In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress Themes – An Overview
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Practitioners – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
WordPress Plugins - Medical Services Providers
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed includes 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 to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, users 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)