In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health or medical-related business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical And Health Practice Services Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more visitors.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we will show you how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engaging with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health apps, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature 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 choose which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right destination.
Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create an event and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is 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 applications, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at medical and health-related themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to build your medical business presence online.
To continue reading, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now