In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Health Center Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI 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 your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your visitors 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
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 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 insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts 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 – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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 – Lets you 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence.
Click here to continue reading:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now