In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Practice Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins For Health Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro 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. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin 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 additional WordPress plugins you can use to 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 users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff listings for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to 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 can access 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)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business presence online.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com