In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Medical Practitioners – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- 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 – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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 (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run your own online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct department.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily create an event and start receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,500+ 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 locate and book a virtual consult with real 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 the widget installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add 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 search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- 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 site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to grow your health web presence.
Click on this link to access Part 3:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum