Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2

In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business online, we covered the following areas:

• Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
• Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Online Economy
• Improving Your Website Pages
• Improving Your Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.

Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:

• How To Improve Traffic
• Generate New Leads & Enquiries
• WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins
• Understanding Themes

Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.

Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress

Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines

There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:

• Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
• Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
• Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
• Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
• Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
• Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.

How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)

Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):

• BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
• bbPress – Set up an online community forum on your website.
• E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
• Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
• Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.

(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)

Generate New Leads & Enquiries

In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.

Provide A Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits including:

• Sends targeted traffic
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Keeps readers updated
• Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
• Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
• Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others

An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, 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
• Contact forms can be added to any page or post
• Looks professional
• Convenience for site visitors

One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

Contact Form 7 allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.

Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.

Add Maps

Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.

Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:

• A map increases local SEO
• Visitors can find you easily and helps plan their appointments better
• Displays location of events

(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)

Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

Health & Medical Services Plugins For WordPress

WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar Plugin)

Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.

(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)

This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar WP Plugin

Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management

(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)

If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin processing bookings in minutes

(Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.

Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:

• Event Espresso

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)

This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization

Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are a few you can include in your site, including the following:

• Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro

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, such as:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculators
• And more

A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)

The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

For more details, go here}:

• Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin 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 WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
• And many more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)

Drug information 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.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data Plugin

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in 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}:

• PubMed Posts WP Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link  indication tags to services, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato WordPress Plugin)

This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers 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 can access insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato – WordPress Plugin

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap)

HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.

With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Concierge Plugin

Trend MD

(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)

TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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}:

• TrendMD WP Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)

WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices.

(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)

If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.

Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on 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 – 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}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)

This plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your content.

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin

In the next section of this guide, we will look at WordPress themes for medical clinics and health businesses.

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This is the end of section two.

To view the rest of this guide, click this link:

• How To Successfully Grow A Medical & Health Center Services Presence Online Using WordPress – Part 3

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