In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical-related business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Essential Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the right area.
Adding Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, 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 start receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are quite a number you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 your users their BMI
- 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 – Data Results)
Drug information 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content 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}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
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 experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin 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, read or cite 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 pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your readers 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, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images in your web content.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click this link:
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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)