In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses
- Improving Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select 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 – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up and run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits including:
- 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
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which section of the center they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)
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 WP software enables you to easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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 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
A premium version of this plugin with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays 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 WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets site visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff listings for doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences 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 14,700+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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, cite or read interesting 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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