In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Health And Medical Center Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we will show you how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- 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 products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something 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 users can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This will help get their message to the correct department.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create your event and start processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that 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 input target weights and supports 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 Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index 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 to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed contains 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 versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, create staff listings for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related business online.
To continue, click this link:
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