In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and manage a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with new prospective customers
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to medical applications, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 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 medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Practice Website
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily schedule an event and start receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
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 Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in online 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 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 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 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized 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 and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise diagrams to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org