VMP 073: The Best Wordpress Plugins To Help You Market Your Veterinary Practice

If you're ever considering building your own website or having a developer create a website for you I think that Wordpress is a great option for you and your veterinary hospital. Wordpress, for those of you who don't know, is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. In plain terms, it is likely the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system that is available. Since it is open source, wordpress is free to download and install on your servers, which is really cool. 

What we're talking about today are plugins for your Wordpress site. Plugins are pre-built pieces of functionality that do specific things on your website, so that you don't have to go out and code a piece of software to make your website custom made.  For example, maybe you want a live chat or appointment setting feature, so you'd go out and find the right plugins to do that, which there are already pre-built ones. Plugins can be both free and also cost money, but the ones I'm going to talk to you about are going to be free. 

Plugins mentioned in this episode:

Wordpress SEO by Yoast- This plugin helps with SEO, and really helps you approach your content and site from a SEO standpoint without having to get a really in-depth knowledge of how to do SEO on your website. This has feeature that do everything from give you previews of how your content will look in search results to create XML sitemaps that you can then submit to Webmaster's Tools. 

Shareaholic- This is a really good social plugin that lets people engage with your content across social media. It also has a google analytics integration so you can measure your social efforts. 

Easy Content Templates- This is a great tool when combined with my 31 Veterinary Blog Posts Ideas Guide, don't worry about what to write, just be able to sit down and grind out some really good content. 

Editorial Calendar- This is great for creating content with a group of people. So if you want to get the whole team engaged, or just plan your content around the calendar, this has great features for getting your content published. 

Google Webmaster Verification Tools- This can help your hospital integrate with google analytics, google adwords and google webmaster tools. It makes pasting your user ID very simple. Measure your marketing or you're just guessing!

 

New stuff to check out this week:

Dr. Braden Collins at Bunbury Eaton Veterinary Hospital doing some really awesome holiday photo competitions. This is great! Take a look Click Here Dr. Cody Creelman's new VLOG on Youtube, check it out, it is epic content, click here Danielle Lambert's new SnoutSchool.com Scoop, stay up to date on all kinds of pet related events and holidays, click here