In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Practitioners – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical tools, vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This helps get their comment to the right department.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up your event and start receiving bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical use, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with extra 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 on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that 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 plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 WP Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog 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}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets site visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(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 patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users can type in a health question and 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 questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue reading, click this link:
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