In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social features to your site with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we’ll show you how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives 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 targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, 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 many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
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 WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
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 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(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 Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will be discussing themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business presence online.
Click here to continue:
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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)