In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Providers – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and run your own online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can easily add social features to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up an event and begin receiving bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
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 posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- 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 – 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 WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise diagrams in your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your health or medical business online.
Click on this link to continue:
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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