In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical business presence online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
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:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can help to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this plugin to set up and run an online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help 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 SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Clinic Website With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
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 just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With 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 enables you to easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy 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}:
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, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in 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 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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, and a search function that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic content editor 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)
This plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,000 conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that 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 – Custom Post Type 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 run a health or fitness business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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