In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Basic Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Functionality To Your WordPress Web Site With Plugins
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do 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 features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to health applications, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps clients can plan their trips better
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more 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
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related uses, such as medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily create an event and start receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), 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 more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we will look at medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)