In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Health Professionals – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – 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 engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to medical apps, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps clients can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. 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 the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This simple WordPress 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 a number of plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive 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 to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering 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 Plugin for WordPress 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 Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes 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)
This plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, add 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 read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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 website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – 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. 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 display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will look at themes for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your health-related business web presence.
To view Part Three, click this link:
***
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie