In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Providers
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Readers can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Health & Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 WP Plugin – Information Screen)
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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets users search posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
This plugin 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 recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized 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 & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we take a look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
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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