Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2

In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health business online, we covered the following topics:

• Challenges Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
• Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
• Basic Web Pages
• Improving The Content On Your Site

In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.

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

• Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
• Generate More Leads & Enquiries
• WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

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

• WordPress Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Features
• Understanding WordPress Themes

Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.

Your Medical Center Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress

Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.

Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress

There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your health-related website’s SEO:

• Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
• Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
• Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
• Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
• Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
• Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
• Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.

WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

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

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)

(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)

Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):

• BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to run an online social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
• bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own forum on your website.
• E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
• Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
• Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.

(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)

How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries

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

Provide A Newsletter

Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic to your site
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Provides useful updates
• Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
• Increases engaging with your users
• Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients

One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.

Adding A Contact Form

Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.

Contact forms provide several benefits, like:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• Gives you control over what gets 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
• Convenience for visitors

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

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

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

Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right area.

Provide A Map

Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.

Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides many benefits, such as:

• A map helps to increase local SEO
• Visitors can find you more easily
• Shows location of events

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

Below are 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 Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins

WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)

The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.

(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)

The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar 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 additional features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar Plugin

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System

(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)

If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings in minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:

• Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators WP 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.

Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro Plugin For WordPress

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)

With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:

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

A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User 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}:

• Weight Loss Tracker

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)

Simple BMI Calculator 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 WordPress 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 site administrator.
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
• And lots more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)

Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.

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

For more details, go here}:

• PubMed Posts Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information about symptoms and 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)

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

Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,700+ conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

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

With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Plugin For WordPress

Trend MD

(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)

The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

• Trend MD Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts)

This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.

(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)

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

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)

If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.

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

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
• And many more.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness websites.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Exercise Images by Everkinetic

(Exercise Images Plugin)

Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings on your health & fitness-related websites.

(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin

In part three of this guide, we discuss medical clinics and health-related themes for WordPress.

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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business presence online.

Click on this link to read the rest of this article:

• Tips For Health And Medical Services Professionals – WordPress Themes

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