In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, 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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web 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 lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots 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 drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
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 read 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 content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin 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, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we discuss health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to continue reading:
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