In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage your own online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can report concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical & Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create multiple events and start processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related use, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content 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 Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing medical clinics and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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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)