In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Health Services Practitioners – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s 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 ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section we discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving general health and diet, access to medical tools, vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Users can raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the right area.
Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more 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 SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works 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. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create an event and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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 For WordPress)
This 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
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features.
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 WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. 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 receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts 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)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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 – You can 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 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum