In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the correct destination.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Health Or Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
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 plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators 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 them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that 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 a number of other 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 trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs 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 posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting 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 is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create 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-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click this link:
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