In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your medical website using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared with other potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Health & Medical Services Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up your event and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at to 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 trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your fitness site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will be discussing medical and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To keep reading, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group