Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2

In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical business online, we covered the following areas:

• Challenges Medical Practitioners Face Online
• Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
• Your Web Pages
• Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website

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

Areas covered include:

• Improving Web Traffic
• Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
• WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation

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

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.

Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress

Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.

Optimizing Your Website For SEO

There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:

• SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
• Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
• Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
• Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
• Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
• Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.

WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation

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

For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin

(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)

Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
• bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
• E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional 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 site.
• Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.

(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)

Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries

In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.

Adding An Email Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Provides practical tips and advice
• Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
• Provides new opportunities for interaction
• Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with new potential customers

An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.

Contact Forms

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.

Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• Giving you control over what is sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• Contact forms can be added to any post or page
• Looks professional
• Is convenient for site visitors

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

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)

Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.

Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.

Another option to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct area.

Add A Map

A map helps your visitors and customers find you.

Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:

• A map improves local SEO
• Visitors can find you easily and helps clients can plan their visits better
• Show location of events

(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)

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

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

WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health & Medical Services Site

WordPress Medical & Health Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)

Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.

(Booking Calendar – Overview)

The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features.

To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, go here: Booking Calendar

Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager

(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)

If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here: Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)

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

Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical usage, but there are several you can use, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: Calculators Pro Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:

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

A premium version is also available and includes additional features.

More info: Calculated Fields Form Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)

This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The data is 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.

Go here for more info: Weight Loss Tracker

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)

This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:

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

More information: Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and 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 – WordPress Plugin – Results)

Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.

PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

To learn more about using this plugin, go here: PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic)

The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.

For more information, go here: MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato)

Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

Go here to learn more about using this WordPress plugin: Treato – WordPress Plugin

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.

With the plugin 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.

More information: HealthTap Plugin

Trend MD

(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)

The TrendMD plugin adds 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: TrendMD – WordPress Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)

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

(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)

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

Go here for more info: WP Nutrition Facts

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)

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

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
• And many more.

Go here for more information about this plugin: WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.

For more information, go here: Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)

The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your posts and pages.

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

Go here for more info: Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress

In part three of this detailed guide, we discuss medical WordPress themes.

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This is the end of section 2.

To continue, click here: The Ultimate Guide On How To Grow Your Medical Services & Health-Related Website Successfully With WordPress – Part 3

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Check Out These Other WordPress Plugins And Themes:

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