In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins that can help to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase visitors to your site generation.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared with other prospective customers
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness apps, free trials, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to continue:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)