In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Basic Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Health Services Professionals – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has 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 For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast 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 (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up a social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you set up a community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- 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 powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and offer them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more popular 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your site 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, chat over text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 – Lets you 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence.
To continue reading, click this link:
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