In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving your website with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you run a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared with new prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right department.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related uses, such as medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create an event and start accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are a few you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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 For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget on 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 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A basic 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
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 site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical 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
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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 – You can 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum