In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section discusses how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To 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, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve 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 sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and plan their trips better
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display 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, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Health & Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application 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 about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for 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 Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin retrieves and displays 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 For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users 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, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your site 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase 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)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your medical business online.
To continue, click this link:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum