In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below 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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- 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
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical calculators, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct department.
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 help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health Businesses
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule your event and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from online 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 work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to 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 widget 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)