaesthetics, nephrology blood disorders, maxillofacial surgery, stroke, respiratory, weight loss surgery, optometry surgical outpatients, etc.
• Dental Services – e.g. preventive dentistry, children’s dentistry, cleaning services, restorations, dental braces, emergency dentistry services, etc.
• Cardiology – e.g. cardiac patient education, chronic heart conditions
• Prenatal/Neonatal – e.g. birthing, midwifery, etc.
• Child Health services – paediatrics, child development, children services, etc.
• Diagnostic – breast screens, lung screening, hearing, gynaecology, MRI scanning, allergy testing, etc.
• Pathology services – laboratory testing and analysis, routine pathology testing, occupational and environmental testing, speech pathology, etc
• Counselling services – mental health services, alcohol, tobacco & other drug services, couples, diet and nutrition counselling, social work services
• Alternative treatments – Chinese medicine, reflexology, hydrotherapy, yoga, chiropractic, hypnotherapy, etc.
• Other medical services – diet and nutrition, othopedics, reproductive endocrinology, optical services, neurosciences, artificial limbs, hearing aids, 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 direct them to your appointment booking page.

About Us

This page needs to describe your business and what it stands for, its unique approach, philanthropical activities, etc.

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

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

Your Staff

If you are looking for quicker, simpler and cost-effective ideas to grow your business online, then help prospective clients get to know, like and trust you, your team and your organization better.

People need to relate to your business. One great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your people. This page should include a photo and a mini biography. Since most visitors will not tend to be familiar with medical or health-related terms your bio descriptions should tell who they are and what they specialize in. You may also want to explain what those specialized areas mean. This page can also include social buttons that will allow your prospective clients to follow your staff members on their social networks.

In this page, make sure to outline your team member’s expertise and qualifications, how they contribute to the success of 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 image source: southperthchiro.com.au)

If you need help how to easily create and add an easy-to-maintain list of employees to your website using free plugins, see this step-by-step tutorial: How To Easily Add A Simple Staff List On Your WordPress Site

Career Opportunities

List any job opportunities available within the organization. It would include training, employee benefits, opportunities for advancement, social aspects of working with your business, etc. It should include information about upcoming career opportunities in the health or medical-related industry.

Include also a positions available section in your page. If there are no positions currently available, consider inviting people to return periodically to the page, join your updates list, follow your social pages, etc.

Case Studies

Customer reviews and case studies are a great way to attract prospective clients and showcase what type of services you offer. Adding a web page with testimonials from past clients and case studies also helps to provide potential clients with social proof.

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

We have created a comprehensive article about using testimonials, case studies and client reviews here: How To Improve Your Visitor-To-Lead Conversions With Effective Customer Testimonials

Contact Page

A clean contact page is crucial.

Your contact page should provide the following information about your clinic:

• Name
• Location
• Phone
• Fax
• Email
• Map
• Website address
• Contact form
• Name of person to contact
• Social media links
• Chat (optional feature)

If you operate in several areas you should make this clear when displaying your address and contact information.

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

Blog Section

A blog is a very powerful marketing tool. Most blogging platforms typically comprise of a content management system that allows you to easily promote your business using content like events, updates, educational articles, discussions on current topics, how-to videos, media presentations, etc.

If you already have an medical or health site, then consider adding a WordPress-powered blog to market your medical company.

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

Very few people know that an expertly configured WordPress site can turn into an automated traffic-generation machine that can help begin to deliver targeted traffic to your website, simply by publishing regular content to your website.

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

Go here to learn more about this:

• WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint – How To Turn Your Website Into A Web Traffic Machine

Legal Info Pages

As a professional health practitioner, having a compliant website is extremely important. This is not only important for establishing trust and credibility with visitors, but also to ensure that no local, regional or federal laws and regulations are being broken wherever you provide services.

Depending on the services you provide, adding some or all of the following legal pages to your medical or health site will help you stay out of legal hot water with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers, and other potential sources of legal threats and inconveniences:

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

We have written a detailed article about adding legal pages to your website here: Adding Legal Pages To Your Website

Tips For Improving Your Web Content

In today’s fiercely competitive online economy, the sooner you begin publishing content on your site, the sooner you will begin to differentiate yourself from competing businesses.

