In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up and run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing 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 post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This helps get their comment to the right recipient.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of medical, health & beauty-related uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and start receiving registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health-related usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to 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 – Information Screen)
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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets visitors search posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato 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 patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your health and fitness-related site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to build your medical-related business online.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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