Tag: Healthcare Business

In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical or health business online, we covered the following areas:

• Challenges Medical And Health Professionals Face Online
• Opportunities For Health And Medical Professionals
• Your Web Pages
• Ways To Improve Your Web Content

In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.

Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:

• Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
• Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
• WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
• WP Themes – An Overview

Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.

Grow Your Health Center Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes

Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress

There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:

• SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
• Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
• Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
• Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show.
• Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
• Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
• Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.

WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)

Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):

• BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
• bbPress – This plugin lets you run your own community forum on your site.
• E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
• Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
• Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.

(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)

Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress

This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.

Provide A Newsletter

Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:

• Sends targeted traffic
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Keeps readers updated
• Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
• Increases engaging with your users
• Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content

A proven way to get your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.

Provide A Contact Form

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.

A contact form provides several benefits including:

• Reducing spam
• Set up automated responses
• Gives you control over what gets sent to you
• Allows you to keep your email address private
• Can be added to any post or page
• Looks professional
• Is convenient for site visitors

A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress 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 insert and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.

Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct person.

Maps

Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.

A map is a useful tool for several reasons:

• Maps help to improve local SEO
• Visitors can easily find you
• Shows location of events

(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)

Below are some of the more popular 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

Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins

Health WordPress Plugins

WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.

(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)

This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and 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 and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar

Event Espresso

(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)

If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start processing bookings in just a few minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.

If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:

• Managing Your Events Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)

This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.

Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculator
• And more

A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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}:

• Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
• And more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)

Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data Plugin

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets users search posts with specific data. A simple 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}:

• PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)

This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link  indication tags to services and conditions, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic

Treato

(Treato)

Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers 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 can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato Plugin

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.

With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Plugin

Trend MD

(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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}:

• TrendMD WordPress Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe)

If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View 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}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials 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}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin

Exercise Images by Everkinetic

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your site.

(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images

In the next section, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.

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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business online.

Click on this link to continue:

• Your Health And Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Themes

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