In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors with WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- 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 site
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more 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, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up your event and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by 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 For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click here:
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