In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical or health business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your medical or health-related business online with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and run a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct destination.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and clients can plan their visits better
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google 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 To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health uses, but there are a few you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming 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, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to display 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 – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, your site 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices.
(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 Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to access the rest of this article:
- How To Build And Grow Your Medical Services And Health-Related Business Online Successfully – Part 3
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum