In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Services And Health Clinic Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up your own social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with other potential clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical applications, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to report concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct destination.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows 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 website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Health & Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical uses, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP 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 Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs 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}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds 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}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search 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 & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)