In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Services
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) 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 Generating More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you run a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with content of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health and fitness, access to health applications, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets users send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the correct recipient.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add 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 online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create an event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
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 other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets users search posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
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, locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable 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 Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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 run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings in your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to continue:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group