In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Capability
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health 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 WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Medical Or Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and 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. A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and start receiving registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related use, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable 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}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
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 add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to access Part 3:
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