In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers In The Online Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up and manage your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness apps, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- 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 page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services 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 site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
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 lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains 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)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. 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 their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This 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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating 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-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise images in your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will look at medical clinics and health themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)