In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Health Services Providers – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section explores how to improve your business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your 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 content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast 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 things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you set up and manage your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- 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 products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with new potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to medical tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- 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 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 drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
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 feature that lets site visitors find posts with specific data. A 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 for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. 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}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add 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 recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
To keep reading, click this link:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum