In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- Understanding WP Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical And Health Services Providers – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your business online with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run your own social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Medical Or Health Services Site Generation With Plugins
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the 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 a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule your event and start processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related use, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
This plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in 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 insert 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, add 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 your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
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 business that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click this link:
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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