In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Services Professionals In The Online Economy
- Essential Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up and run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with new potential customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical Or Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget 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 other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, feedback entries and more.
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 your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 own a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers 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, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business online.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group