In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Center Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more visitors.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up an online social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Services & Health-Related Website Using Plugins And Themes
Medical & Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 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 medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown 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 Plugin)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 shows users their 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical 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 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your 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, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence.
Click on this link to access the rest of this guide:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum