In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health or medical business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Themes – An Introduction
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
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 (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section will show you how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online 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 offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create your event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are a number you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date 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 Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes many 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. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for 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 Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets your visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
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 Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin 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, cite or read 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin 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 or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical business online.
Click on this link to access the rest of this article:
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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