Category: WordPress Business Strategies

In Part One of this article on ways to build your health or medical business web presence, we covered the following topics:

• Online Challenges For Medical Providers
• Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
• Your Web Pages
• Improving Your Web Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.

Areas covered include:

• Improve Web Traffic
• How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
• WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic

To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Capability
• Themes – An Introduction

Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.

Improve Website Traffic

Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation with plugins.

Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress

There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:

• SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
• Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
• Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
• Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
• Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
• Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
• Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.

WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.

For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)

Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up and manage a social community on WordPress.
• bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on your website.
• E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
• Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
• Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features on your site.

(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)

Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress

Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.

Provide An Email Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Provides updates
• Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
• Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with users
• Provides another way for readers to share your content

One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.

Adding A Contact Form

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.

A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:

• Reduces spam
• Set up automated responses
• Gives you control over what gets sent to you
• Allows you to keep your email address private
• Different forms can be added to any page or post
• Looks professional
• Convenient for users

A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)

This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right area.

Adding Maps

Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.

Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:

• They improve local SEO
• Helps visitors find you easily
• Show location of events

(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)

Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins

Medical Plugins For WordPress

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)

Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, such as medical practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.

(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)

Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar

Event Espresso

(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)

If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes

(Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:

• Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)

Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.

Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:

• Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro – WordPress Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)

The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculator
• And many more

The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown 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}:

• Weight Loss Tracker Plugin

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget

(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
• And many more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)

Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)

Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data Plugin

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.

PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

For more details, go here}:

• PubMed Posts Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link  indication tags to conditions, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato – WordPress Plugin)

Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato WordPress Plugin

HealthTap

(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.

With the plugin 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin

TrendMD

(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

• TrendMD WordPress Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe)

If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
• And many more.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your site.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)

Exercise Images lets you add exercise images to your website.

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images

In part three, we will look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.

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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to build your health web presence.

Click on this link to continue:

• The Complete Guide To Building And Growing Your Medical Center Services Website – Part 3

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