Tag: Medical Business

In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:

• Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
• Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Online Economy
• Basic Web Pages
• Improving Your Web Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.

Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:

• Tips For Improving Web Traffic
• Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
• WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.

Grow Your Health Services Website – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins

Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines

There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:

• URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
• Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
• Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
• Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
• Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
• Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.

WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.

For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• Page-List – WordPress site map plugin

(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)

Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up and run a social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
• bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
• E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
• Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
• Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.

(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)

Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries

In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.

Provide An Email Newsletter

Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:

• Sends targeted traffic
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Provides useful information and advice
• Provides a targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
• Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
• Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with new prospective customers

One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.

A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:

• Reduces spam
• Set up automated responses
• Giving you control over what is sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• They can be added to any page or post
• Looks professional
• Is convenient for users

One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 Plugin)

This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.

Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.

Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right person.

Map

Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.

Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:

• Maps help to improve local SEO
• Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
• Displays location of events

(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)

Below are some popular 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, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes

Health Services WordPress Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)

This free plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.

(Booking Calendar – Overview)

The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar Plugin

Event Espresso

(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)

If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and start processing registrations in a few minutes

(Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:

• Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)

Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization

Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical use, but there are a number you can use, including the following:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max 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, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)

This free 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

The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker)

This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker WP 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}:

• Weight Loss Tracker

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)

Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress 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 trainer (admin).
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
• 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}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 – Data Results)

Information about drugs 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress

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 lets users search for posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.

PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

For more details, go here}:

• PubMed Posts WP Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create staff member pages for doctors/therapists and more.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin

Treato

(Treato)

Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,700+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato – WordPress Plugin

HealthTap

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.

With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Concierge Plugin

TrendMD

(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)

This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. 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}:

• TrendMD Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Labels)

WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)

If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
• And many more.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)

Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)

Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise illustrations in your pages and posts.

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images Plugin

In part three of this detailed article, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.

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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related web presence.

To view the rest of this guide, click this link:

• Your Medical Website – WordPress Themes

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