In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Practitioners – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your business online with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to medical applications, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Practice Site Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Health And Medical Services Providers
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web Using 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 for WordPress enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress 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 other WordPress plugins you can check out 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 Plugin will retrieve and 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 Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Labels)
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 or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering 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, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to view the rest of this guide:
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