In Part One 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 topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
In this section we will discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with new prospective clients
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with high value content and offer them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Medical & Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up your event and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many 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 WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple 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 – User 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 additional plugins you can use that 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data 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 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts 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. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and 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 with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add 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 interesting 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 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 and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise drawings into your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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