In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose 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.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords 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
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send 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 posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with valuable content and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can 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 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 into any post or page, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
WordPress Health And Medical Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related site to immediately add 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. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports uses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso For WP)
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 software enables you to easily set up your event and start processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is 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)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by 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, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A basic 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, create staff listings for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content 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 over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge 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 With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD 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}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue reading, click here:
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