In Part One of this article on ways to build your health business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical & Health Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this plugin to set up and manage your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
This section will show you ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, 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 adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct destination.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- 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 Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins - Medical Providers
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are a number you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form 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 plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website 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 look at to 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 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 many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, 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 – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic content editor 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 WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 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 – 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, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors 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 video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will add 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 Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise illustrations to your fitness-related site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health-related web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
***
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)