In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below 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 known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical apps, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right destination.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides 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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that 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 plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
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 WP Plugin – Data Results)
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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,500+ conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating 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)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we take a look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue:
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