By providing great content with useful information, tips and advice, you will get your visitors to share your information online and come back for more content. Content marketing is a great way to inform and teach your visitors and prospective clients about your business and services.

For example, if your business provides weight loss services, then some of the topics you can cover as content on your site:

• Common medical conditions that can cause weight gain
• How to identify the bad habits that need to be corrected to ensure lifetime weight loss
• Weight loss pills (common ones, side effects, long term results, do they work?)
• What processed foods can ruin your weight loss goals (and healthier choices)
• And many other content topics

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

Include the keywords and terms in your content that your readers will be searching 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 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 business online using content. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also completely FREE!

Ways Of Improving Visitor Experience

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

Use RSS Feeds

RSS feeds can help to improve your visitor engagement and user experience in several ways.

If you provide content that adds value to others, other sites will want to syndicate your content to their visitors.

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

• All of your content updates are kept in one place
• your content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• Your feed can be shared
• Users can subscribe to your RSS feed
• A feed provides links to your site
• RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregator services
• RSS provides several ways for your readers to receive your content (e.g. users can read your content on their mobile device using feed readers)
• It’s built into WordPress

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

To find RSS feeds with loads of useful content for your website, visit sites of relevant government departments and well-known industry bodies.

Below we have listed some examples of RSS feeds you could consider adding to a medical or health site:

• US Department Of Health And Human Services – e.g. Blog posts feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SelectedHhsBlogPosts, etc. You can search by departments and select individual RSS feeds, like feeds on women’s health issues (e.g. Breast cancer, Health care for women, Heart health and stroke, Menopause, 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. ACS Publications, Neuroanatomy, European Heart Journal, jobs.ac.uk health and medical jobs, Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, etc.) go here: http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_RSS_feeds_on_health
• National Institutes Of Health (www.nih.gov) - Find various RSS feeds on health-related news here: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
• FDA – Find FDA-related feeds (e.g. consumer health information updates, food safety reports, product recalls, radiological health, etc.) and podcasts here: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/RSSFeeds
• Department of Health UK (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. Western Australia – http://www.public.health.wa.gov.au/feed/?types=news
• Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (www.cdc.gov) - Find various health-related 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 feeds section (e.g. Research: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Research.xml)
• MedicineNet.com – MedTerms Medical Word of the Day: http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/dailyword.xml. You can also select individual feeds here (http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/article.htm) (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease, Cancer, Neurology, Oral Health, Digestion, HIV, etc.)
• Medical News Today – Medical News Headlines: http://rss.medicalnewstoday.com/featurednews.xml
• Medical News Today – You can also select specific RSS feeds here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/newsfeeds-rss (e.g. Stem Cell Research, Complementary Medicine/Alternative Medicine, Compliance, Flu/Cold/SARS, Back Pain, Nutrition/Diet, Alzheimer’s/Dementia, etc.)

You can also search online for general RSS feeds, e.g. “medical rss feeds” or search for feeds on specific topics, e.g. “medicaid rss feeds”, “insomnia rss feeds”, “medical practice management rss feeds”, etc.

(Add RSS feeds to improve your health or medical website’s UX.)

Add Forms

Checklists and explanatory charts are a fantastic way to help increase user engagement, add value to your audience and provide something unique. Checklists and medical forms can provide useful instructions and resources to perform a task. Checklists and charts are great client instructional tools.

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

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

Provide Online Tools

Providing unique online tools, gadgets and applications on your site can help increase visitor engagement and add value to potential clients. Health-related calculators are useful tools you can add to your website. Other applications could include things like nutritional tools, and even recipes.

In part two of this detailed guide, we discuss a number of online tools you can use in your medical or health website using WordPress plugins that can improve seo, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

***

This is the end of section 1.

To continue, click here:

• Tips For Health Practitioners – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins And Themes

***

***