In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capability
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Health Services Providers – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your medical or health-related website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
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 XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to run an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up and manage a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we’ll show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct department.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up multiple events and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned 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 Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form 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 Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- 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 For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog 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 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 lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 gain insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to 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 images inside your web content.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we discuss WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to build your medical-related web presence.
Click on this link to access the rest of this article:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now