In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Practitioners – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and generating more web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you set up and run a social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up and manage a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with new prospective clients
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Services & Health-Related Site
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related uses, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to 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 For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress 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 collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,700 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that readers 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise drawings on your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click here:
***
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com