In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Practice Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores how to improve your medical or health website with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you run a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides 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 you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form 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 plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps customers can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Services And Health Center Site Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
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 software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to 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 to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed includes 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 was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
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, 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 is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing 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 – Lets you 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 For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss health-related and medical WordPress themes.
***
This is the end of section 2.
To keep reading, click this link:
***
***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now