In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Clinic Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation with plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With 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 URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own online social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you run a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features to your site.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical apps, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
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 enquiries reach the right recipient.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin 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 WordPress lets you easily create multiple events and begin accepting registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides 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 specifically designed for health-related use, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
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
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
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 Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by 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 add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets users find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online 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 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin 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 or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that readers 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, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise images into your content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we will look at medical clinics and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to keep reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)