In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical & Health Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and drive more web traffic using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical, health and beauty-related uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various 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 Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
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 – Data 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 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 doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your health and fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related business presence online.
To continue, click this link:
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