Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2

In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:

• Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
• Opportunities For Health Services Professionals
• Your Web Pages
• Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website

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

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

• Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
• Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
• WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

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

• WP Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Capability
• A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.

Grow Your Health & Medical Services Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes

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

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress

There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:

• SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
• Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
• Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
• Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
• Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
• Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
• Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.

WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.

For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:

• 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 can improve your SEO)

Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run a social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
• bbPress – Use bbPress to run a community forum on WordPress.
• E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
• Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
• Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.

(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using WordPress plugins)

Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools

This section covers how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.

Providing A Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits, like:

• Sends targeted traffic
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Provides useful updates
• Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
• Increases interaction
• Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients

One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.

Add A Contact Form

Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.

A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:

• Reducing spam
• Set up automated responses
• Gives you control over what gets sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• Contact forms can be added to any page or post
• Improves the professional look of your website
• Convenient for users

A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 Plugin)

This free plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.

Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct recipient.

Adding Maps

Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.

Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:

• A map increases local SEO
• Helps visitors find your office easily
• Shows location of events

(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)

Below are some 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 That Can Help Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors

Health WordPress Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar)

The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.

(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)

This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.

Go here for more details:

• Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin

(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)

If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and start processing bookings literally in a few minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System)

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

If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:

• Event Espresso

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)

Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.

Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health applications, but there are many you can include in your website, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

Go here for more details:

• Calculators Pro – WordPress Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)

The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:

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

The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features.

Go here to learn more about using this WordPress plugin:

• Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker 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 supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

More info:

• Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator

(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)

This simple plugin for WordPress 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 other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
• And many more

For more details, go here:

• Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)

Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

For more information, go here:

• Drug Interaction Data

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts Plugin)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets your visitors search posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.

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

More info:

• PubMed Posts Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)

The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link  indication tags to services, etc.

Go here for more information:

• MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato)

This plugin 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 from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 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:

• Treato Plugin For WordPress

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap WP Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.

With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 over video or text chat, or send questions.

More information:

• HealthTap Plugin

TrendMD

(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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.

More information:

• TrendMD Plugin For WordPress

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.

(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)

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

Go here to learn more about this plugin:

• WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)

If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
• And many more.

Go here for more info:

• WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.

More info:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Exercise Images by Everkinetic

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)

For more details, go here:

• Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin

In part 3, we take a look at medical WordPress themes.

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This is the end of section two.

To continue, click this link:

• Your Medical And Health Services Website – WordPress Themes

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