Growing A Healthcare Business Online With WordPress

In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we covered the following topics:

Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Professionals
Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
Your Website Pages
How To Improve Your Web Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.

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

Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Generate Leads & Enquiries
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:

Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.

Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress

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

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress

There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:

Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.

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

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve 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 (for visitors)

(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)

Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):

BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your site.
bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up a forum on WordPress.
E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.

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

How To Generate Leads & Enquiries

Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.

Provide An Email Newsletter

Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits, like:

Sends targeted traffic
Keeps readers from forgetting about you
Provides useful information and advice
Provides a targeted marketing channel
Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
Increases user interaction
Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content

A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.

Contact forms provide several benefits, like:

Reduces 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 page or post
Improves the professional look of your website
Is convenient for site visitors

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

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 Plugin)

This free contact form plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email 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 adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.

Provide Maps

Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.

Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:

A map helps to increase local SEO
Visitors can easily find you
Display location of events

(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)

Below are some 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 For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation

Health Services – WordPress Plugins

WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar)

Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.

(Booking Calendar – Overview)

This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin

Event Espresso

(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)

If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create your event and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes

(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.

To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:

How To Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)

Calculator Pro Calculators 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. The plugin supports internationalization

Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:

Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

Calculators Pro – WordPress Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)

With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:

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

A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many additional features.

For more details, go here}:

Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)

This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)

The plugin allows users to insert 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 WordPress Plugin

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:

BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
And lots more

For more details, go here}:

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)

Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)

Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.

PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

For more details, go here}:

PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)

This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.

For more details, go here}:

MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato – WordPress Plugin)

Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

Treato – WordPress Plugin

HealthTap

(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)

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

With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service.

For more details, go here}:

HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin

TrendMD

(Trend MD WP Plugin)

This plugin lets you 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

Trend MD WordPress Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.

(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)

WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)

If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.

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

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
ZipList Recipes – 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}:

WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)

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

For more details, go here}:

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Exercise Images by Everkinetic

(Exercise Images Plugin)

This plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.

(Exercise Images – Database)

For more details, go here}:

Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin

In the next section, we will look at themes for medical clinics and health-related businesses.

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This is the end of section two.

Click here to continue:

The Step-By-Step Guide On How To Build And Grow Your Medical-Related Business Online Successfully With WordPress – Part Three

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