In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical-related business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you run your own social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms to your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find 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}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related 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 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
***
***
"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)