In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your 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 used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One 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 known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your 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, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you set up your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical 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. It has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate 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)
This plugin 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 lots more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets site visitors search for posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the 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 For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, create 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 you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that site users 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 and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view Part 3, click here:
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