In Part One of this article on ways to build your health-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Basic Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Services And Health-Related Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins that can help to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
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 add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct department.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email 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 & Ticket Manager
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related use, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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 WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 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 Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 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 Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or 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 their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type 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 dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will be discussing themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related business presence online.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)