In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical-Related Businesses Online
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Providers – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic with plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to set up and run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Convenient for site 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 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This 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 email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI 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 to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering 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 for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create staff member pages for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato 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 collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video 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, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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