In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services
- Essential Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- Themes – An Overview
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Clinic Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides several 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
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right destination.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or 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 online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein 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 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 lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This 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 written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 over video or text, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to build your medical business web presence.
Click on this link to access Part Three:
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