In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- 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 posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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 (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with other potential clients
An effective strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of 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
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 lets you insert multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right area.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
Health Or Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related website that will immediately add 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)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and start accepting bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and 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 calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin retrieves and displays 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your health & fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Click here to read the rest of this guide:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group