In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you set up a social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engaging with users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, such as medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule an event and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical use, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets site visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your site visitors can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise drawings inside your web content.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum