In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Functionality
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – 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 SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this plugin to set up an online social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with new prospective customers
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health apps, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- 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
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This helps get their message to the correct person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
Medical Or Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Your Events Automatically With 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 WP software allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
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. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your 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)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive 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
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin 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 business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your health and fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your health and fitness websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at medical clinics and health-related themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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