In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health & Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section covers how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are 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 For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at 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 trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets your visitors search posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients 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 over 14,700 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type 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 business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your health and fitness site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business presence online.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group